Lolita never died

Three syllables and a whole world: Lo-li-ta, dismantled and reassembled in cryptic wordplay, in acrobatic twists of meaning indifferent to heat and cold, to good taste and morality. In his masterpiece, Vladimir Nabokov entrusts the story of a mature man’s passion for a young girl to the cynical and desperate, perverse and submissive voice of Humbert Humbert.

So here we are in the memoir of a literature professor obsessed with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter. Nabokov manipulates the reader just as a cat would a mouse. He draws them in, placing them in the shoes of the incestuous stepfather, only to horrify them when they realise they are inside the mind of a paedophile. But by then it is too late and they can no longer escape the fascination: they must carry on and read to the very end. Reading can also foster a sense of complicity with the author’s genius and his virtuosity: ‘Don’t you see?’ he suggests, ‘there’s nothing true here… Lolita is America reflected in the pupils of a young, vulgar Russian aristocrat, hungry for life. Or perhaps it’s life and youth themselves, now gone and beyond our grasp…’

On this page, certain storylines usually have a single possible outcome: to exit the scene, the protagonists die. And here we know straight away that they have already gone. The foreword by John Ray, the ineffable editor of the text we are reading, explains that Humbert died in prison on the eve of the trial that was to judge him. As for Lolita, having run away with another man, she too is now dead; having reached adulthood, she died in childbirth … The memoir of vile passions, now reduced to ashes, was perhaps the literary device devised to shield the author from scandal – which, in any case, did occur in 1955. Yet, at the same time, it remains a useful hook to captivate the ordinary reader hungry for true stories, whilst not neglecting the more astute reader, who is allowed to catch a whiff of the falsehood in order to be drawn, without hesitation, into a skilful game. One can read "Lolita" and lose oneself in the intricacies of its formal perfection whilst completely disregarding its content.

In these trying times, there are many good reasons to pack Nabokov’s novel and return to reading "Lolita", even if – in the era of the Epstein files – it inevitably seems stripped of its most risqué significance. "Lolita" as a work of literature, certainly, but here above all as the source of an imagery and a language springing from the pages of the novel. Before Lolita, there were no ‘Lolitas’ – those ambiguous young girls – even though child prostitution and the buying and selling of innocence were highly prized, refined luxuries in nineteenth-century Europe. Before Lolita, there were no ‘nymphs’ – the delicacies of the pimping trade – or young girls first abused and then crowned as temptresses. With that tiara upon their heads, we have watched them parade for decades as the ‘beauties’ of the crime pages without paying them much attention at all.

‘Nymphet’ is a word that appears almost seventy times in Nabokov’s novel; in coining the term, he provides Humbert Humbert’s definition in a style of ironic voluptuousness: “It sometimes happens that certain young girls, falling within the age range of nine to fourteen, reveal to certain spellbound travellers – who are twice or many times their age – their true nature, which is not human, but that of a nymph (and thus demonic); and I intend to designate these chosen creatures by the name of nymphets”. Of course, not all young girls between the ages of nine and fourteen are nymphets: “If that were the case, we initiates, we solitary wayfarers, we nymphet-lovers would have gone mad long ago. Nor is beauty a valid criterion; and vulgarity – or at least what a community defines as such – does not necessarily do any harm…”. So what, then, distinguishes a nymphet from her peers inhabiting that bewitched, immaterial island defined by age limits? All the young girls there may be ‘temporarily’ plain, or pretty, likeable, cute, but they are ‘still ordinary creatures, plump, shapeless, with cold skin, paunches and pigtails’. There are few nymphets, and to see them, ‘one must be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of burning poison in one’s loins and a hyper-voluptuous flame perpetually alight in one’s sensitive spine (oh, how one must conceal oneself and make oneself small!) to discern at first glance (…) the deadly little devil amongst the well-behaved girls; and she, unrecognised by her companions, mingles amongst them, herself unaware of her own fantastic power’. Only a much older man, ‘with a jolt of perverse pleasure’, can spot her and then mould her into a Lolita. Thus it is the nymphet, albeit unwittingly, who beckons the paedophile to her using an unconscious code. The novel shows that the hunter needs to regard his prey as his accomplice: and if he notices her and uncovers her, elevating her to the status of a nymphet, she will make him the plaything of her whims.

Nabokov’s novel is the delirium of Humbert Humbert, who shamelessly confides in himself and the reader what he knows about himself; the author does not exonerate his character, but certainly what we know of Lolita comes from Humbert, who is pathetically self-centred. Everything that revolves around him is for his sake; there is no version of Lo. And yet we have had one for some time – in fact, more than one – but in the holiday suitcase there is only room for the best: the one written by Pia Pera, "Diario di Lo", published at the end of the twentieth century, in 1995 to be precise. This year, marking the tenth anniversary of the author’s death – she passed away in 2016 from ALS – her books have returned to the spotlight, with exhibitions and conferences (the most recent in Lucca at the end of July) organised by the Pia Pera Orti di Pace Association. She is remembered above all as a philosopher-gardener, the writer who, in her final years, had found a balance – as Edoardo Albinati writes – between creative maturity and personal maturity, leaving Milan to go and live on a farm on the outskirts of Lucca. And there she cultivated the land, following “the initiatory path” revealed in the books that followed: from L’orto di un perdigiorno, published in 2003, to her farewell to the world with Al giardino ancora non l’ho detto in 2016. Among other things, she wrote the lyrics for Gianni Nannini’s rock opera inspired by Pia dei Tolomei.

