Thank you to everyone for all the feedback. I want to be absolutely clear, this video isn't an attack on any other creators and their opinions on Lolita. It is a piece of fiction open to interpretation. Specifically, I in no way want to encourage any hate towards Lola Sebastian. She is an immensely talented creator with many excellent videos on the subject. Please keep all comments/discourse respectful.
I can not and also will not be respectful of a video that concludes as it's major point "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner." Your major interest here is not actually exploring why he wrote the works that he did with the subject matter that he chose but on griping about how you can't stand that people have a better and more accurate grasp on his oevure than your intellectual laziness could stand to pursue. Sorry. Your real problem is with people who actually do more than a surface level reading of his works coming away with deeply informed opinions and the correct conclusion that he was not glorifying the works. You are doing nothing more than virtue signaling. You clearly have no interest in understanding the man who you have chosen to condemn. You are clutching at your pearls and leaving it at that. It's obnoxious and surface level takes like these should be had at a younger age than whatever big age you are. Seriously. It's bad. This is bad. You're wrong. Not much subjectivity here about your correctness in the conclusion "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner so he must be a creep and a weirdo." Also your conclusion isn't even fully formed to a coherent point. You just state "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner" = problematic. I have seen better takes on the man's literature by teenage girls on tumblr. Quite frankly you should be embarrassed.
I would not be proud of making a video that makes people say: now I don't have any interest in the book. It's not worth reading. That seems to be what you have done with anyone who agrees with you. They're relating your opinion to people they don't like (persecution/virtue signaling) and then they are saying they wont look into it themselves. You would be excellent at the Ministry of Truth.
as a csa survivor, lolita was really impactful to me when i first read it (at about 16/17) because it really highlighted the extent to which HH was trying to pull a delusion into reality, and how Dolores is a literal normal child who behaves like a child and has no interest in or even understanding of his delusions. being able to see myself in her was huge in learning to stop blaming myself for what happened to me
Oh yeah, thats part of why i enjoyed the book so much too. Definitely a valuable perspective from an evil main character. Gives a lot of insight to what these monsters are thinking. It still feels super fucking weird that some adult man was able to write this so accurately and put his mind into the mind of a predator with such ease.
Me too. And near the when she can barely stand him. She seemed to never really like him too much overall but at the end it felt visceral. It’s unfortunate that so many people have the wrong idea about this book.
tired : nabokov is a weirdo for writing lolita wired : nabokov actually wrote lolita as a critic of predators inspired : nabokov is a weirdo for writing all those other books
@@ariagrace8117oh do tell me more! The passages that were included were really alarming to say the least but I’m really interested to hear what you liked about it! Obviously there’s more to the book than the weird pedophilic incest and stuff.
There are few mentions in history from people who knew the family who talk of his uncle Ruka and his obsessive interest in Nabokov. Nabokov himself has mentioned that he used to "fondle" him, so have people who knew them. The photograph of Nabokov with his uncle and mother is very eerie to look at with how he is being held. It is a very common theme for artists who go through CSA to reference it in their art constantly. Of course this isn't me defending the author but its just a different perspective as to why he wrote so much of one theme but never had any documented events of harming anyone. Instead he was critical of authors like Lewis Carroll for his obsession with young girls.
"Fondle" is such a weird word, because it did used to be used in a way that meant more like "caress" or "cuddle" and is now pretty much only used to mean "touching inappropriately". Like it's pretty common for Victorian fiction to mention "fondling the baby" and they just mean an appropriate affectionate touch. It makes Nabokov's use of it when referring to his uncle especially nebulous.
@@pinkrimmedazureeyesNo they're saying the word used to have a different definition/usage so its unclear what exactly they meant by its usage, I don't think anything in their comment implies they think he enjoyed the experience. Just that the definition of what he meant is unclear (at least being read on its own, I don't know the details of any further context is given to that quote)
@@mediocreme7798 This is 1984 level thinking. Let me turn this around on you. If someone named Rick reported CSA to you and Rick said: I am being fondled by my uncle." And your reply is: " Well, Rick fondle is such a weird word, because it did used to be used in a way that meant more like "caress" or "cuddle" would that seem appropriate to add to you???
Nymphet actually dirives from entomology it is a descripter of a bug that retains its adalecent traits into adulthood. Which Nabokov would know cause he was a bug guy. But it is also interesting that the term is used to sexualize and adultify a child rather than to describe a childlike adult. But once again I feel like this is just a good use of an unrelyable narrator. Like of course HH is using both religious and scientific illusions to further his justification of being the actual worst and an abuser of children
@@conorkelleher2571no where does the word nymph mean or connote child bride in its etymology, it simply means maiden bride or young woman bride. This would be used to describe a woman who is her like maybe early early 20s or late teens while retaining virginity. Hesiod stating waiting 5 years after puberty, that being said he was not Athenian and most of what we know as Ancient Greek history is Athenian, they were known to engage in sexual activity with youths as young as 12-13 which was roughly the age girls were married there, their husbands being in his 30s. So yeah, bit of etymology and history.
Speaking as a CSA survivor, I love Lolita. It's a book I have read many times and I have found a mountain of meaning in. That being said, I have always read it as an anti-pedophilic book. This video is enlightening in some ways. But at the same time, Lolita still remains what it is to me. If Nabokov truly had pedophilic tendencies that didn’t stop him from understanding what that kind of abuse does to a child. It is likely that he understood what that abuse was - unfortunately pedophilic temdencies can be the result of child abuse. I disagree that there is pleasure in Nabokov's gaze when he writes about Dolores. I am not denying that there might be pleasure in his gaze when he did his other writings ot rather I can not speak on that. But just like someone who is attracted to women might write a scene depicting the rape of a woman through the eyes of the rapist, without pleasure, a man who has pedophilic desires can write with an understanding of what that kind of abuse does to a child. Even if Nabokov lost that understanding later, the way I see it he had it when writing Lolita. No matter wether or not he was aroused by his other writings - and to be clear, I am disgusted by the passages you showed - Lolita isn't a pleasurable story, even for a pedophile - the sex scenes are not cery explicit, the book deliberately breaks with a pornographic-like format it has in part one and the pain of the victim is centered. Another reason I am sure of this is because in an interview (I will find the source and edit it in later) Nabokov himself said, that while Humberts feelings towards Lolita might be defendable, the way he treats her isn't. I remember that line because it always bugged me a bit for onvious reasons. Even if he understood the underlying desire, the moral of the book remains to not hurt children, as he put it in that interview. What I can gather from the other texts is that they, unlike Lolita, don't properly and realistically depict the consequences of pedophilic abuse. I can not gather from Nabokov's writing as presented in this video a fetish for depicting children's pain over experiencing abuse. If anything, the scenes you pulled from Ada make it look like SA is something pleasurable for children (to be clear, a 17 year old and a 12 year old is SA, it's actually the age gap I had with one of my abusers) Lolita breaks with that theme by actually depicting the consequences of pedophilic abuse and that is not something any person, even someone with pedophilic tendencies would find arousing. My take away? I will definitely read Nabokov's other works and come to my own conclusion on his body of work, though that will properly take me a life time since Lolita already took me over a year from all the breaks I had to take. For now, Lolita remains what it was to me: A book realistically depicting what pedophilic abuse does to a child.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, it resonated with me deeply and I found it very meaningful. As a fellow surviver (my abuse occurred when both myself and my abuser were teenagers, so my perspective is slightly different) I continue to find deep meaning in Lolita especially because of the way both H’s and L’s “titillated” pleasure is unflinchingly portrayed without masking the deep harm caused by H’s abuse on both parties. To me it is a story that allowed me to reclaim the complex, flawed, and beautiful humanity of not only myself but also (from a safe distance as he’s been completely out of my life for over a decade) my abuser. I think it’s important to remember that at the end of the day Lolita is a novel, and that makes it a uniquely safe place and prism to unpack these impossible and ugly truths and questions about the nature of the human condition.
If nabokov did have dark thoughts(censoring due to yt), ultimately the author is dead. Idk if he ever hurt anyone but, supposing he did have these tendencies, writing lolita isn't something he would do if he thought it was okay and I'd imagine he may have struggled with stuff but we have no evidence he hurt anyone(that I know of anyways). Some people write to process their own pain rather than express it on a real person. Regardless, read the books and form your own conclusions as you intend to do.
@@dismurrart6648I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading Nabokov admitted to being abused in a similar way to the character of Delores in his childhood by a male family member.
Well said. I won't repeat what you wrote as you did so very well, but just to say, I am also a CSA survivor who has read the book several times have found solace in his understanding of a CSA survivor. Being that he was one himself, that would make sense. I do find @owlcritism critique of Nabokov's other work quite simplistic and with an agenda he set out with.
Nobokov: I have written an alternate Earth where America is deeply different from real life Editor: Oh! What are the main changes you’ve made to our society? Nobokov: Incest
@@l..l_ Oh I know, Alabama actually has pretty strict laws when it comes to that issue, last time I checked. New Jersey doesn't, and appareantly Ohio doesn't either. It's just the meme.
i mean, i actually think incest is far more prevalent than we like to think, at least in american culture, given it is such taboo that many survivors are often not given spaces to talk about it. i especially think the culture around how fathers are supposed to be guardians of their daughters innocence and how close father/daughter relationships are often not looked at closely enough. we live in a profoundly sick world and i can't help but think that avoiding discussing issues issues like csa and incest makes it easier for people who commit such acts to hide.
The reason I’m still on defence is that Nabokov NEVER and I mean NEVER associated himself with underage girls. Every other author with PD allegations and rumours ( like Lewis Carrol) was always around little girls,trying to form relationships with them .I’m still prone to believe he was abused thus the obsession with the subject and wanting to understand a world that a person will get away with something so horrible ( his uncle was never punished and as far as I know no pedo character in Nabokov’s book is directly punished for their despicable actions too). In an interview one time Nabokov said that he’s a moralist .In a weird way, I kind of believe him.
i also think it's important to remember he was born in 1899 and died in the 70s. Not saying that as an excuse but more so saying that men like his protagonists were probably more open abt it than our society. idk what the age of consent was back then but i'm pretty sure young brides were still common. if you're society is chill w/ grown men marrying 16 y/o, i can def imagine conversations where grown men opened up abt girls even younger. i know my family has told stories of ppl in their communities growing up where it was well known 'person x' targeted young ppl but nothing was done, and it usually happened to young girls. it's possible he turned his trauma into a story or he just saw a lot of sick ppl in his life
@@ositaiza888 exactly. Also, the pd is always trying to get into the family ( becoming a stepdad, being friends with the parents) while the mother is too weak to defend their child ( the notorious uncle was the brother of his mother as well). This is a very common predatory technique but it wasn’t talk much around his time ( the young brides with huge age differences as you said was more well known).He lived in an era where big artists were harassing their teenage fans with impunity while himself never had any communication with them in that context , like trying to lure the underage fans of Lolita ( something a pedo will have definitely done after his book huge success) .
Yeah I agree with you here. A lot of people write about really despicable subject matter as a way to process ideas/ explore their own experiences / try to glean something of value from a character with a pathological psyche. It absolutely does not mean the author excuses or participates in the things they write about.
I mean, 'an aristocratic-born internationally renowned literature and language professor who grew up with a weird gropey uncle and a father who yelled at the farmers from a balcony' does unfortunately make this all very unsurprising. An interesting, detailed look into it all the same!
I think this is a fascinating and thought-provoking video. With that said, I do feel it lacks further consideration of how Nabokov's uncle very likely sexually abused him. To me, a lot of these passages seem to be Nabokov trying to grapple with both loving his uncle while also having been abused by him. The men in these stories are often described with similarities to how Nabokov elsewhere describes his uncle’s appearance and clothing, for starters. And a lot of these men are not morally “good” characters but do have redeeming qualities; to me, this reflects Nabokov processing his own fond yet painful memories of his uncle, trying to understand why his uncle did what he did and if he can still have parts of him that are "good" despite everything. Also, some of these men are just straightforwardly bad, evil people. Something I’m shocked you didn’t point out is that the man in “Lilith” is literally in hell, which is not somewhere good people go, and that it’s strongly implied that he’s there for raping a child (see the line discussing “that remembered child”). The sexual descriptions in the poem seem more to humiliate the man further by shaming him for his arousal - as the demonic crowd do - rather than to be titillating. It also strikes me that a lot of these young characters seem to hold some level of power or control through being instigators in the sexual encounters. It’s common for CSA survivors to latterly reframe the events in a way that gives them more control in order to deal with conflicting feelings of powerlessness, disgust, and potentially even enjoyment (which in hindsight often inspires shame and guilt). So this once again makes me think that it reflects Nabokov's own troubled consideration of his uncle and what he did to him. Final thing I’ll say is that I don’t agree with the idea that narration in the third person means that it reflects the author’s own perspective on certain subject matters. I think you could just as easily argue that using third person rather than first person allows some distance and for more detached analysis of the events. It gives the reader space to consider the mixture of shame, pain, pleasure, and guilt both victim and perpetrator may feel for differing reasons. All in all, really interesting content, but I feel uncomfortable about the lack of nuance and how this impacts the conclusions drawn within this video.
Thanks for you comment! You’ve mentioned some really interesting things I feel I could have done a better job at explaining in the video. Firstly, while considering Nabokov’s work as a potential response to his own abuse is a valid interpretation, there isn’t much in the way of evidence to support the claim. I didn’t want to confidently assert that he was abused without proof, and I didn’t see any I found convincing. Even his descriptions of his uncle in Speak, Memory were fairly brief and not something I was comfortable using to make any real assertions. I’d also suggest that, even if I were confident in saying that he was a CSA survivor, I’d have liked to have seen more of a discussion about that when I first picked up Lolita for the first time. As it is, it’s too easy for people to read his work without that important context. Secondly, while, yes, the man in Lilith has (literally) gone to hell, and so we can assume is not a great guy, I didn’t think that did enough to justify the level of explicit detail. Regardless, my central idea was not that any one piece is so explicit that he must have found it sexually gratifying, but that he repeatedly constructed scenarios that let him depict children in this way. Each individually might be justifiable for any number of reasons, but taken as a whole it’s clear what he wanted to write about. In any case, thank you for your considered comments. It certainly isn’t a topic with one simple answer and I’m grateful for a measured discourse.
@OwlCriticism The "graphic detail", when it comes to CSA in the real world, doesn't magically disappear only because we pretend not to see it / aren't comfortable discussing it. I get it: Nabokov's writing makes you and me see the darker sides of humanity and it's often "icky", "bad", "yikesy". Because CSA *is* "icky and yikesy"; even if it pretends not to be. And the "it occurs suspiciously often in his novels": 1) Nabokov liked his patterns 2) why are you only taking into account the "means he was secretly a pedo" possibility? *Maybe* it was there because it was something he intensively thought about, not necessarily in a "that's hot!" way? I understand that most people see only the cynical side of Nabokov but this is a gross oversimplification; if you read Nabokov more attentively, you'll notice how sensitive the guy (or at least his writing) deep down was. You said that "there's pleasure in that gaze". Sounds like you're trying to present an opinion as fact. And question: have you seen Fire Walk with Me? If so: do you think there's "pleasure in that gaze" too?
@@OwlCriticismThere isn't "much evidence" that Nabokov is a pedophile either: there is no evidence he ever hurt a child, or even associated with children. Concluding that he was purely from a reading of his fictional writing is a pretty big leap too, especially with the amount of circumstantial evidence that suggests there is *at least a possibility* that Nabokov was a survivor of child abuse himself. Of course given the time he lived no one would have spoken of it openly enough for anyone to say conclusively, but it feels wild to me to brush it off when it is, in my opinion, the screamingly obvious explanation for "guy who never offended but circled around the topic obsessively in fictional writing". Sure, you can conclude from his text that Nabokov may have derived some sort of sexual [something] from fictional depictions of child abuse, but jumping to "it's because he wanted to fuck kids" when there's that whole other possibility right there feels... actively irresponsible? Clearly he had a fixation with the subject of child abuse as it appears in his work many times. But the framing of it is very familiar to me as someone who experienced abuse as a child. Weirdest sentence I'm ever gonna write, but if you read something written by an actual pedophile you would see the difference immediately. Nabokov depicts what he does with a clear understanding of the pain that it causes. Maybe he personally found such scenes titillating (not an uncommon byproduct of abuse -- still EXTREMELY different from being attracted to actual children), or maybe he was fixated on trying to understand what an abuser is feeling when they do what they do, or how a victim can willfully blind themselves to their own suffering. But I don't think there's any ambiguity to Nabokov's understanding of child abuse as something heinous and disfiguring in its overall impact, regardless of how he chooses to render the subjective experiences of the respective individuals in the abusive relationship. This video was a really bizarre experience for me as a writer who has similar fixations in their work. Is this how Regular People see me? Do you read me as a predator for using fiction to process my own experiences? That Nabokov's work textually condemns the abuse of children even as he depicts it feels so clear and obvious to me I can't even imagine anyone feeling otherwise. And yet here we are. I don't know, man, something about this video just left me feeling painfully misunderstood and it wasn't even about me. "Hiding in plain sight". God damn, man. I'm glad Nabokov is dead.
I disagree that first-person writing is necessary to excuse writing "indecent" content. I think a skilled author can use any POV to portray the thoughts and actions of an immoral/amoral character, and third person does not necessarily imply that the narration reflects the real-world beliefs and attitudes of the author. This is sort of a small part of my larger opinion that the worldview of an author isn't the responsibility of the reader--whether Nabokov was a real-life pedophile or not, Lolita exists independently of him, and what anyone might take away from its content is dependent on the individual reader. This isn't me saying "death of the author" exactly, but I don't think it should be an author's responsibility to morally justify what they write--either by implying or outright stating "I think this content is bad," or by trying to communicate it via POV or some other literary device. I do think it's the reader's responsibility to read critically, but in my opinion that shouldn't extend to trying to only read books that are either morally pure or which "justify" their immoral content. I hope I'm making sense.
I think what bothers me the most about the almost uncritical (or perhaps uncontextualized??) discourse about Lolita/Nabokov critiques being ‘presentist’ (i.e. through our modern values) is that they don’t consider the contemporary discourse - how did people reading his works feel at the time? How normalized was it for an older man to marry a very young woman/teen? These are the questions that seem to go mostly unanswered here, which is valid bc this is literary criticism and not a history, but I think thinking historically about this situation may help untangle some of that reticence to apply presentism here. I’m not a historian of Russo-American literature, and I’m sure folks have written on this extensively, but this approach to my own work on colonization in North America, Indigeneity, interracial marriage, etc. has had to deal with this a lot. I guess my questions coming out this are what were contemporary reviews like, both academic and popular? What did his wife think? What did people think of his earlier works before Lolita came out? I don’t want to come across as having not enjoyed the vid - this was fascinating and makes me more interested in Russian literature (I’ll probably end up down a rabbit hole here some time lol). Great stuff!!
in the afterword of Lolita, Nobokov adresses a few points about the book. I recommend anyone who wants a taste of the prose but has no time for the full book to read it.
As many others have pointed out before me, that is absolutely not how 1st vs 3rd person works, and the point about it is almost so egregiously incorrect that it tanks the credability to the rest of the video essay. I am shocked it was included in the essay at all, let alone hasn't been removed from the video by this point. As for the larger conversation youve presented - this video is, at its core, just the same discourse lolita already has taken to his larger body of work. It boils down to "The themes this author is fixated on causes me a great amount of disgust, and because im disgusted by it, there must be something wrong with the author for thinking of it." Say there was an author whos best known story was one written from the perspective of a serial killer. The story goes into gratuitous detail about the way the killer stalks, manipulates, gaslights, and eventuallt kills their victim. Through the lens of that story, the act of doing so is constantly glamorized. The killer is shown to have a great desire to kill, taking pleasure in the act of killing. Say that you then discover that is the /only/ thing that the author writers about. That even the novels that have nothing to do with horror have the protagonist implied to have a desire to kill. Would you be trying to have this conversation about them? Would you be attempting to speculate on the morality of the authors personhood through their writings, or would you simply accept that theyre interested in writing slaughter fiction and horror? While its not incorrect to say thay we as a society have a fixation on sex and purity culture, this fixation is a two way street. Trauma and abuse revolving around sex and sexuality, and the portrayals of it, are seen are more envelope pushing and taboo then portrayals of any other kind of trauma. When in reality, the disgust you get from the portrayal of CSA and sexual abuse in fiction holds the same moral weight as any other morbid portrayal of violence and abuse. That is to say - fixation and fascination of the topic itself is not a show of an author (or readers) moral character, and so a lot of the points being made here fall flat when its just a regurgitation of that idea.
i think it's always a red flag when anyone discussing anything requiring a great deal of media literacy fundamentally misunderstands the structure of writing, because typically it means that they are structurally inept at evaluating the content.
It's just frustrating, isn't it? Most of our social lives are filtered through detailed recommendation algorithms designed to saw off any unpredictable edges that might confuse the hyper-personalized advertising machine, tempting us into lifeless but marketable predictability with the promise of convenience, and rather than insist on our irreducible complexity as human beings, some people treat art that engages with that discomfiting complexity as a source of moral contagion, demanding in its stead the sort of comfortable, one-dimensionally "pro-social" media that companies would love to see one of their commercials next to. Anyways that's my parody of what a pretentious person would say about the subject. Not me tho
Paused this video to get some lunch and was shocked to realize id already consumed 35 minutes of it. Found you through your A Little Life essay and absolutely loved it-your style of building and weaving your main thesis through your essays is incredible. Thanks for posting!
these comments, jesus christ. i've just begun the video but this guy can't seriously be arguing that nabokov is a paedo himself. that would be unbelievably crass and shallow
I'm not like hugely interested in defending Nabokov here but I did find a few parts of this to be... Either dishonest or lazy. Like bringing up Pale Fire was weird when the passage in question was literally written by Kinbote, who is explicitly a pedophile (although for boys not girls). Which is to say it's weird to equate anything he says as from Nabokov. Similarly Ada is explicitly in the text a memoir that Van is writing, the way he writes about his past is all colored by that context (and Van is very clearly not a good person). Which is just to say equating these books narration with the views of Nabokov is genuinely bad reading. And I cant do a rundown of every single novel you discuss but it certainly makes me skeptical when you frame the works I have read in such a way that anyone who has read them would realize you just are not right. I think there's space to ask about the prevalence of CSA in Nabokov's work but I think it's kind of a gross leap to say hes a pedophile
Thank you for adding this (assuming this is true and in good faith, I’ve only read a little Nabokov and couldn’t read much more due to his prose being insufferable to my own taste, so I can’t verify), while I still find the general tendency in Nabokov’s work towards depicting young girls in a sexual manner concerning, this definitely puts into question the worst of the examples in the video. However, I think you do discredit the fact that Nabokov is an author who had decades and many books to explore sexual themes beyond the pedophilic and his tendency to unnecessarily return to implicitly or explicitly depicting such is frankly concerning at the very least. I also find that it doesn’t really matter that he himself never stooped to actual pedophilia; The video is more of a critique on Nabokov’s depiction of pedophilia within his work, and how viewing Lolita within the context of his overall body of work puts into question just exactly what the books intention was and how Nabokov himself actually viewed such acts. This may seem a bit critical and overly defensive of the video, to be frank, I would respect him a lot more if he revealed this despite how it may contradict his point, and I appreciate your extra info (and if there’s anything else you’ve since found that further contradicts, I would absolutely appreciate the extra info).
Ok, I'm a bit less generous after finishing the video. You give your viewers the impression that this stuff just hasn't been noticed before, and there can't really be another conclusion than that Nabokov was really into the idea of pedophilia, even if he never acted on his desires, ending the video with the dichotomy not between different scholarly positions on his work, but on whether or not one is personally comfortable with reading work written with the morals of "another era" (itself a bit odd, given we're talking about a modern writer, and given the values being discussed). If you don't casually dismiss the possibility that Nabokov was sexually abused as a child, then we're left with three possibilities: 1. Nabokov wrote about pedophiles because he himself was a (probably non-offending) pedophile. 2. Nabokov wrote about pedophiles because he was a victim of child abuse. 3. Something else is thematically going on here, and Nabokov is using a horrifying recurring image to do-- something. You don't consider 3 in the video, because you don't get into Nabokov scholarship. At one point you ask, "Why is this, from a storytelling point of view, necessary?" And then, instead of considering what people have argued about that text-- move on. What are the scholarly debates around "Ada or Ardor"? Why do scholars believe that that scene is in that book? What do they think it's doing there? Again, I understand that youtube videos should not be held to the same standard as professional scholarship-- but you're the one raising the question that you could go ahead and try to answer, and you're the one framing this video as making a serious argument about how people should read Nabokov. If you're going to approach the topic, you should consider the conversation that already exists rather than frame it as unknowable. But it's the possibility of 2 that really strikes me here. You note that people can too-easily dismiss the pattern because so many of the examples are connected to Lolita, the text which might have an autobiographical scene of child abuse. If Nabokov was in fact abused, then what we see is a man throughout his life returning to the topic of abuse and trying to investigate the mind of the abuser, and potentially conflating the victim with the abuser is, to my mind, horrifying.
In my very basic understanding of Nabokov, he does not take Literary Analysis lightly. That a story is not always "on the side of the perspective" and one must have grasp of the situation. i.e : If you're listening to a story about an adventurer's trip to a foreign land, you should have an understanding of what that land encompasses (e.g: the geography, the culture, boundaries, etc). Nabokov is very "anti-vibe" on writing stories. Everything written should and must have realistic viewpoint. Nabokov writing a story where the reader is extremely detached to the narrator/MC is, as far as I am able to understand his stance, very apt of him. A story about a deranged man fantasizing about nothing but laying with a young girl, while very extreme on that category, corroborate perfectly to his "realist" view of literature. It's a testament on his position where you should not take the general bias of the story and indulge solely in it.
one of the reasons why I keep returning to Nabokov is exactly the reason that so many people hate his work: his constant pre-occupation with the gross and the obscene. I do not necessarily disagree with a moral argument against Nabokov, I've read a couple of works that you didn't mention here that, while didn't have any of the themes of Lolita, still had this undertone of gross misbehavior and unusual sexual ruminations. I even get a hint that that Nabokov never really *likes* his characters. There is always a hint of contempt towards them that I find fascinating. I think the fact that authors have consistently and throughout history managed to write truly obscene and incredibly gross things is telling about us as people, that we need an expression for the dark crevices of our minds, for the most obscene of our actions and the most disgusting of thoughts that we may have. That we need an outlet for what is utterly depraved and would never be socially acceptable. Everytime that I read Nabokov I am challenged and confronted by the full complexity of the human psyche. And I believe we are better off by having something obscene to look into than we would otherwise be.
If I remember correctly Ada is written in the third person, however it is supposed to be written by the protagonists Van and Ada. So Van is writing in third person about himself
All the "I won't read this book after your essay, thanks" comments tho. Putting Lolita and Nabokov aside; if your essay discourages *so many* people from reading the source material, then there's something off, isn't it? A good, thought-provoking video essay should only be the beginning of the journey, not the last point. The fact that this video pretends to be Progressive TM only makes things worse; who knows, maybe I'd fall for this too a few years ago.
I disagree with this notion, Mr Owl clearly said he enjoyed the flowery language and the thing he just gets an icky feeling thinking about it. He clearly enjoyed the book just feels a bit weird that none of the critical reception acknowledges how he actively chooses to only write about touching children
@CamielLeake 1) I didn't say anything about the essay's author liking or not liking the book; I only said that there's something off, since many people (not everyone, mind you) in the comments are discouraged from reading the book / judge the book/Nabokov based on this video 2) uhm. He didn't "actively choose to write only about touching children".