She possessed tremendous creative energy. The writer we are remembering here, however, is not the scholarly one. It is the other Pia, the one capable of taking a huge risk: writing the diary of Lolita, taking on a literary giant like Nabokov, even though her closest friends advised against it. At the time, Pia Pera was forty years old; she was a restless, cosmopolitan woman, bold and capricious, with a laugh that is remembered as infectious. I did not get the chance to meet her, and I am very sorry about that; she began contributing articles on nature and gardens to Il Diario just after I’d left. An enchanting portrait of her can be found in "Due Vite", the book for which Emanuele Trevi won the Strega Prize in 2021. And there one realises that Pia had all the right qualities, the audacity and that touch of madness needed for a triple somersault such as giving a voice to "Lolita". She was a great translator and had absorbed enough Russian spirituality to view America through the eyes of an exile like Nabokov, who, after a frustrating period of wandering through Europe, had chosen it as his new homeland and had mastered its language.

At the time of "Lo’s Diary", having edited for Adelphi his own edition of one of the oldest texts in Russian literature, "The Life of Archpriest Avvakum", Pera was translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which she would render into Italian – as Trevi himself puts it – “in free verse of extraordinary lightness, brimming with all of Pia’s finest qualities: mischief, sparkling intelligence, metaphysical thrill…”. But above all, she had realised that Lolita had long since escaped from the pages of the novel, freeing herself from Nabokov’s text. And, like every great character, she had long been living a life of her own. Like Bovary, like Karenina or like Nora, Lolita has created a world and a lexicon of her own, and like every myth she is subject to constant reinterpretation; the novel is merely her origin.

Thus, "Lo’s Diary" is structured as a mirror image of the Nabokovian version. And so we begin again with the preface by John Ray, the ineffable editor, who this time receives a visit from Dolores Maze, alias Aze – in short, Lolita. Like all teenage girls, Lo felt very special and had a cloth-bound diary with a badly dented clasp, full of loose sheets, dog-eared pages, little drawings and naughty words. Lolita never died and is now going to hand over her diary which, like almost all diaries, seems unpublishable. As for her stepfather, well, he lives in Paris under an assumed name… What follows is a stream of thoughts and words, a spoken text with the special effects typical of the narrator’s age. A twelve-year-old girl, orphaned of both parents, ready to do anything – lie, pretend, seduce, prostitute herself – just to survive the wretched adults around her. She has no respect for them – how could she? – and exploits every one of their weaknesses; she knows that to outwit an adult, you have to play along and make them believe whatever they want.

Lo’s Diary was received with interest and enjoyed considerable popular success, but it also left readers somewhat bewildered. It may sound sacrilegious to Nabokov fans and prove disappointing to those expecting the tragedy of a kidnapped child, only to encounter a young girl made shrewd by her experiences. A girl who has nowhere else in the world to go and who ‘yawns vaginally’ because Humbert is boring, repetitive and old. Lo’s Diary has been translated into several languages, but to allow the novel’s publication in English, Dmitri Nabokov, the author’s son and heir, demanded half the royalties and insisted on adding his own preface. Until 2030, in the language chosen by Nabokov for Lolita – as stated in Pia Pera’s afterword – the novel will be accompanied by this embarrassing addition. She then adds that, if this criterion were valid, books would no longer be able to engage in dialogue with one another, and we would have to pay royalties to Dante for fictionalising Beatrice’s life; nor would Jean Rhys ever have been able to publish that marvel, "The Great Sargasso Sea" – the story of Rochester’s mad wife, a key character who remained entirely voiceless in Charlotte Brontë’s "Jane Eyre". And after all, Nabokov’s is not the only possible Lolita*.

She was so right that Lolita was on her way to Iran. In the same year as "Lo’s Diary" was published – 1995 – Azar Nafisi, daughter of a former MP and the former mayor of Tehran, had resigned from her university post as a professor of English literature and had begun, every Thursday morning, to discuss the works of great authors with seven of her best students. As soon as they entered her home, the girls would remove their headscarves and let their hair down; those meetings would give rise to "Reading Lolita in Tehran".

Nafisi believes in the power of literature, loves Nabokov and thinks she wants to show that the forces of evil are not all-powerful, even when they appear to be. Evil is often also utterly ridiculous. Like Humbert in his Humbertandia, where Lolita the nymphet is merely a figment of his imagination, a creature he would like to have ‘without will or conscience – indeed, without even a life of her own’. And if you think she’s just a little shrew, remember her night-time sobs and ask yourself, as Nafisi writes: isn’t manipulating someone to elicit behaviour that aligns with your own desires or your own worldview the very essence of every totalitarian impulse? Never mind America; the myth is (and will continue to be) constantly rewritten. In the story of Lolita, the girls of Tehran recognised themselves as being at the mercy of the theocratic state. Like Lo, they must adapt, please, and pretend to play along; they steal small pockets of freedom, such as talking secretly about literature, listening to forbidden music, or dancing with their hair down. If they rebel, they know they could be killed.

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”, translated by Giulia Arborio Mella, is available in the Adelphi paperbacks, as is Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran”, translated by Roberto Serrai. “Il diario di Lo” by Pia Pera, in the edition with an introduction by Emanuele Trevi, has been republished by Ponte alle Grazie, the publisher that is bringing all of this author’s books back to bookshops: in September, “La bellezza dell’Asino”, her first collection of short stories, will also be reissued.