... Yeah I dunno if a reader finds those passages you quoted 'not, not erotic', uhm... that's on them? 🙃 I've read Lolita thrice now, over a span of about 15 years: once as a teenager, in the midst of an abusive, CSA relationship I was groomed into around Dolores Haze's age, then twice, about a couple years apart, as an adult, who finally acknowledged her experience had, in fact, been CSA (I've also experienced incestuous molestation as a younger child, was semi-groomed by another adult as a teenager, and been in an emotionally abusive relationship as an adult). And it's my favourite general fiction novel of all time. From my perspective, the status quo amongst gen pop IS to view Lolita as a gross endorsement of paedophilic abuse, and to view its author as a 'paedo' by default. Because some people cannot separate art and artist. Which might be part of the problem here as well? I mean, respectfully, I don't find your case particularly convincing in any case (writing teenage romances counts as pedophilia now, what? Paedophilia has a specific clinical definition, for one thing, so...), but also, at the end of the day... who cares? Even IF Nabokov had questionable fantasies/desires, why should that impact one's reading of the book Lolita (or any other of his books, for that matter)? I don't think Lolita endorses paedophilia and, quite frankly, I just don't see how anyone can have that take, unless they are themselves ALREADY inclined to molest children. The text, to my mind, clearly shows the reader that Dolores Haze is a victim, hell even freaking HH acknowledges this at the end of the book. Now I don't think Nabokov SET OUT to write an "anti-pedo" book, either (also, I don't really care either way, because I subscribe to "death of the author" pretty strongly). The motif is almost incidental, in a way, to the book's theming on memory, manipulation, beauty or language (such as I read it). Like I wouldn't necessarily recommend Lolita to people looking to read about the experience of CSA/abuse/trauma, for instance. BUT, as it so happens, I found it incredibly useful on my own healing journey, because Humbert Humbert, as a character, is the perfect portrayal of a garden variety child predator. He is pathetic, narcissistic, and rationalising to the extreme, and goes through all these thought loops to absolve himself of his wrong-doing. I have studied the psychology of my own rapist extensively, at this point, through his old messages and police investigation transcripts (I'm suing him for damages), and the parallels are striking, even funny, to a certain extent, in a morbid humour sort of way. Because the fact is predators aren't, for the most part, monsters. They are human beings, they walk among us. My rapist, to this day, believes we had a beautiful love story, and that I'm the one who broke his heart, as a child and teenager. That I had agency as a disabled child (he met me in a hospital setting). Just like Humbert Humbert. But I don't think writing a character like Humbert Humbert says anything specific about the writer. I'm pretty sure I could convincingly craft a child predator character if I wanted, given the research I've done, and my own lived experience as a victim studying her abuser. Hell, author Sofka Zinovieff did so in her own book, Putney, which also portrays an experience of CSA from both the POVs of the victim and abuser. Honestly, I wouldn't even care that much if Nabokov HAD committed criminal acts (but I've no reason to believe that given the dearth of evidence tbh), because he's dead and buried and, once again, I don't find Lolita (or the other books of his I've read, including Ada or Ardor, the other one I actually enjoyed) promotes a pro-paedophilia message in the slightest. Like my favourite standalone fantasy novel of all time is The Mists of Avalon, and there the author actually committed a crime towards her own child (at least, as far as the evidence points towards). But I don't see that crime endorsed, in the slightest, in the novel itself, and the author is also dead and buried so it's like... why should that stop me from finding all the beauty and meaning I do in the work, which I relate to on its own merits in any case? As to the whole 'first person' v. 'third person' thing... I just don't know where you're getting that from. 🤷♀ I mean if that's how you interpret literature then fair enough, to each their own, I just can't make sense of it personally. I read Pale Fire (found it tedious, wasn't for me), Pnin (boring, wasn't for me), The Enchanter (which yes I simply viewed as a kind of early draft of Lolita, big whoop) and Ada or Ardor (thoroughly enjoyed it, but needs a re-read), and never got this sense of a 'hidden in plain sight' paedophilic motif. 🤷♀Yeah the siblings are weird in that book, but I just read it as that: weird characters, because Nabokov was interested in weird, obsessive, perverted characters for whatever reason. Like I've literally never read his stuff and gotten the impression that his characters were meant to be taken as aspirational role-models. In fact I feel like there's a lot of mockery going on in the texts I've read. Your interpretation is sheer speculation, which is fine, but you can't just state "he had gross predilections" as fact, in my opinion. 🤷♀Maybe he did, maybe he didn't; we'll never know. And maybe, as some have suggested, he himself was abused and was just working through some of that in his writing. 🤷♀Interestingly enough, that's the take of author Vanessa Springora, who wrote a memoir about her experience of being groomed and raped by another writer, as a teenager. I guess I'm just bugged by this trend of armchair psychologising writers (especially dead writers, christ) based on A book, or even several books of theirs (which, on its own, is alright, I guess, as long as it remains a statement of opinion), and asserting the conclusions of said psychologising as undeniable fact, and then that LEADING to blanket demonising works of literature, and then anyone who enjoys them by association. Not saying you're doing that in your video, because I don't think you are, but it's what I see most of this kind of discourse feeding into, unfortunately. I'm also a little tired of readers (speaking in general terms here), who haven't experienced these kinds of things, then acting as weirdo "defenders" of victims/survivors' and getting all outraged and pearl-clutching on behalf of us, at a book they haven't even read most of the time, as if they actually understand how triggers and trauma work, when it's very bloody clear they don't. In this comment section alone, there have been several victims of CSA who loved Lolita, or at least found it meaningful, cathartic, etc... but it's like our voices don't matter when it comes to discussing controversial works like these (again, not speaking about this specific essay, but more about discourse in general). Or when it comes to discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of sexual violence, and trauma (like falling in love with an abuser, orgasming from rape, discussing rapists as fucked up human beings rather than boogeyman monsters, etc...) with the nuance it needs. Also... how exactly are you using the word pornographic? Because that wasn't particularly clear in the video. 🤔 I did read Lilith just now... uhm, I mean I don't really know what to make of it, tbh. The fact it's titled Lilith makes me think more about the whole "demonic" female figures motif than anything else, which yes is present in Lolita, but like... I dunno I find it difficult to extrapolate much more beyond that (also maybe the simple fact is I've read much worse in the 'this is obviously pedo shit, right?' department). I'll give you a point on the books covers thing, which I didn't know, but there again I don't know that I can extrapolate much more beyond the fact he was thinking about marketable covers and wanting to be marketed as high brow fiction. 🤷♀ The one point I agree with you on: we shouldn't dismiss critical analysis of works of fiction just because we (misguidedly, imo, as I hate the concept of genius and pointedly don't use it myself, anymore) label their creators 'geniuses'. But then I don't: I can call a work of fiction a masterpiece without calling its creator a genius - I hate adulation. But I profoundly disagree Lolita stands as some festering wound in the side of Literature (Lolita's legacy, as promulgated by Stanley Kubrick, however, that's a different story). And I disagree even more with your last sentence: I didn't read Lolita through Nabokov's eyes, I read it THROUGH MY OWN. N.B.: I feel like the age thing is easily explained by it simply being the start, more or less, of the transitory, pubertal age. It's that transition that holds fascination, I guess, as the age during which one goes from being a child to an 'adult', on a biological level at least. Like that would be the same reason Will and Lyra are around that age in His Dark Materials, what with the theming on critical thinking, questioning authority, and how Dust works, etc... and the same reason why a lot of older YA stories take place around that age. I really don't think it's deeper than that, but eh, that's just my interpretation. 🤷♀
I completely agree with your points and find your perspective very interesting. Regarding Lilith, I just wanted to tack on that for me it’s pretty straightforwardly a tale of a child rapist who is being tortured by being humiliated in hell. The poem mentions a “remembered child” which implies that while alive, the man assaulted a child. Lilith is less an evil woman and more one of many demons who are punishing him for what he did. In many ways it reads to me like Nabokov was condemning the man for his sins, which got him put in hell, forced to be eternally sexually humiliated. The sexual details in that poem are just further humiliation, laughing at the man for finding this appealing to the point of public ejaculation.
@@rgw10810 Oooh okay that actually makes sense as an interpretation! I also kinda like it, then, given Lilith's association with cursed motherhood and sexuality in Biblical/Jewish/Western lore/folklore, feels like a good way to turn her demonic nature into something positive, if she's punishing a child molester!
@@rgw10810 I mean, Lilith is rather famously Adam's supposed "first wife," she was kicked out of Eden for not obeying him and was treated like a demon thereafter. The theme of vilifying women for their own agency or failure to confine themselves to the strictures of male expectation (or, to zoom out, the theme of conflict between ourselves as subjects and other human beings, who insist on being fully-formed subjects themselves instead of objects for us to use or cast away as we see fit) seems pretty relevant to this discussion
I cant understand how anyone could feel anything other than seething hate for Humbert after that offhand line he had about Dolores crying herself to sleep every night.
Y'know. I used to say stuff like "Your My Hero Academia incest fic isn't the next Lolita." about people holding controversial smut fanfiction as sacred / above all criticism, but as it turns out I was apparently completely wrong in the worst possible way!
How about not comparing fanfiction to books that were published in the last century and discussed widely since then? And how about reading "Lolita" before commenting on it (because your comment suggests that you haven't read it)?
Not saying that incest fanfiction shipping is great literature I'm just a huge defender of fanfiction Percy Jackson, the illiad, Dante's inferno, Romeo and Juliet
What you seem to want is for the author to tell you something is problematic-a sort of "hey, yeah, I know it's weird." More than anything, you want to know whether the author is on your team. For such a subject, you can't really be faulted for that. But a book is a thing on its own. The author is dead, and we have killed him.
I just hope that his questionable writing was his way of coping with the trauma he experienced as a child. Feel like you brushed over that pretty quickly. I hope it’s his way of breaking the cycle of abuse instead of perpetuating it in a way many people far too often do, but there seems to be a lack of critique of such thought processes throughout his work. I also feel as though the “hell” double entendre was skimmed over rather quickly but I haven’t read the work so I’ve got no clue how relevant it actually is. Anyways, great video
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Maybe he is the “12 year old” girl and the abuser having so many of his characteristics is a way to disguise the real nature of the dynamic. I am not sure if it’s true but it is a possibility.
I didn’t want to dwell on it too much since there isn’t a ton of evidence, and I didn’t want to start working backwards and assuming what happened to him. It’s a valid interpretation but not one I wanted to really focus on. Thanks!
The truth is that we will never know the truth (and I wish some people commenting on this video were aware how complex all of this is and that a one hour video with out-of-context quotes from books isn't enough to form a judgment; and to be clear, it's perfectly fine and normal to be grossed out by these, I'm just worried that people will now jump to conclusions upon learning that someone might enjoy Nabokov's prose, but I hope it's just my paranoia, lol). Maybe he was a closeted pedophile, maybe it was a form of processing things, maybe it was a mix of both, maybe it was a way of divert the reader's attention from other things that may be alarming; for example, many Nabokov characters were also murderers (HH included!), how about reading his prose from this angle? Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nabokov was an intelligent trickster and, as far as I know (because everything he did and said needs to be taken with a ton of salt), hated generalizations and easy answers; some people try too hard to get into his head, and it makes them look like Charles Kinbote. Oh well! Anyway. Lolita is still a brilliant portrayal of a destructive obsession; Dolores Haze, even when HH tries to steal her name, remains a very complex and well-written character (when people actually pay attention to the text, that is), and the consequences of HH's actions are painfully accurately described.
abuse very often self-perpetuates, I think it’s important to separate his trauma as a victim from his desires as an adult, even if it could be a method of coping. weirdly this isn’t the first time I’ve run into an author in the same circumstance, there’s an artist in the Warhammer 40k community that’s…contentious, and personally I disliked how the people shielding the artist from criticism made other SA victims feel unsafe.
So, I'm a bit confused. around 13/14 minutes in, you've just mentioned and dismissed the common conclusion that Nabokov was sexually abused by his uncle, and that at least one scene in Lolita is autobiographical. I'm looking at your sources, and I'm not seeing any academic biographies-- or any biographies--- of Nabokov in your list. "People say this person was a victim of sexual abuse, *but actually* no one can really say if he was really abused or not" is a very bold statement; would it not be worth naming, quoting, and carefully refuting the scholars whose arguments you found unsatisfying in this area? I know it's possible you didn't read any academic biographies of the man, or couldn't find pertinent peer-reviewed scholarship, and of course we shouldn't expect a youtube video to have to rely on often paywalled sources like that. But if you *didn't* do that kind of research, it feels a bit irresponsible to me to mention and dismiss the idea so quickly, when we're talking about a public figure being sexually abused as a child. I'm sorry if this is all a bit too blunt or rude, you do genuinely seem like a thoughtful video essayist, but I don't really know how to put this critique any less bluntly.
Are you of the impression that academic biographers seriosuly entertain the idea that this man was sexually abused? This is the first I've heard of such an idea. A casual google seems to show up what you'd expect; no serious biographer contends the abuse ,it mostly stems from people online misunderstanding a line in Speak Memory. Neither Boyd nor Pitzer (his two chief biographers) contend it, both speaking about his actual written experiences of the time instead, and the lone academic who supports the idea (Grossman) cites no sources other than those two biographies.
@@conorkelleher2571 if the youtuber has a problem with Grossman, I think it's worth addressing in the video, not brushing over. It's deeply weird to mention it *at all* and then go "but anyway, actually he probably just loved writing about pedophilia"
It's crazy that he affirms no one can say for sure Nabokov was a SA victim since there is no concrete proof while trying to infer he was a pdfile without any concrete proof lol
*sighs* the story about the ape isn't a true story, it's another Nabokovian trick; many Nabokov scholars tried to find the original picture, and only found evidence that suggested this was a fictional tale inspired both by fiction and reality. There isn't one "real" inspiration for Lolita.
It's not possible to fully know who Nabokov was or what his experiences were, but when you say it doesn't matter if he was a victim of csa from his uncle but rather who he became... everything else that follows seems to imply the opposite. A csa victim trying to understand the mind of their abuser and continually writing stories exploring the subject, who might even start to sound like they endorse it especially if they have a complex relationship with that past and that trauma, is different from someone who simply has an attraction to underage girls. There's no evidence that Nabokov ever assaulted someone, so even if he was a pedophile and wrote these stories from that perspective, all he did was write some fiction pieces from that, which makes it seem like 'who he became as an adult' is irrelevant. But because 'who Nabokov was as a person' is unknowable and he seems to have playfully obscured a lot of it, it seems a bit fruitless to me to chase questions like 'why does his work always focus on incest and pedophilia'. To me, it definitely seems like reckoning with childhood trauma, and I understand that very well from personal experiences, as well as knowing the story of one of my best friends who experienced POCD and even after recovering from that a conviction that persisted into adulthood that she was attracted to children which she had to deprogram in therapy, all due to deep sexual trauma from her childhood. The way the brain responds to SA is veryyy tricky and complex, especially for the developing mind of a child, so sometimes people grow up with a need to explore what happened to them from the POV of their abuser or start to sexualize their trauma. I'm not a pro literary critic or someone with a degree in literature and I just analyze things for fun so I'm comfy in a complete death of the author ignorance is bliss perspective so this isn't really for me to explore but it seems like a weird jump to condemning him here...
Highly recommend "Lolita Podcast" by Jamie Loftus if anyone i looking for a super deep dive into the novel, it's adaptations, and the wide spread cultural impact.
I find it quite challenging to separate an author's personality from their work, particularly in this case, because it's essential to analyze the context in which Nabokov created "Lolita." The context is rather complex, as certain events in Nabokov's life influenced his creation of the character Humbert. It's likely that Humbert was modeled after his uncle and the views on young girls by Lewis Carroll in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." I would argue that "Lolita" is more a way to understand the mind of such a horrific person as Humbert-an abhorrent and troubled mind that Nabokov likely drew from his own experiences, perhaps from his childhood and later when he had a son of his own. For those interested, I highly recommend a deep analysis of this work on the channel "Филолог всея Руси" - Вы не поняли Лолиту
God the whole thing about "he sat at his desk and chose to think about young girls" he such a pernicious, cowardly and quite disgusting way of saying it. What a nasty way of framing it, when the accusation in substance is meaningless... and then you shift this BS to "his fondness for sexualizing young girl" ! OMG
to anyone considering clicking on that link in the description and reading “lilith” out of morbid curiosity- it’s so much worse than he described. in both subject matter and quality.
oh man, agreed, but i would honestly recommend that folks (who are comfortable with doing so) check it out, if they're interested. there was a particular line that made my face twist into an involuntary frown, but i think it definitely adds context about nabokov's broader themes
So I know russian and I checked both the original and the translation... and I gotta say that the translation is worse and more explicit than the original. No, honestly, this translation sucks and has some questionable choices of interpreting the text, and it doesn't do the original's justice at all, both lyric-wise and rhythm-wise, it's so bad... The original, *despite its content*, is genuinely a good poem? or at least well-written. That said, I don't know how to view this poem. I could say that Nabokov was being edgy and that the pеdophile protagonist is punished cause duh he's in hell surrounded by imps and ultimately humiliated--but that's just an interpretation and I don't know if it matches the intention...
Ok I’ll start this by saying I try not to watch videos about lolita that I think will annoy me. As a person who was sexually abused as a child, I have formed a very deep interest in the subject of CSA on a lot of sides and it frustrates me immensely to see people spout shit about it. especially when it comes to predators themselves. But I gave this a chance cuz I liked some of your other stuff, and I’m glad I did cuz this video’s got a lot of meat to it. I just hope you don’t mind that I pour my guts out into your comment section because this is going to be very long. probably longer than a lot of the essays I've written for college hah. also content warning for like, CSA, incest, SA, pedophilia, all that kind of stuff. Also I had to break this up cuz it was too long :’) So I don’t really know where you’re coming from with this third person = the author's opinions idea. I think it was the right choice for Lolita to be written in first person, but as someone who writes a lot of stories in third person myself, I’m confused as to why that would be more disturbing or indicative of the author's opinions. Third person writing often takes on the opinions of the characters it follows, or at the very least describes things through their mindsets. So you would still see the world through the eyes of someone who categorizes certain children as “Nymphets” as third person would be describing this guy who sees these girls as nymphets. I think this focus on if the story is in first or third person kind of weakens your video here because it makes it harder to take seriously, as I find it unconvincing that third person is supposed to be inherently neutral or factual. You can have unreliable third person narration as third person narration is just a different way of writing. Side note this video made me very interested in reading Ada, as I’m always down for explicit stories about sibling sexual abuse cuz of my own experiences with sibling sexual abuse. Another side note, and kind of a nitpick so I’m sorry, but I find it amusing as someone who is very aware of how normalized and common pedophilia, incest, and sexual abuse in general are, to hear you describe Ada as an alternate world where those things are normalized. I understand what you meant, but make no mistake, pedophilia, incest are absolutely rampant in America if not the entire world. They are also somewhat normalized, but getting into that would be an entire different rant. I’d like to take a second here and compare Nabokovs writing to a book I recently finished called The Incest Diary. The Incest Diary is an anonymously published autobiographical story about a girls incestuous relationship with her dad. It's very explicit and blunt about what happens in it, it uses words like cunt, pussy, penis, cock, and dick. The narrator, who IS the author, describes being aroused just by writing about her trauma. It was, to me, a very refreshing and exciting book to read. Because something that happens with a lot of victims of sexual abuse is that they develop sexual complexes about it. This is often ignored because it would challenge a lot of people’s ideas around what is and isn’t ok, sexually, and about how they can support victims of sexual abuse. No one wants to admit that a lot of victims are going to have weird sexual complexes when they’re abused sexually. Because then you would have to accept that it's ok to have disgusting fetishes and no one wants to do that haha. In the incest diary, she gets turned on thinking about her dad. Which makes sense, her dad was the foremost sexual figure in her life since she was like 3 years old. Being turned on by taboo shit like your trauma is one of the main ways people’s minds cope with sexual abuse. And it’s also a good example of how creating or consuming that kind of kinky content in no way reflects on if you’re a pedophile. Later in the book she gets turned on by a guy she’s dating describing how hot she looks in a picture as a child. But getting turned on by this kind of ageplay stuff doesn’t at all equate to finding real children attractive. Here’s another important thing: I write a lot of stories. Most of these stories will include sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, or pedophilia in some way. Because those are the things I’m interested in talking about. I’ve always found it very confusing and annoying to hear that I’m supposed to write about these things without sexualizing them, because they are sexual. That’s kind of the whole point. I understand what people mean when they say this, but I don’t agree with it. I don’t agree that the only good way to write about sexual abuse is to make it seem as repulsive or sterile as possible. Because sexual abusers don’t see it that way, a lot of them take quite a lot of joy in it, and I don’t think it’s helping anyone to pretend otherwise. Rape is bad because it’s assault, because it’s hurting someone, it’s not bad because it’s gross. And there’s a lot of ways to show that, but I don’t think discounting the titillating or more sexually provocative ways of doing that helps anyone. Because if it did, it would discount that rape can occur and be pleasurable and still be rape. Kind of like the "if it was rape why did you cum?" victim blaming shit. This gets especially hairy when it comes to child on child sexual abuse, as is portrayed in Ada. Because the scene you described of the two girls and the boy, with the kissing and all that shit? It’s similar to things that happened to me. We enjoyed it at the time, cuz we didn’t know any better. Nobody talks about how kids can hurt other kids that way, if they talk about sexual abuse at all. When I see things like that, I see myself, and I rarely get to see myself that way. It was gross erotic fanfic of a similar nature that actually made me realize I’d been sexually abused, because it portrayed my reality way better than anything else I’d ever read before. Sidenote but I liked your joke about “easter eggs but with pedophilia” because I’m pretty sure I legit do that across my stories, since I’ll often include characters from one of them in another. Anyway this video reminded me of an idea that’s annoyed me since I was 12 (haha, there’s 12 again!) and first began thinking about this stuff, is that if someone IS a pedophile in their own mind, who cares? It doesn’t matter if he thinks incest and children having sex is hot as long as he doesn’t rape anyone. I was worried I was a pedophile when I was 12 for a lot of the fantasies and things I’d have going through puberty, and I decided that if I was then there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It didn’t matter so long as I didn’t rape anyone because it was just in my mind. Which was easy enough cuz it turns out I don't want to rape anyone, or even have sex with anyone. But my point is this: this video is interesting and clearly genuine and I truly appreciate you making it. I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know before. I liked the way you debunked that whole “no girls on the cover” thing, because I’d heard that around before and totally bought into it. But in the end, all I see is a guy who had a lot of weird taboo kinks. In many ways, his writing mirrors some of my favorite people’s writing. I’m friends online with a lot of victims of incest/csa, and a lot of us have develop incest and underage kinks. We’ll write stories about sexual abuse, both ones that are erotic and ones that aren’t, and ones that blur the line between those two things. And these are my favorite artists in the world because they make me feel seen and cared about in a way no other media about CSA does. It makes sense to me that he would want strict control over how people perceived him, if he feared being made out as a kind of monster over his kinks/fetishes/desires. If anything, this makes me appreciate his work more, as I’m a staunchly pro-kink kind of person, and as far as I can tell this was a lifelong sexual obsession of his that never bled into real abuse. People who write about this kind of stuff are often survivors, like my friends I mentioned before, and will often face harassment and doxxing and all kinds of stuff for writing about this shit in a way more people don’t understand. Not cuz they’re too dumb to understand it, just cuz they dont have the life experiences to relate to it.
I mean, and this is getting a bit off topic in an already very long youtube comment but- even actual child rapists aren’t inherently attracted to children. Some of them are, but a significant amount of child sex abuse is done out of a desire to feel powerful by controlling or hurting someone else. I know this shit because reading about the facts of CSA is one of my main hobbies. Anyway, I truly appreciate the effort you put into this video. I was worried going in that you were just going to look at his books, say they’re gross and that he’s probably a pedophile or something. I liked the part where you made it clear that these things, as far as anyone can tell, never crossed over into real life. Because that's the most important thing to me. I really liked the part at the end where you mention how people often see whoever they claim to be a genius as above writing fucked up things Just Cuz They Want To. I roll my eyes at that kind of thing a lot. Firstly because I’m not sure I believe in the concept of geniuses anyway, and secondly because it enables a lot of horrible abuse to believe someone is Too Smart to be crude or cruel. I also appreciate how you mention that before he got into all the weird shit that may or may not have been like, his kink or something, in Ada, the first book that really engaged with pedophilic stuff was Lolita. I don’t agree with how you framed it though, like it was a trick or something to get people inoculated. But I do understand how it could seem that way when all your concerns kept getting brushed aside as you not being Smart Enough or something. That can be really frustrating. To me, I read him first fully engaging with these ideas in Lolita as him kind of laying down the morality of the situation before indulging in the stuff he wanted to. It’s like someone saying “Look just so we’re all clear this shit is bad if you do it in real life ok?” like laying down the rules of a fucked up kink scene before you do it. I’m going to have to disagree with your conclusion, and your use of the idea of it as a festering wound of sorts. There are a lot of reasons people can be obsessed with taboo ideas, especially pedophilia. There’s a kind of OCD, for example, where one is obsessed with the idea of being a pedophile, and fears that they’re a danger to their loved ones. I’m not saying he has that of course, my point is just that there are a lot of reasons someone can have that kind of fixation without it being an inherently bad or dangerous or suspect thing. As I’ve said before, I don’t hold people’s kinks against them, no matter how taboo, because they aren’t real. He didn’t actually hurt anyone, aside from that affair with a college girl, and in my opinion that was sketchy because of it being an affair and him having a position of power over her. I mean, my obsession with pedophilia and CSA in general comes from an attempt to heal through understanding it both through a sterile lens and through the less clean, messy, sexually charged lens of my own psyche. So yea, I really can't agree the idea that him having this sexual fixation mars his work at all. If anything it makes me enjoy his stuff more, because it means we’ve both got weird sexual kinks. Potentially from trauma but idk I wont speculate further on his life. Because that's beside the point, I don't think people need trauma to write about fucked up shit. Mostly cuz that'd be a weird standard, but also because I think it'd be pretty gross to expect an author to have to tell you if they experienced horrific trauma to approve of them writing about fucked up things. Anyway, if you actually read all this holy shit, thank you. And if you didn’t well. Thanks anyway, I liked the video and the amount of care you put into it. I wouldn’t have commented if I didn’t think there was a chance you might actually listen to me, hah.
Thanks so much for your comment (and i did make it to the end ha). I really appreciate your being respectful even when you disagree with some of my conclusions. I do agree that the whole first/third person thing isn't the strongest point, but I do think it's worth considering when talking about how his other works contrast with Lolita. As for the idea of CSA vs actions, I'm not sure how I feel about that in larger society, but I think Nabokov is a special case since his profile and status could be used to normalise that behaviour, harming people even if he himself never did. Regardless, it's a complicated topic, and not one that has one simple answer. Thanks again for taking the time to comment!
FWIW, I really appreciated your long and thoughtful comment. What you said about the taboo of enjoying sex that was rape really resonated, because I experienced that myself: I was groomed as an older child, to fall in love with my rapist/abuser, who was a much older teacher. The very first rape was more 'stereotype-congruent' in that I had a freeze and dissociated response, but the others felt like normal sex at the time. The fact I experienced pleasure from those acts is more soul-destroying than the acts themselves, in a way, but that is so incredibly hard to tell people who, for the most part, can only imagine the super physically violent kinds of rape. I also like what you said about the distinction between child rapists and pedophiles (a medical term, first and foremost); I too developed a special interest for this stuff, over the years, to make sense of my own experiences of abuse and CSA. And yeah Lolita is my favourite general fiction novel of all time as well, I have found it very useful on my healing journey.
Hey Imp, I know this is weird af coming from a total stranger but do you have any socials? Your comment struck me in a way that never struck me before and I never write comments but I made a throwaway just so I could express how much I wish I had someone like you to discuss these things in my life. I’m in the same boat as you-in my case I was incested by my ‘father’ and trafficked before that. I went to therapy to process my trauma and the severe disorders that came along with it, but even after reaching a point where my trauma no longer bothers me I’m left with so many thoughts on how society treats CSA victims and how we are constantly decentered and treated like freaks in conversations ABOUT US. To me it feels like people only care about CSA because it repulses them and not because of the harm it causes-I’m often wondering how many of these people WOULD molest a child if they didn’t have that moral impulsion and had that kind of attraction. Like you, CSA and pedophilia became a special interest for me, and for a while I even wanted to become a psychiatrist specializing in counselling pedophiles who seek treatment (I have since realized psychiatry is not a field for me due to the amount of frustrations and injustices I would witness and endure.) One trope that I’m very mad about and my friends know I’m very mad about is the trope where the scene needs a scapegoat character for the audience to want dead, so they just make them a child molester. It turns my trauma into a fucking plot device and gimmick to manipulate the feelings of the viewer while simultaneously never giving space to the victims and survivors and THEIR story, and if that isn’t a representation of how society treats us then I don’t know what is. The entire time I was reading your comments I found myself nodding furiously and screaming “YES!!” internally as you’ve put into words the thoughts that have been circling in my mind for so, so long. I’ve always had the urge to write about and discuss the social implications of this kind of abuse and how it impacts our lives even when everything is “all behind me.” We have thinkpieces and essays on every other social issue on this continent EXCEPT for this subject, where we’re constantly censored because people don’t like to think about us and process the reality of what’s happening in this world. Our sufferings and emotions are stuffed into a little closet, only taken out when people want to use us as a bullet point in an argument or a chance to morally grandstand. And it fucking hurts. I would love to talk to you and your friends about this stuff. I know it’s weird that a stranger is asking for this, in a YT comments section of all places, but when I read your comment it just struck a chord so deep that I thought to myself “I have to talk to this person. I HAVE to.” Most of my friends are also CSA survivors, but they’re all at the stage where they’re either just barely aware of it or are struggling to process it and have just frozen it out of their minds, which leads to rather bland discussions because they won’t-CAN’T-add anything to the wider discussion other than just nodding along. I can make a burner discord and leave the tag here if you want to keep your social channels private, and if you don’t want to talk that’s totally fine too- I won’t hold a grudge, I know this is a terribly weird request. But regardless, thank you for sharing your thoughts here. Your words mean so much to a little stranger like me. PS-I also use it/its pronouns. They’re technically my primary set that I feel most comfortable in, but because it’s so unconventional I just let people use any pronouns on me instead. I still genuinely cannot put into words how much this comment means to me. Thanks again🥲🥲
I love your comment so much... everything about it is how I feel exactly but put so eloquently and succinctly... Both of my parents each had their own special hand in molesting me and it's hard to struggle with... living with that. I wish to meet you or your friends so badly because i never met a person who really GOT IT like you do,,, lol its kinda funny doing this in a youtube comments section but like, it would be cool to actually get to know you
If he was a victim of CSA, and as a result had an inappropriate sexual attraction that he explored through his writing, and refrained from acting on any minors… I mean, you can’t help what you’ve been through or what thoughts you have. You can choose not to act on it. I’m not saying he’s an amazing author, I’m just saying we don’t need to demonize him or anyone for passive gross thoughts if they aren’t acting on them? That just further stops people from wanting to open up and get help, and stigmatizes them even more.
not trying to undermine survivors nor the incredible, extensive research done for the video, but the screenshot of a page from "speak, memory" rubbed me the wrong way. this was not only because the wording leads to a disturbing conclusion but also because the memory of this episode somehow has completely escaped me. scrolling through the comment section led me to believe that a lot of people jump to conclusions about that part of nabokov's life, so i decided to refresh my memory and look it up in "другие берега" (1954), the russian version of his autobiography and the version i was originally familiar with. the wording there does nothing to suggest any kind of abuse. obviously, the reality might be something different entirely, but this being the only "evidence" for the theory, one can't help but try and analyze it somehow. the english and russian paragraphs are almost identical in structure, but lexically they couldn't be any more different. for example, instead of the verb "fondle," he uses the russian verb "ласкал," which in that instance is free of any sexual connotations and at the time was quite a widespread term describing tenderly playing with a child/non-sexual touch and caresses. even though the english memoirs came first, in the foreword for the russian version, nabokov admits that it was hard to express some of his thoughts in english. for that reason, "speak, memory" took him so much time "because the memory was tuned to one key - the musically unspoken russian." again, abuse happens even when the victims do not talk about it openly, but in my opinion, any scholarly deduction from something that could as well be clunky wording by a multilingual person doesn't fit any academic standards. for an author to use the themes of pedophilia in their work, one doesn't have to be neither a survivor nor an active predator - sometimes they are just a creepy guy with the moral compass of a fin de siècle russian aristocrat. and he wasn't alone in that as well. i mean, even though nabokov is not traditionally associated with the so-called silver age authors, they had quite an influence on his writing, and it will be extremely hard to name a silver age author who hasn't addressed the topic of child sexual exploitation in their art or done it in good faith.
Thanks for the insightful analysis, I had always by second-hand sources taken it for granted that Lolita had been an autobiographical, in a sense, book of the author digesting their childhood traumas in the Freudian sense of working the conflict out through sublimation into the book - not that the book was an invented imagination of being in the paedophile's life from an author with no experience in childhood sexual traumatic occurrences personally. This doesn't make the book any less of an interest or fascination for me, but more of it because of how it implies the imagination of the author outside their experiences. It has become almost a matter of cultural presupposition that I assumed it otherwise with Lolita's origins. Would you mention some of the silver-age authors in question that you cite implicitly at the end of your comment who deal in childhood exploitation or had proclivities towards it? I know Uranian (eroticisation of youth in sodomy) was prolific in many English verse up to Oscar Wilde, but am unlearned in the Russian realm of literature pretty generally and do not know the Silver-age author's theme and verse.
@JingleJangleJam i am not going to use examples from silver-age poetry, because i believe that i am not qualified enough in that particular department, but among the prose there are at least two works that also have directly influenced nabokov's writing - "the petty demon" by fyodor sologub and "sulamith" by aleksandr kuprin other prosaic texts that tackled the abovementioned theme from the top of my head: g. ivanov "распад атома" (disintegration of the atom), i. bunin "легкое дыхание" (light breathing), "зойка и валерия" (zoyka and valeriya), l. andreyev "в тумане" (in the fog) but again, i can't and not really inclined to speculate whether or not the chosen themes of their body of work had anything to do with real-life offences - i suppose, one could start researching diaries and correspondence, but things like that are famously hard to get your hands on, unless they have been published, of course i am not aware of any author having an actual criminal conviction, however for that period of russian history that's not saying anything if you want to really dig deep and understand the whole mindset around sexual emancipation and taboos, i would highly recommend picking up anything on the subject from the main silver age philosophers vladimir solovyov, nikolai berdyaev or (most importantly) vasily rozanov
@@proustration Thanks, aside from academia discussions too - I have what I think is an interesting point I want to make about the literary terminology used to describe these actions or behaviours between adults and children. In recent times the term ''sexual abuse'' has become most popular, in a new introduction published in 2010 edition of Sigmund Freud's 'the Psychology of Love', the English literary graduate and feminist writer Jeni Johnson writes, and I want to pay attention to what she writes in brackets and makes a critical point of Freud's writing style by using generous quotations of Joyce's critique of Freud seen in Finnegan's Wake; ''Writing in the condensed, portmanteau language of dreams, Joyce provides a pithy precis and implied critique: as Freud, inventor and arch practitioner of 'Sykos . . . on 'alices', listened to his patients, as they talked of their lives, their memories, their dreams, and as their symptoms manifested themselves in shades at once muted ('meiotic': understated), he noted their recurrent recourse to 'prepossessing drauma present in [their] pasts' ('drauma': drama, trauma, and from the German Traum: dream; and 'prepossessing' daddies who were 'not always undemonstrative relative(s)'. Joyce, writing later, generously applies litotes - 'not always undemonstrative'. Freud in 1896 thought his patients' fathers too, too demonstrative: they had 'seduced' (now there's a euphemism) their daughters.'' Now there's a euphemism! For the rest of the essay, she uses the terminology 'sexual abuse' instead of 'seduced'. The most common way many people, who claim that they aren't understood in it at all often, describe themselves is through sexual abuse survivor. I choose not to... The reason? I think that 'sexual abuse', in my opinion, as what is missed by the above author, is itself actually the greatest euphemism of all. I think it is euphemistic to call the things that occurred between me and adults as a child as ''sexual abuse'', and I think ''sexual abuse survivor'' is another euphemism in the sense since I find it to actually be a vague and mild designation, description or point. So ''seduce'' someone, whoever, in its older and more historical context and literary use, was to ''Lead astray, tempt into sin or crime, corrupt; persuade (woman) into surrender of chastity, debauch. Hence -ible. And I think people are more disturbed by the use of ''seduce'' for children than by the use of ''abuse'', an abuse might just be when I tell you you're an idiot, an abuse can be innocuous and ignored, it doesn't involve a loss or leading astray, and the word abuse can vaguely mean many things. The word seduce from Latin ''Se(ducere duct- lead) and people are disturbed by Freud's language when he says the child is seduced in modern writing, because they can't admit that children are among the most easy people in society to lead, because they are taught to trust in and be led by adults all their life. I think to call someone an abuser of a child is a euphemism of to call them a seducer of a child.
@@JingleJangleJamvery apt. abuse can describe many things. for example, one can abuse a customer service employee and although the word abuse can describe their actions, it does not have as loaded connotations, as let’s say, abuse of a partner.
@@candyfuntime184 I think because euphemisms help particularly embarrassing and shameful topics to become more plainly spoken in ordinary language, I think most people don't realise that the word 'abuse' originated as a euphemism because now the euphemism itself, like in the case of the Soviet Union where the euphemism ''liquidate'' replaced ''murder'', the euphemism starts to build up a reputation as a euphemism that gives it a darker or more controversial edge even though its actually vague in its expressiveness. A masturbation can be seen as an abuse, in older definitions in the dictionary, the definition of the word is literally ''to practice self-abuse''. A customer service line has a use, a function, an abuse is to mis-use the purpose of something, like when Larry David said the point of waiting in line and sampling a flavour of ice-cream before you buy, is that you only sample one type of ice-cream so the line isn't too long, otherwise you would be ''abusing your sample privileges.'' That the expression is vague is because it implies some normativity of value-use of something. A child as kind of like a utility to be served toward a practical use in being raised properly into the next stage of becoming a human being. Lenny Bruce in his autobiography, writes about how masturbation can be seen as a form of self-abuse by children during the conservative times in which he made his stand-up act; ''One eventful day, I discovered self-gratification. An older kid conducted a school, and five of us graduated about the same time.'' Later his father finds him at an importune moment. . . ''I was propped up in bed, taking care of business. I was so involved, I didn't hear the door open. ''Leonard, what are you doing?'' It was my father! My heart stopped. I froze. He repeated: ''I said, what are you doing?'' To say it was a traumatic moment would be euphemistic. I had to restrain myself from asking: ''Would you wait outside for just a minute?'' He snarled, ''It's not only disgusting, what you're doing - but goddamnit, in my bed!'' He sat down and proceeded to tell me a story, that story we have all heard, with embellishments. Its grim conclusion left three of our relatives in state insane asylums - poor souls who had never been instructed in the wisdom of sleeping with their hands above the covers.'' And it goes for another page of writing on masturbation. . . ''Oh, what a cursed thing! I could see myself on a street corner, giving testimony for the C.B.W.A. - Crooked Back Whackers Anonymous: Yea, Brothers, I was of mortal flesh. Fortunately for me, my father walked in on me the day I was having my struggle with Satan.'' Anyway, Lenny Bruce so aptly here with words portrays how in the past, masturbation was seen as a form of self-abuse, because the word ''abuse'' in its linguistic function can come to reflect the mores of a particular time, and can abstracts mean just to use a function of something other than its indended usage, which is a highly vague term with many complex social connotations.
Thank you for posting this. To be honest, I find it extremely concerning how people are so unwilling to even consider recontextualizing Nabokov. Some of these books are truly appalling. I do however disagree that him be an CSA victim is irrelevant. Often childhood trauma can lead to unhealthy adult pathological love and desire. This has been studied already. My own experiences have taken a great deal of therapy to process and work on fixing. I do wonder if Navakov’s own writing reflects pathological and intrusive thinking patterns in his life. Something he would never act or even feel compelled to act upon but which he could not separate from attempts of contextualizing his uncle’s thoughts. One will never know, but I do remember reading some of his writings about Lewis Carroll specifically and he seemed to detest him. It may be that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
You bring up a lot of good points but it's difficult to take the whole video seriously with your pearl clutching. As a victim of csa and a late bloomer, my first sexual feelings were very fucking weird and upsetting. Parental figures and members of the same sex- the first one obviously will never be not icky but as a believing christian in the midst of a very conservative christian community it was still very traumatic. I just had to somewhat come to terms that my sexuality was just fucked up and I had to work hard to reach any place of healing. Kinky erotica and porn and also lot of research on pedophilia etc was basically my obsession. I didn't tell anyone about it and maybe thank god I wasn't a literary genius who wrote and published things. For the topics you're dealing with and implying some horrendous things about the author's actions and intentions- you really need to research and tolerate some truly uncomfortable topics. You seem to have completely left out how victims of csa can experience arousal and even positive feelings about their abuse and abuser. And that writing about these weird shameful but definitely horny things is what you will expect a csa survivor who happens to be a good author to do.
the issue of sexuality is difficult in this regard because in many cases, if you were harmed as a child, it can become an obsessive fixation as an adult, and most people tend to get suspicious of it because they simply were never in situations where they could have become obsessed in the same way. i feel many sexually traumatized people and survivors of grooming and csa are often scrutinized more heavily for their "abnormal" sexual fixations, when in actuality few people want to confront why it is abnormal. most people are terrified of how truly horrifying that is and also how completely normal it is, so instead of creating a place for people to confront it, they ignore the topic entirely and condemn mention of it even from suvivors.
i would like to add that nabokov was heavily inspired by the kidnapping of sally horner to write lolita. As in humbert's MO is the same as the kidnapper and even how lolita tragically passes very young just like sally
Such a dreadful take. It's just not the same as Kipling being excused for colonialism - because Kipling did actually support the British Empire. Nabokov is totally different, he is making a point that aesthetically pleasing literature can be written that is totally disconnected from morality. The author stand-ins and self-references are there precisely to challenge people who didn't understand. He was against the idea that novels had to have a moral theme and so deliberately celebrated the most gross subjects.
I'd love to see the letters he wrote to you explaining his intricate thought process. Oh wait... As far as what personal opinion I'm going for, I'll go with video-man's
@@atrustworthyfellow6887 Well, first of all, he wrote a lot of non-fiction describing his process. Second, you can come to your own opinion without parroting mine or the video man's you know.
having read only lolita, pale fire and despair, i feel unable to fully engage with this video. i still think my original interpretation of lolita as criticizing pedophiles stands regardless. and the passage cited from pale fire in the context of the overall book just feels irrelevant to me. i'd have to read the other works on the "a list" myself to understand if his works are covertly condoning pedophilia. but the usage of "nymphet" to describe a real life child is pretty damning to my opinion on nabokov as a person. ur videos really make me think, i just subscribed also this is vibes based and not academic, but there's always been this "too good to be true" feeling around lolita for me. "it's controversial but actually it's not, it's 100% a perfectly written representation of pedophilia and its consequences". and if you question that you just read it wrong. it's one of the best books i've ever read, but critiques of aspects of the book are valid
While I can see Nabokov as legit harbouring some kind of secret unsavoury obsession, the portion of his work classified as sexually abusing minor girls seem a bit exaggerated (he definitely sexualized minors frequently, but I would not classify some of it as abuse due to the context it was written in). My personal opinion on him is that he likely wanted, but did not get a chance to “get with” girls his age when he was 14-18, a time when “love” supposedly was most exuberayting, maybe because he was socially awkward, held back by fear or simply didn’t meet a lot of girls his age. This plus a lot of pent up desire/emotion (he did have a very sheltered childhood, but as an adult writer liked to write about eccentric and morally questionable minds) stayed with Nabokov as a desire to frequently return to the idealism of young/infantile love. But he is probably not a pedophile in the natural sense, that we would classify pedophiles today. That is of course not taking into account he might’ve been sexually abused as a child because there’s no strong evidence. I’m open to interpreting him as either way because my favourite novel has always been Pale Fire 😂 not so much into the young girl stuff
Because young girls are a symbol of innocence, nothing more. Nabokov lost his home and dad early. His main theme is the loss of innocence. His books were always about trying to go back, to find the lost kingdom of his childhood, be it in the memories or in art. It was never about real girls, or girls at all really
@@daniels.9740 Maybe, Pale Fire does all of what you say without the young girl stuff 🤷🏻♀️ but he definitely got an unusually lot of work done that involved young girls
@@fanofrpgalore1546 Pale fire, as a poem in the story, exists only because a little girl dies, so not exactly without them, lol. But yes, he explores this theme in many other ways in his books
The people in the comments feels so detached from the content of the video somehow. Like, Nabokov doesn't have to politically correct, or a victim of an SA, to be appreciated. I dont think this is the point of the video.
Yes, this video is just a reaction on random other content creators saying Nabokov is a saint writing Lolita and that it's nature is good and moral, which is very simple minded.
Well, if there's one silver lining to all this, it's that after the novel came out and caused a stir, people started to kinda give more of a shit about child m*lestation. Kinda, but it was something considering no one gave a shit about children in the early 20th century, period. At the very least it got people actually talking about the topic of csa.
I don't disagree with your points, but Ada is still my favorite novel. I read it first as a fifteen year old girl and I found the description of young love and puberty, with the shame and secrecy and pure joy associated, profoundly resonant. I'm reading an excerpt at my coming wedding. I guess true emotions can come from books with problematic authors.
Also I loved loved loved the interplay of the three different languages, Russian, French and English. Coming from a multilingual family myself, it was the first time seeing it described in a true to life way for me.
Exactly, if the book means something to you then where it came from shouldn’t detract from that. Congratulations on the wedding! (Also yes username checks out 100%)
the way you cherry pick and grasp at straws to make a point that's not very nuanced at all is making me reconsider your analysis of A Little Life (the video that made me found this channel)
I think A Little Life is a book that is way easier to criticize; for example, the lack of research in A Little Life is obvious, and you can't say the same about Nabokov's work. Ugh, I wish someone did a thorough response to this poorly attempt at psychoanalysing Nabokov; I've already seen people outside YT who referenced this video to "prove" that Vlad's work is inherently evil.
I don't see how he cherry-picked; he acknowledges the merit these books have as works of art. He just also highlights the reoccurring themes in these works. In no way does he admonish or berate the novels or Nabokov and says, in no uncertain terms at the end, that the books cannot and should not be simply dismissed.
I think the implication of Nabokov being the victim of CSA by his uncle is relevant, because it raises the question of whether or not he was subconsciously working through his own trauma. It absolutely would not make it right - but it is still a valid angle to consider.
In the occasion that my other comment gets deleted for being too confrontative Here is a copy of the lone full-length Nabokov ever gave, like two years before he died, on the talk show Apostrophes. He talks about his most infamous and controversial novels such as Lolita and Ada. If you can speak French or read Spanish, you’ll understand it. It starts at 10:31 and ends at 1:12:00. th-cam.com/video/a0MHIBoWOQg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=6FMeYA5KSzSMnrF9 Who would you rather hear speak on the more suspicious, inappropriate parts of Nabokov’s oeuvre: the man himself or some guy?
For anyone who wants to read this interview in an alternate language with the help of Google Translate, The Nabokovian has a transcript of the original French, which can be found here: www.thenabokovian.org/node/25734 Google Translate can be a bit wonky (for example it turns ‘le phare’ into ‘beacon’ rather than ‘lighthouse’), so bear in mind! For people who want a more exact translation into English, Brian Boyd translated this interview in the collection ‘Think, Write, Speak’ (pg.1,254) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). Also bear in mind, as I mentioned in the video, Nabokov’s answers were prepared ahead of time (you can see him reading off cards), and as such his comments are fairly consistent with those found in Strong Opinions from 1973. Thanks!
I think it’s a very reasonable conclusion to come to after this video about Nabokov as a man widely renown as a “genius” could’ve been fully capable of recognizing his attraction to young girls and knowing it would be frowned upon in society. It’s not unreasonable to think that a man that intelligent could use a form such as writing as a functional outlet for those thoughts instead of acting on them.
I couldn't have said it better myself! Obviously we can't know Nabokov's intimately-held predilections, but if he really harboured an attraction to little girls, the healthiest thing he could've done with it (considering the time and context in which he lived) was sublimate that attraction into his art and steer clear of real-life children, which is by all accounts what he seems to have done.
Actually no, seeing that a man (who himself was a victim of child sexual abuse) wrote about child sex abuse and thinking it means he himself must have been a child sex abuser and chose to “hide” this fact by publicly writing about it is not intelligent.
@@damonhastings540you do realize that those who have been victims of sexual abuse as children are more likely to repeat the abuse into adulthood right? Also how would explain such flowery language used to describe such things through various works throughout his life?
@@Lxurelxi I consider this to be common knowledge. I'm also not in the habit of accusing victims of child sex abuse of being pedophiles simply because I watched some misleading youtube movie about books you haven't read.
@@d.hastings1779 neither am I but we also don’t even have confirmation that he was a victim of sexual abuse. Regardless of that the continuous appearance of viewing young girls in a sexual context is prevalent in many of his other works. That is fact. My opinion is formed based on the textual evidence that are in his books. It’s not just Lolita and there is something alarming about that.
@@somerandommenimo it's kinda sad in his case, he was sexually abused as a child and i guess you could see his case as perpetuating a cycle of abuse. Hopefully him putting his thoughts into words helped him deal with that shit without feeling tempted to hurt anyone.
@@somerandommenit is absolutely deniable. Anyone can write on anything if they have the imagination and skill to do so, as Nabokov did. This video essay is pure shit, it is nothing.
From Grammarist: “Daemons are good or helpful spirits. The idea of the daemon has survived today as a sort of guardian angel or an inner driving force. Remember, a demon is an evil spirit, a daemon is a good spirit.“
After watching this video, and reading all the comments. I’m left with all kinds of emotions, mostly disgust and uncomfortableness. Which, I think is the point. I think what you and other commenters said all brought up interesting points, even if I disagree. To be honest, I’m not sure if I can really comment something worth reading, because I’m feeling a lot of different ways. Which, I think is one of the most important things literature can do. I also haven’t read Lolita or his other works, I just knew of Lolita and want to check it out. I still do, but I do think it’s one of those books I’d have to read over and over to truly get it. I want to take Nabokov in good faith, but it does feel kind of difficult. From just a look at the comments, and discourse surrounding it as a whole. Lolita is important for csa survivors, that cannot be denied. I do have to disagree with you just midly brining up his uncle, I’m just regurgitating, and you *did* bring it up. But it almost feels, ignored? If he was a victim of csa, it’s pretty common for csa victims, to write about csa. I mean, of course it’s disgusting, reading through some of these comments genuinely disturbed me. But, if csa survivors general consensus is “pedophilia in the fictional context can be used to cope, even if on the surface level it seems pornagraphic, a lot of us developed weird sexualities/kinks because of what we went through” then I think we ought to listen. I’ve met some who disagree and I’ve met some who agree. I won’t get into it myself, but I was a victim of being preyed on as a kid. Nothing happened thankfully, it mostly just stayed in his subtle actions, but it got scarier when I saw how he treated other young girls around me. Not that I have to state what happens to me to have opinions on this, I guess what I’m saying is I just genuinely don’t know what is or isn’t the right answer. It’s never that easy, it’s usually never that black and white. But, I’m just saying him potentially being a csa victim recontexualizes a lot of his work. To be frank, I feel some are being really harsh over this. I’m not sure if it’s the kind of audience you attract, I’ve only one other video. But, you said you made this to inform others who aren’t as familiar with his work and I do feel informed. I absolutely would have a more educated opinion if I read his work, and I’ll never have the knowledge of the scholars who study him. But I feel gross, angered, amazed, weird, and enlightened. Literature is amazing.
fully agree here. his main point, which he totally failed to make because it was ultimately about lolita - one of his least morally grey works - is that there are way too much unecessary and graphic descriptions of young girls than need be. and that's enough argument for me personally, his ability to write doesn't makes it any less concerning. im sure there r better, clearer, and more representative works out there by women, at least. stuff more explicitly political and clearly meant for young girls/victims, for one. i can respect other people getting into morally grey authors/works but i think people getting on his ass for not being able to wrap his head around it isn't making his argument void as it's still about a man obsessively writing pornographic content sexualising young girls - as if we dont have this enough
@orca9781 Yeah, I have to agree with you. And I also genuinely agree with his main point and what you said, I myself do find myself respecting his work less with this knowledge. Of course there’s still merit, and I would never ever try to act like anyone who cares about his work is a bad person. But, my og comment did fail to address the nuance that there’s other works that tastefully cover csa. I’ve just seen some comments and other people say it’s an important book to them, to be able to see the perspective of the monsters who did that shit to them. In a way, it kind of calms me. Again, what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what others have went through. But, if I were to be “against” all his work as a whole, it would be because of what csa survivors have said. Of course there’s csa survivors who don’t like his work and i absolutely respect that. I’ve just also seen people say it’s meaningful for them, and I can’t just take that away from them. I find myself really on the fence here, because he isn’t alive and I can’t just ask him. But, on one hand him himslef likely being a csa survivor just simply recontextualizes owls entire video imo at least. But, also media doesn’t just exist in this nebulous vacuum and no amount of reasoning or explanation can change that. As you stated, plenty of old men sexualize little girls everday, and it’s a problem in our society. And, eh, intention just doesn’t change that. Sure, there’s a lot of those girls who grew up and felt comforted by his works but there’s some who also didn’t.
@@wolfieeeeeeeeeeee You said that perfectly & its how i feel too. I think this is the thing, i feel lolita belongs to the audience more than the author, so its okay to hold it dearly, but that doesn't make the author any less exempt from criticism. The inclination to assume that it exists in a vaccuum completely forgets the very real possibility that Nobokov himself didnt even try very hard to dispute. Lolita for SURE transcends the author, but there needs to be a middle ground met lest they totally disqualify the very real consequences of hailing problematic authors. i am alw more than certain that there are better works out there by better people and yet audiences are still dragged into the same list of authors - white european cishet men - always leaning towards a concerning level of moral abstraction that they profusely refuse to clarify in the name of the creative (good art is not morally grey art), likely because of the post structural ass inclinations of foucault & derrida who were also real tight with, you guessed it, pedophiles
I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before and maybe it’s being congratulatory for a benchmark, but beyond the well-written and -organized videos, thoughtful exploration of subject matter, good editing and just being a funny person on top of all that, I really appreciate your ability to tie everything together and have an actual conclusion to your videos. There’s a lot of popular youtubers that do long-form analyses that start off great, but then they get to the end of the video and it’s just like, “well, there’s all the facts, weird, right??” quit bluebаlling me with your nerd shוt and wrap up your ideas for christ’s sake 😤
Just going to plug Lola Sebastian’s video on Lolita for further watching/reading :) great dissection and discussion, thank you! Peeling apart western cannon is incredibly important, especially when more problematic elements go unacknowledged in larger critique.
Hmm I don't really agree with this at all. I see where you are coming from but it's a big misunderstanding of themes and plot. Lolita is about narcissism, and Nabokov was an edgy freak (and a genius) who obsessively circled around extreme themes, but expressed them in relatable ways. Cishet men often portray themselves as disgusting perverts in expression of sexual desire, in contrast to the delicate innocent pure woman - isn't this just a more extreme expression of that?
A lot of this focus is a little pointed. Nabokov, I think, is an edgelord. He is being edgy. The amount of times "being gay" becomes a text or subtext is also pervasive. I think his idea is to push the boundaries, and for him it's anything from being gay to being straight but attracted to young girls. If you ever do this video again, do it on some other taboo, and you'll probably find just as much to talk about.
I’ve been a compulsive liar basically my whole life, as well as having a penchant for creative writing and self inserts. No clue if this is the case for other truthless folks, but in spite of consistently lying about all sorts of things, big and small, short and long term, I can relate to the strong compulsion to find an outlet for the truth (a whole nother layer of self-destructiveness). Which is something I add aspects of to my writing a whole lot, but I will thank my lucky stars ten times over that my baggage makes me feel practically angelic compared to Vlad’s whole p*dophilic fascination.
Oh hell yeah, I was just telling a buddy about your a little life video, AND I just finished reading pale fire. I guess I'm gonna read Lolita before coming back here but dropping a like and comment for the algorithm 🫡 keep up the fire vids
This video sorta misses alot of stuff about the book and author so if anyone wants to know more, I'd recommend Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus. It's a real deep dive, 11 episodes, each around an hour long
You know, I really liked your analysis of A Little Life, and I do fully plan to continue to watch and support your videos in the future, but this one kinda pushed some buttons for me. I think my biggest qualm is your equation of pedo- or hebephilic desire with total immorality. Assuming that Nabakov did actually have such desires-which, as you say yourself, we have NO evidence of having been the case based on his real-life relationships and the accounts of those who knew him-I don't think it's helpful to demonize him for obliquely expressing them through fiction. There are non-offending pedophiles in the world who suffer tremendously because they understand that their desires are inherently harmful to the object of their desires and can thus never be acted on morally, and who already have to endure the constant feedback that they're the worst of the worst the world has to offer and inherently irredeemable scum because of desires they have no ability to rid themselves of. Not to mention that many actual child abusers who commit sexual crimes against children don't even meet the definition of pedophilia, because rape and assault are more often crimes of power than genuine desire. With all of that in mind, I have to say that I find your take on Nabakov deeply uncompassionate on a number of levels-I think it's a topic worth examining, but I think you should have let this one percolate for quite a bit longer and done much more research into not just Nabakov and his books, but the accusations you're leveling against him here. I don't think just flinging "Nabakov was a pedophile and here are the cherrypicked quotes that prove it" out to the masses, who are bound to be repulsed by that declaration due to both the inherent disgust most of us feel towards the sexualization of children as well as to the pedophile witch-hunt that we as a culture are currently engaged in (and I will note that accusations of pedophilia are very often used by the right wing to demonize demographics they dislike, such as Jewish people and queer people), is a responsible move without further analysis of what that would mean for our understanding of his works or emphasis on the fact that this is strictly YOUR reading of his works, without any proof from life that he a) intended them that way or b) committed any crime beyond potentially feeling those desires, which is not a crime at all. A video like this could be used to point out red flags to look for in other works where the sexual abuse of children is being more overtly condoned, or to present a nuanced view of Nabakov as a person who may have been expressing some unrealized traumas and/or desires in his works, but having landed on "Nabakov was a pedo and his books are gross!" as a conclusion honestly feels shallow and rather below what I believe your analytical capabilities to be after having watched your video on A Little Life. I would love to see you take some more time to develop your thoughts and come back to this topic, but as it stands, I honestly think this video is bordering on irresponsibly incomplete in its analysis. I'm sorry to say that as I'm sure it's hurtful to get that sort of feedback, but this is a topic I have trouble holding my tongue on due to just how much bad-faith discourse I see around "pedophilia" these days. I very much enjoy your whole vibe and this style of video, though, and I'm looking forward to the next one.
Thank you! This is why I called this video only pretending to be progressive; all the "yikes, gross" comments regarding the heavy topic that is pedophilia/CSA (a very childish reaction, if I have to be perfectly honest) are reactionary and it pains me to see that it's so common even in, uhm, leftist spaces. Lolita, a book published in 1955, and written by a liberal coming from an aristocratic family (!) presents a much better understanding of the problem and of the consequences of CSA; too bad that this video's shallow analysis of it left many people with an impression that it's a "pedo fantasy". Edit: perhaps this is Lolita's fate: to be shallowly read & misunderstood. Which is ironic, considering that this is exactly what HH did to Dolores Haze (but even he was able, at some point and to some degree, recognize it).
Great response to this video, I share most of your issues with it. I also really liked the video on A Little Life, but this one was... not it, to put it nicely.
There's a lot that could be said but Nabokov* had an affair with his student (Katherine Peebles), already an abuse of power before you consider their ages, 44 and 19. Power and sex are conflated for predators, they aren't somehow disjointed or mutually exclusive as often thought by the naive majority. It's rare for pedophilia to be an accidental aberration, a random "crossed wire" in an otherwise normal person - it's not a sexual orientation (and acting like it is is actually offensive to homosexuals and the like). It's a desire which is usually thought through and develops consciously, which makes the desire itself is inherently evil in most cases. Acting on it is a separate issue. Nabokov was obviously intelligent enough to either hide anything he did, or just skirt the line. Most pedos who don't offend, don't offend because they're fear the consequences, but they'll tell you along with a sob story that they don't offend because they have a conscience...and you people will believe anything.
Idk if i was more engaged with the content of your presentation or in waiting for the coffee to splash/spill. The way you flailed that cup around so recklessly, i had convinced myself it must be an empty prop. Until, of course, the Incident.
lolita is one of my favorite books of all time because i really thought he was making a point but this video sort of threw everything into question for me. i like stuff like this because it complicates lolita further and theres nothing i like more than a complicated puzzle. bad people can write great, even revolutionary, things, and while i dont think nabakov was a bad person per se his true views on children are genuinely horrifying and revolting. im not sure what to do from here. my brain is sort of frying over the implications of all of this but the way this was handled was incredibly thought provoking, even if it all makes my stomach turn.
I like this video analysis, but it suffers a little bit from being too fixated. They say if you look for something, you'll find it. Nabokov pushed more social boundaries than just pedophilia, and if we read his canon, we'll see that pretty clearly. If a video exactly like this focused on other Nabokovian patterns with the same intensity (incest, murder, homosexuality), we'd find a very similar conclusion about those things.
i would continue to question your thoughts because it seems you actually had a fairly mature takeaway from the book. i think this video is very biased in the hope that he can "prove" nabokov was "problematic" (something people have been trying to do for years because they're uncomfortable with his writing) and while it is good to question the nature of ideology around you and where that ideology comes from, i think it as just as good to question owl criticism's intentions as much as nabokov's.
1) I really don't understand why contextualizing someone's work is so controversial? It is just pointing out a pattern. 2) ffs people, watch the whole video before commenting. The amount of comments that point out something that the video does say (specially al later points) just shows how y'all are commenting as a gut reaction.
@@iris-vu8wk People are allowed to write whatever they want. “Canceling” people for works of fiction from years ago is silly; there’s no reason to place rules on what people are allowed to write, and when a book is so old it’s understood that weirdness that may be present in it was really just quota for its time period. But if you wrote something weird, you still wrote something weird, and Nabokov wrote several chapters of biological sibling incest intercourse including children under the age of 16. In a discussion about his morals, I think bringing up THAT book would kind of be more necessary than yet again bringing up the Lolita, when I’m more than sure that half the people in this comment section understand that Lolita was “problematic” with good reason to be.
@@moving1n have you read Adabor Ardor? Much like 100 Years of Solitude (and many other works) incest is used as a literary device. It is understood that in Ada or Ador that the two siblings are writing a reflection on their life together, hence the book being in 3rd person, and thus making the book unreliable and obfuscated, romanticising their undoubtedly traumatic pasts. Theres an assumption in the video essay and in many comments that Nabokov’s self inserts in his novels begin and end at the perpetrators of the abuse he writes, but why the assumption he couldnt be identifying with the victims? Will we ever know if Nabokov was a victim of CSA for sure? No. Does his work often deal with CSA? Yes. Has anyone ever come forward about him abusing them? No. I think, especially in the wake of Neil Gaiman being accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, this whole “writing about icky topics = more likelihood of being a bad person” just shows it’s fallibility. We have a man who wrote about pedophilia and incest who was never accused with the exception of speculation due to what he wrote about, but we have a beloved children’s author who wrote “wholesome” books who has been accused of brutally assaulting a teenager.
If he never actually hurt anyone in the real world, and all he did was right about these... "impulses," does that make him a bad man? I mean, is it wrong to write about it if you don't actually do it? It's not a gotcha, I'm actually thinking about this, idk.
To conflate the fictional work of a speculated CSA victim, to conflate a person’s art with a genuine crime, is not a valid critique. Someone who went through something traumatic has themes of his own trauma in his writing - this is common.
@@bouncingbuttons7441 Yep. People who haven't had to deal with the real horrors of this stuff are always the ones offended on us victim's behalf. But the reality is that therapists and psychologists around the globe agree that the creation of art is one of the best, safest, and most well-researched coping skill out there. Talking about our experiences through art is how victims survive and, hopefully, thrive.
I think its really unfortunate how many comments under this video seem to conflate "csa victim = someone who WILL grow up to have pedophilic tendencies" when that is a popculture bullshit theory that does nothing but harm survivors who arent part of that minority percentage. I think your analysis on all of of nabokovs work is relevant and necessary, and if we want to keep talking about his books, we should address all the themes and patterns in them clearly. Its completely fine to be bothered by his works; the notoriety of a work does not protect it from criticism.
I came here from your video on A Little Life and feel a bit stupider now for having enjoyed that video. It's like when I stumbled upon that podcast Your Favorite Band Sucks and got some laughs out of their episode on Kpop, and then realized how little substance their arguments actually held when they talked about media I enjoy. I feel like it's your responsibility as a creator to do better than this. If a topic is particularly unsavory, that doesn't mean that the author has to feel the way his characters feel. Which PoV he uses in his writing doesn't somehow change that. Borges writes pretty much exclusively in third person, but I don't think that he encourages things like crucifying people or becoming a murdering outlaw. Authors like Stephen King exist, and people haven't accused him of doing anything but too much cocaine, even with that scene towards the end of IT. I feel like there is a fundamental misunderstanding of Nabokov's works that had to go into this video. Have you read any of his novels besides Lolita? The age difference/pedophilia is never portrayed in a positive light, even if a character writes about it that way. What's right in the mind of one person is totally nightmarish and unthinkable in another. I actually hold Nabokov in similar esteem to authors like Poe, who pioneered the use of the unreliable narrator. Even their prose styles seem similar to me. Taking any character at face value in a Nabokov novel is a mistake, and then this attempt to hold the author to account for those ideas? Come on man, is everything okay to write about or is nothing? Do we think that Poe was murdering people, removing their hearts, storing them under floorboards, and then suffering hallucinations while being questioned by the police? I mean I'm pretty speechless here...
Personally, I think Lolita really ties together the rest of his work, rather than being an exception. You don't write Lolita if you think pedophilia is a _good_ thing. In that specific context, it feels like he was a man that _knew_ how abusive a lust for children was, and struggled intensely with the fact that he felt it strongly nonetheless. I don't think that detracts from his character by itself, since I don't believe in thought crime. The man vented his objectively harmful fetish that he clearly didn't find acceptable to act on by writing problematic erotica. That probably can't be called a _good_ thing, but it's at least much more noble than the alternative.
also i can't believe nabokov practically said "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Lolita. The artistry is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of French literature most of the themes will go over a typical reader's head."
yeah, he did. the book is a very engaging book and while the idea of iq is a colonialist and a racist one, you do have to have a lot of media literacy to read any of nabokov's books. perhaps it's a statement of pretension, but i also think that he has a point. he is engaging with elevated language and very taboo concepts and that's something people with poor media literacy cannot handle unless they are seeking to expand their taste.
@@bouncingbuttons7441 i agree! i say this not to denounce the genuine literary merit and depth in his work, but merely to make a silly little youtube comment by altering a copypasta, since it was the first thing that came to mind when i heard him express this idea!
@@Eve.v okay i've never seen that copypasta! slay for real, my autistic ass just loves to take things too literally. i now see the joke and it is quite hilarious how pretentious he was.
Did you read the paper, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia" by Brandon Centerwall? Published by the University of Texas press. I'm seeing some similarities in your argument (and, of course, the titles are identical). Just curious, as I was immediately reminded of that particular paper as I listened to this video.
For what it’s worth, the idea that people who were abused as kids are more likely to abuse someone else in the same way in the future, has been disproved. That was a myth. Do what you will with this info.
@@Zythryl interesting. i'm just saying it's extremely relevant to the topic of why he wrote about the subject. so dismissing it made me dismiss the video
@@Zythrylnot really. From my memory, it's pretty much unclear. I'm pretty sure the study was done on the incarcerated SA child abusers, and the results are pretty much 50/50 on whenever they were themselves abused in childhood or not. A lot of then also report to not be attracted to children outside of the abuse which imo only further proves that SA is not about attraction at all. When it comes to abuse overall, I'm pretty sure neglect was proven to "cause" the most abusers. Though all of this is pretty unreliable if you ask me because it has to come from a self report. A lot of people will lie about whenever they were abused or not, either because they're in denial, or because they want to gain sympathy. I understand the impulse because it can easily be twisted into "abused people will abuse" ideology but I would rather prevent harm than demonize people tbh.
@@DGarrettDG good for you, to be honest. He proceeds to use writing as a way to justify his opinion that the author was a pedo. As someone who is a CSA survivor and is associated with a lot of others SA survivors, that is honestly offensive to me, and only shows his ignorance.
@panonymousbloom5405 i'm so used to "good for you" being an insult on the internet i'm not sure if you're agreeing with me. but if i follow right i'm sorry for your experience and agree. people need to understand fiction is not endorsement. tbf i didn't finish the video so that might be harsh
Bend sinister has a very similar plot to invitation to a beheading, including the hope to be rescued from prison by a child who's related to the person who's the reason for his imprisonment.
Honestly, I initially thought this was just a joke referencing the fact that we don't know *any* of the real names of the characters in Lolita, but oh well.
i'd actually never heard in depth about all the points you made-- one person told me about his uncle and i thought "oh okay"... the reality is, in my opinion, pretty disgusting. though the book was one full of interesting uses of language and effective at controlling the reader, considering the author now just makes it.. ew. of course, one cannot just forget good writing, but i suppose we should all watch how we speak about the author. thank you for making this video!
I also had 3 stages when thinking about reading Lolita: 1 - this book is weird and creepy, Im not reading that. 2 - wow, that unreliable narrator stuff seems interesting. And the book actually condemns Humbert? Nabokov seems to be a good writer with normal opinions. I should read that. 3 (after watching this video) - nope.
I highly recommend everyone listens to Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus! She goes over the various adaptions of Lolita and “Lolita fashion” and how the culture consumed Lolita. She also goes over Nabokov’s personal life and what inspired him to write Lolita. She also talks about … the failed Lolita musical LOL. It’s just a really good podcast that is only about 10 episodes long.
so happy i stumbled upon this channel! you speak so eloquently and articulate your points so well, i really hope to see more content from you in the future!
Nabokov's proclivities are smeared all over his other work (which do not have the same excuse that Lolita does). See also his fondness for both Lewis Carrol and Balthus-it's basic Occam's Razor. If it quacks like a duck...
@@yeehawneehaw5215 "Nabokov noted when interviewed by Alfred Appel in 1966, 'I have been always very fond of Carroll'. He also said this- "In answer to the question: what scenes one would like to have filmed...Lewis Carroll's picnics..." iykyk.
Nabokov loved writing unreliable narrators in fiction, so naturally, we must conclude, he himself is an unreliable narrator in fiction. If it quacks like a duck...
another great video! enjoyed it very much. i was thinking all throughout the video about amis' article and ofc you bring it at the end :) I am curious though, do you just not enjoy nabokov's writing at all? I say this because I read Lolita not knowing too much about its controversies (pre-facebook age) and as a high school girl myself, enjoyed it SO much because it's a beautifully written, at points hilarious, truly ecstatic book. I note my age to say i'm not one of those who say 'oh you just didn't get this complex work.' I'm saying, in my innocence, I loved the book and that Lolita as well as Pale Fire, Pnin etc,, truly enhanced my mind and soul when I was a younger, less competent reader. I think he's unparalleled among english prose writers and his writings just brought me so much joy. for you, did you just not see the literary values, or do you see the literary value but think that the moral issues void or lessens it? I'm probably a pretty amoral reader (I'm perfectly square in my personal life i swear) so I'm intrigued by the more 'interrogative' mode of reading that you seem to show here. Not saying nabokov didn't have GLARING issues, and maybe i'm just trying to justify enjoying his writing so much, but truly, I'm curious-- all his books you so comprehensively read, did you not enjoy them? or is it that the moral implication just clouded over your enjoyment? Is it that you are recommending that people adopt your more 'ethical' mode of reading nabokov, i.e. being aware of the ~~implications of his gaze~~? really curious as again, probably a more 'amoral' reader here.
or i guess i should ask like what would be the difference that having this ethical approach to reading nabokov have? do you think if people had this ethical mode on they would automatically enjoy the book less? or can people enjoy the book/see its literary value just as much and still have the ethical mode reading on? and in this case, i guess, the real difficulty for relatively amoral readers like me, what practical good would it add to the world if I enjoyed the book just as much but were just consciously aware that I have the ethical mode on??
I don't think he is prescribing anything. At the end of the video, he talks about the current narrative surrounding the author. Owl talks about how this author was skillful in controlling his public image. There was an obvious and disturbing pattern of pdf-ilia in so much of his published work but thanks to his masterful manipulation of his own public image, no one is allowed to point out the obvious due to the fear of being marked as an unintelligent buffoon. Idiotic internet essayists have spread actual misinformation about the author. Multiple booktubers have wrongly stated that the author despised the covers for Lolita because of his moral objections to the sexualization of minors. In reality, he was more concerned about the marketability of his book. I think Owl just wants people to face the reality about the person Vladimir Nabokov is. He even says we should read whatever we please. I love reading books written by Oscar Wilde but I am under no false impressions about who he is as a person. He was a disgusting creep who entered into relationships with teenage boys. It doesn't ruin his books for me when I acknowledge his creepiness. I hope acknowledging the fact that Nabokov is a disgusting creep doesn't ruin his books for you. You should keep reading them if they mean something to you. I know I will.
@lucyferdakool has summarised pretty well. I did enjoy the writing, but I didn’t want to praise it too much since it’s pretty well-known how excellent a writer he was. Personally, his style isn’t my favourite, but I did enjoy the writing overall. If it brings you joy then by all means read it, but there are people who read it without having the context you had and so don’t know how to feel when the more problematic scenes appear.
Nabokov was a victim of CSA himself. He wrote Lolita, hoping people aren't too dense and realize how deep the book is. Sadly, people were too dumb and thought he was sympathizing with the MC, who was narrating the book, when he was actually on Lolita's side the whole time. He even asked his publishers to stop putting images of girls in the cover because it's not an erotica, but they said "screw you" to him and still continued.
Thank you to everyone for all the feedback. I want to be absolutely clear, this video isn't an attack on any other creators and their opinions on Lolita. It is a piece of fiction open to interpretation. Specifically, I in no way want to encourage any hate towards Lola Sebastian. She is an immensely talented creator with many excellent videos on the subject. Please keep all comments/discourse respectful.
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I can not and also will not be respectful of a video that concludes as it's major point "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner." Your major interest here is not actually exploring why he wrote the works that he did with the subject matter that he chose but on griping about how you can't stand that people have a better and more accurate grasp on his oevure than your intellectual laziness could stand to pursue. Sorry. Your real problem is with people who actually do more than a surface level reading of his works coming away with deeply informed opinions and the correct conclusion that he was not glorifying the works. You are doing nothing more than virtue signaling. You clearly have no interest in understanding the man who you have chosen to condemn. You are clutching at your pearls and leaving it at that. It's obnoxious and surface level takes like these should be had at a younger age than whatever big age you are. Seriously. It's bad. This is bad. You're wrong. Not much subjectivity here about your correctness in the conclusion "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner so he must be a creep and a weirdo." Also your conclusion isn't even fully formed to a coherent point. You just state "he chose to write about children in a sexual manner" = problematic. I have seen better takes on the man's literature by teenage girls on tumblr. Quite frankly you should be embarrassed.
@@pinkrimmedazureeyesI'm glad there's someone else here who hates this as much as i do haha.
@@whatsthatnoise5955 he's sensitive and deleting my comments.
I would not be proud of making a video that makes people say: now I don't have any interest in the book. It's not worth reading. That seems to be what you have done with anyone who agrees with you. They're relating your opinion to people they don't like (persecution/virtue signaling) and then they are saying they wont look into it themselves. You would be excellent at the Ministry of Truth.
as a csa survivor, lolita was really impactful to me when i first read it (at about 16/17) because it really highlighted the extent to which HH was trying to pull a delusion into reality, and how Dolores is a literal normal child who behaves like a child and has no interest in or even understanding of his delusions. being able to see myself in her was huge in learning to stop blaming myself for what happened to me
Oh yeah, thats part of why i enjoyed the book so much too. Definitely a valuable perspective from an evil main character. Gives a lot of insight to what these monsters are thinking. It still feels super fucking weird that some adult man was able to write this so accurately and put his mind into the mind of a predator with such ease.
Same here!
@@cynabonabelle And again, I need to get out the Hannibal Defense. Because his writer wasn't a cannibal either.
At least as far as we know.
Me too. And near the when she can barely stand him. She seemed to never really like him too much overall but at the end it felt visceral. It’s unfortunate that so many people have the wrong idea about this book.
I haven't read this but I went on a similar journey in accepting that it wasn't my fault too
tired : nabokov is a weirdo for writing lolita
wired : nabokov actually wrote lolita as a critic of predators
inspired : nabokov is a weirdo for writing all those other books
Nabokov was absolutely a weirdo 😭 but I'm glad he was, Ada and Ardor is one of my favourite works of weird fiction of all time.
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@@ariagrace8117oh do tell me more! The passages that were included were really alarming to say the least but I’m really interested to hear what you liked about it! Obviously there’s more to the book than the weird pedophilic incest and stuff.
This is called *The Bell Curve*
Can't blame him, imagine having your father killed by Sergey Taboritsky who was even more of a weirdo
There are few mentions in history from people who knew the family who talk of his uncle Ruka and his obsessive interest in Nabokov. Nabokov himself has mentioned that he used to "fondle" him, so have people who knew them. The photograph of Nabokov with his uncle and mother is very eerie to look at with how he is being held.
It is a very common theme for artists who go through CSA to reference it in their art constantly. Of course this isn't me defending the author but its just a different perspective as to why he wrote so much of one theme but never had any documented events of harming anyone. Instead he was critical of authors like Lewis Carroll for his obsession with young girls.
"Fondle" is such a weird word, because it did used to be used in a way that meant more like "caress" or "cuddle" and is now pretty much only used to mean "touching inappropriately". Like it's pretty common for Victorian fiction to mention "fondling the baby" and they just mean an appropriate affectionate touch.
It makes Nabokov's use of it when referring to his uncle especially nebulous.
That photo is so disturbing.
@@FabricofTimewhat are you even saying here? That the word fondle hints at him being fond of being sexually abused?
@@pinkrimmedazureeyesNo they're saying the word used to have a different definition/usage so its unclear what exactly they meant by its usage, I don't think anything in their comment implies they think he enjoyed the experience. Just that the definition of what he meant is unclear (at least being read on its own, I don't know the details of any further context is given to that quote)
@@mediocreme7798 This is 1984 level thinking. Let me turn this around on you. If someone named Rick reported CSA to you and Rick said: I am being fondled by my uncle." And your reply is:
" Well, Rick fondle is such a weird word, because it did used to be used in a way that meant more like "caress" or "cuddle" would that seem appropriate to add to you???
Nymphet actually dirives from entomology it is a descripter of a bug that retains its adalecent traits into adulthood. Which Nabokov would know cause he was a bug guy. But it is also interesting that the term is used to sexualize and adultify a child rather than to describe a childlike adult. But once again I feel like this is just a good use of an unrelyable narrator. Like of course HH is using both religious and scientific illusions to further his justification of being the actual worst and an abuser of children
This is wrong. Nymphet dirrives from Greek "Nymph" (child or bride). The entomology use and Nabakov's use are actually wholly unrelated.
@@conorkelleher2571no where does the word nymph mean or connote child bride in its etymology, it simply means maiden bride or young woman bride. This would be used to describe a woman who is her like maybe early early 20s or late teens while retaining virginity. Hesiod stating waiting 5 years after puberty, that being said he was not Athenian and most of what we know as Ancient Greek history is Athenian, they were known to engage in sexual activity with youths as young as 12-13 which was roughly the age girls were married there, their husbands being in his 30s. So yeah, bit of etymology and history.
@@Bloomingmandrakes Whatever the etymology, Nabokov meant "demon."
Speaking as a CSA survivor, I love Lolita. It's a book I have read many times and I have found a mountain of meaning in. That being said, I have always read it as an anti-pedophilic book.
This video is enlightening in some ways. But at the same time, Lolita still remains what it is to me. If Nabokov truly had pedophilic tendencies that didn’t stop him from understanding what that kind of abuse does to a child. It is likely that he understood what that abuse was - unfortunately pedophilic temdencies can be the result of child abuse.
I disagree that there is pleasure in Nabokov's gaze when he writes about Dolores. I am not denying that there might be pleasure in his gaze when he did his other writings ot rather I can not speak on that. But just like someone who is attracted to women might write a scene depicting the rape of a woman through the eyes of the rapist, without pleasure, a man who has pedophilic desires can write with an understanding of what that kind of abuse does to a child. Even if Nabokov lost that understanding later, the way I see it he had it when writing Lolita. No matter wether or not he was aroused by his other writings - and to be clear, I am disgusted by the passages you showed - Lolita isn't a pleasurable story, even for a pedophile - the sex scenes are not cery explicit, the book deliberately breaks with a pornographic-like format it has in part one and the pain of the victim is centered.
Another reason I am sure of this is because in an interview (I will find the source and edit it in later) Nabokov himself said, that while Humberts feelings towards Lolita might be defendable, the way he treats her isn't. I remember that line because it always bugged me a bit for onvious reasons. Even if he understood the underlying desire, the moral of the book remains to not hurt children, as he put it in that interview.
What I can gather from the other texts is that they, unlike Lolita, don't properly and realistically depict the consequences of pedophilic abuse. I can not gather from Nabokov's writing as presented in this video a fetish for depicting children's pain over experiencing abuse. If anything, the scenes you pulled from Ada make it look like SA is something pleasurable for children (to be clear, a 17 year old and a 12 year old is SA, it's actually the age gap I had with one of my abusers) Lolita breaks with that theme by actually depicting the consequences of pedophilic abuse and that is not something any person, even someone with pedophilic tendencies would find arousing.
My take away? I will definitely read Nabokov's other works and come to my own conclusion on his body of work, though that will properly take me a life time since Lolita already took me over a year from all the breaks I had to take.
For now, Lolita remains what it was to me: A book realistically depicting what pedophilic abuse does to a child.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment, it resonated with me deeply and I found it very meaningful.
As a fellow surviver (my abuse occurred when both myself and my abuser were teenagers, so my perspective is slightly different) I continue to find deep meaning in Lolita especially because of the way both H’s and L’s “titillated” pleasure is unflinchingly portrayed without masking the deep harm caused by H’s abuse on both parties. To me it is a story that allowed me to reclaim the complex, flawed, and beautiful humanity of not only myself but also (from a safe distance as he’s been completely out of my life for over a decade) my abuser. I think it’s important to remember that at the end of the day Lolita is a novel, and that makes it a uniquely safe place and prism to unpack these impossible and ugly truths and questions about the nature of the human condition.
If nabokov did have dark thoughts(censoring due to yt), ultimately the author is dead.
Idk if he ever hurt anyone but, supposing he did have these tendencies, writing lolita isn't something he would do if he thought it was okay and I'd imagine he may have struggled with stuff but we have no evidence he hurt anyone(that I know of anyways).
Some people write to process their own pain rather than express it on a real person.
Regardless, read the books and form your own conclusions as you intend to do.
@@dismurrart6648I can't remember where I read it, but I do remember reading Nabokov admitted to being abused in a similar way to the character of Delores in his childhood by a male family member.
@@gRinchY-op5vr they talk about it in the video
Well said. I won't repeat what you wrote as you did so very well, but just to say, I am also a CSA survivor who has read the book several times have found solace in his understanding of a CSA survivor. Being that he was one himself, that would make sense.
I do find @owlcritism critique of Nabokov's other work quite simplistic and with an agenda he set out with.
Nobokov: I have written an alternate Earth where America is deeply different from real life
Editor: Oh! What are the main changes you’ve made to our society?
Nobokov: Incest
the read more came in clutch there
@@Jdgjtfjutfvh it really did omg
Sweet Home Alabama
@@l..l_ Oh I know, Alabama actually has pretty strict laws when it comes to that issue, last time I checked.
New Jersey doesn't, and appareantly Ohio doesn't either.
It's just the meme.
i mean, i actually think incest is far more prevalent than we like to think, at least in american culture, given it is such taboo that many survivors are often not given spaces to talk about it. i especially think the culture around how fathers are supposed to be guardians of their daughters innocence and how close father/daughter relationships are often not looked at closely enough. we live in a profoundly sick world and i can't help but think that avoiding discussing issues issues like csa and incest makes it easier for people who commit such acts to hide.
Well, I can safely say I went from knowing one or two things about Nabokov's body of work to knowing a certifiably alarming amount.
The joys of the INTERNET... It be like that sometimes
I promise you this video is bullshit.
No you still don’t know anything about his work.
The reason I’m still on defence is that Nabokov NEVER and I mean NEVER associated himself with underage girls. Every other author with PD allegations and rumours ( like Lewis Carrol) was always around little girls,trying to form relationships with them .I’m still prone to believe he was abused thus the obsession with the subject and wanting to understand a world that a person will get away with something so horrible ( his uncle was never punished and as far as I know no pedo character in Nabokov’s book is directly punished for their despicable actions too). In an interview one time Nabokov said that he’s a moralist .In a weird way, I kind of believe him.
i also think it's important to remember he was born in 1899 and died in the 70s. Not saying that as an excuse but more so saying that men like his protagonists were probably more open abt it than our society. idk what the age of consent was back then but i'm pretty sure young brides were still common. if you're society is chill w/ grown men marrying 16 y/o, i can def imagine conversations where grown men opened up abt girls even younger. i know my family has told stories of ppl in their communities growing up where it was well known 'person x' targeted young ppl but nothing was done, and it usually happened to young girls. it's possible he turned his trauma into a story or he just saw a lot of sick ppl in his life
i feel that way about nabokov too tbh
@@ositaiza888 exactly. Also, the pd is always trying to get into the family ( becoming a stepdad, being friends with the parents) while the mother is too weak to defend their child ( the notorious uncle was the brother of his mother as well). This is a very common predatory technique but it wasn’t talk much around his time ( the young brides with huge age differences as you said was more well known).He lived in an era where big artists were harassing their teenage fans with impunity while himself never had any communication with them in that context , like trying to lure the underage fans of Lolita ( something a pedo will have definitely done after his book huge success) .
It is also possible to be a pedophile and not sexually abuse children, which is a wild concept for many.
Yeah I agree with you here. A lot of people write about really despicable subject matter as a way to process ideas/ explore their own experiences / try to glean something of value from a character with a pathological psyche. It absolutely does not mean the author excuses or participates in the things they write about.
I mean, 'an aristocratic-born internationally renowned literature and language professor who grew up with a weird gropey uncle and a father who yelled at the farmers from a balcony' does unfortunately make this all very unsurprising. An interesting, detailed look into it all the same!
Owl criticism bingo:
Spills coffee ✅
Struggles to pronounce words ✅
Problematic author ✅
I think this is a fascinating and thought-provoking video. With that said, I do feel it lacks further consideration of how Nabokov's uncle very likely sexually abused him. To me, a lot of these passages seem to be Nabokov trying to grapple with both loving his uncle while also having been abused by him. The men in these stories are often described with similarities to how Nabokov elsewhere describes his uncle’s appearance and clothing, for starters. And a lot of these men are not morally “good” characters but do have redeeming qualities; to me, this reflects Nabokov processing his own fond yet painful memories of his uncle, trying to understand why his uncle did what he did and if he can still have parts of him that are "good" despite everything.
Also, some of these men are just straightforwardly bad, evil people. Something I’m shocked you didn’t point out is that the man in “Lilith” is literally in hell, which is not somewhere good people go, and that it’s strongly implied that he’s there for raping a child (see the line discussing “that remembered child”). The sexual descriptions in the poem seem more to humiliate the man further by shaming him for his arousal - as the demonic crowd do - rather than to be titillating.
It also strikes me that a lot of these young characters seem to hold some level of power or control through being instigators in the sexual encounters. It’s common for CSA survivors to latterly reframe the events in a way that gives them more control in order to deal with conflicting feelings of powerlessness, disgust, and potentially even enjoyment (which in hindsight often inspires shame and guilt). So this once again makes me think that it reflects Nabokov's own troubled consideration of his uncle and what he did to him.
Final thing I’ll say is that I don’t agree with the idea that narration in the third person means that it reflects the author’s own perspective on certain subject matters. I think you could just as easily argue that using third person rather than first person allows some distance and for more detached analysis of the events. It gives the reader space to consider the mixture of shame, pain, pleasure, and guilt both victim and perpetrator may feel for differing reasons.
All in all, really interesting content, but I feel uncomfortable about the lack of nuance and how this impacts the conclusions drawn within this video.
Thanks for you comment! You’ve mentioned some really interesting things I feel I could have done a better job at explaining in the video.
Firstly, while considering Nabokov’s work as a potential response to his own abuse is a valid interpretation, there isn’t much in the way of evidence to support the claim. I didn’t want to confidently assert that he was abused without proof, and I didn’t see any I found convincing. Even his descriptions of his uncle in Speak, Memory were fairly brief and not something I was comfortable using to make any real assertions. I’d also suggest that, even if I were confident in saying that he was a CSA survivor, I’d have liked to have seen more of a discussion about that when I first picked up Lolita for the first time. As it is, it’s too easy for people to read his work without that important context.
Secondly, while, yes, the man in Lilith has (literally) gone to hell, and so we can assume is not a great guy, I didn’t think that did enough to justify the level of explicit detail. Regardless, my central idea was not that any one piece is so explicit that he must have found it sexually gratifying, but that he repeatedly constructed scenarios that let him depict children in this way. Each individually might be justifiable for any number of reasons, but taken as a whole it’s clear what he wanted to write about.
In any case, thank you for your considered comments. It certainly isn’t a topic with one simple answer and I’m grateful for a measured discourse.
@OwlCriticism The "graphic detail", when it comes to CSA in the real world, doesn't magically disappear only because we pretend not to see it / aren't comfortable discussing it.
I get it: Nabokov's writing makes you and me see the darker sides of humanity and it's often "icky", "bad", "yikesy". Because CSA *is* "icky and yikesy"; even if it pretends not to be.
And the "it occurs suspiciously often in his novels": 1) Nabokov liked his patterns 2) why are you only taking into account the "means he was secretly a pedo" possibility? *Maybe* it was there because it was something he intensively thought about, not necessarily in a "that's hot!" way? I understand that most people see only the cynical side of Nabokov but this is a gross oversimplification; if you read Nabokov more attentively, you'll notice how sensitive the guy (or at least his writing) deep down was.
You said that "there's pleasure in that gaze". Sounds like you're trying to present an opinion as fact.
And question: have you seen Fire Walk with Me? If so: do you think there's "pleasure in that gaze" too?
@@restlessdream8745 yesss let's talk about laura palmer as a delores figure !
@@restlessdream8745yess!!! love the fire walk with me reference!
@@OwlCriticismThere isn't "much evidence" that Nabokov is a pedophile either: there is no evidence he ever hurt a child, or even associated with children. Concluding that he was purely from a reading of his fictional writing is a pretty big leap too, especially with the amount of circumstantial evidence that suggests there is *at least a possibility* that Nabokov was a survivor of child abuse himself. Of course given the time he lived no one would have spoken of it openly enough for anyone to say conclusively, but it feels wild to me to brush it off when it is, in my opinion, the screamingly obvious explanation for "guy who never offended but circled around the topic obsessively in fictional writing".
Sure, you can conclude from his text that Nabokov may have derived some sort of sexual [something] from fictional depictions of child abuse, but jumping to "it's because he wanted to fuck kids" when there's that whole other possibility right there feels... actively irresponsible?
Clearly he had a fixation with the subject of child abuse as it appears in his work many times. But the framing of it is very familiar to me as someone who experienced abuse as a child. Weirdest sentence I'm ever gonna write, but if you read something written by an actual pedophile you would see the difference immediately.
Nabokov depicts what he does with a clear understanding of the pain that it causes. Maybe he personally found such scenes titillating (not an uncommon byproduct of abuse -- still EXTREMELY different from being attracted to actual children), or maybe he was fixated on trying to understand what an abuser is feeling when they do what they do, or how a victim can willfully blind themselves to their own suffering. But I don't think there's any ambiguity to Nabokov's understanding of child abuse as something heinous and disfiguring in its overall impact, regardless of how he chooses to render the subjective experiences of the respective individuals in the abusive relationship.
This video was a really bizarre experience for me as a writer who has similar fixations in their work. Is this how Regular People see me? Do you read me as a predator for using fiction to process my own experiences? That Nabokov's work textually condemns the abuse of children even as he depicts it feels so clear and obvious to me I can't even imagine anyone feeling otherwise. And yet here we are.
I don't know, man, something about this video just left me feeling painfully misunderstood and it wasn't even about me.
"Hiding in plain sight". God damn, man. I'm glad Nabokov is dead.
Found you with the little about A Little Life and I want you to know that your content is fire. Keep it up
that was his first video for me as well! love it
Same! He’s got brilliant and quite sensible takes on books. Funny and entertaining too
I disagree that first-person writing is necessary to excuse writing "indecent" content. I think a skilled author can use any POV to portray the thoughts and actions of an immoral/amoral character, and third person does not necessarily imply that the narration reflects the real-world beliefs and attitudes of the author. This is sort of a small part of my larger opinion that the worldview of an author isn't the responsibility of the reader--whether Nabokov was a real-life pedophile or not, Lolita exists independently of him, and what anyone might take away from its content is dependent on the individual reader.
This isn't me saying "death of the author" exactly, but I don't think it should be an author's responsibility to morally justify what they write--either by implying or outright stating "I think this content is bad," or by trying to communicate it via POV or some other literary device. I do think it's the reader's responsibility to read critically, but in my opinion that shouldn't extend to trying to only read books that are either morally pure or which "justify" their immoral content. I hope I'm making sense.
really excellent analysis here!
i appreciate this comment a lot, it's nice to see people with the same opinion on this :)
Even if that is true, no one can stare into the abyss too long without it leaving its mark on you.
@@Jonjzi "the abyss"? what an interesting way to phrase that. i'm sure csa survivors would love to hear you call their trauma "the abyss"
@@bouncingbuttons7441 why do you assume I've never been abused?
sitting on spilled coffee must have still been more comfortable than reading about siblings doing...... whatever they were doing
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I think what bothers me the most about the almost uncritical (or perhaps uncontextualized??) discourse about Lolita/Nabokov critiques being ‘presentist’ (i.e. through our modern values) is that they don’t consider the contemporary discourse - how did people reading his works feel at the time? How normalized was it for an older man to marry a very young woman/teen? These are the questions that seem to go mostly unanswered here, which is valid bc this is literary criticism and not a history, but I think thinking historically about this situation may help untangle some of that reticence to apply presentism here. I’m not a historian of Russo-American literature, and I’m sure folks have written on this extensively, but this approach to my own work on colonization in North America, Indigeneity, interracial marriage, etc. has had to deal with this a lot. I guess my questions coming out this are what were contemporary reviews like, both academic and popular? What did his wife think? What did people think of his earlier works before Lolita came out?
I don’t want to come across as having not enjoyed the vid - this was fascinating and makes me more interested in Russian literature (I’ll probably end up down a rabbit hole here some time lol). Great stuff!!
Just listen to the Lolita podcast by Jamie Loftus and find out
You will see this guy is dead wrong...
in the afterword of Lolita, Nobokov adresses a few points about the book. I recommend anyone who wants a taste of the prose but has no time for the full book to read it.
As many others have pointed out before me, that is absolutely not how 1st vs 3rd person works, and the point about it is almost so egregiously incorrect that it tanks the credability to the rest of the video essay. I am shocked it was included in the essay at all, let alone hasn't been removed from the video by this point.
As for the larger conversation youve presented - this video is, at its core, just the same discourse lolita already has taken to his larger body of work. It boils down to "The themes this author is fixated on causes me a great amount of disgust, and because im disgusted by it, there must be something wrong with the author for thinking of it."
Say there was an author whos best known story was one written from the perspective of a serial killer. The story goes into gratuitous detail about the way the killer stalks, manipulates, gaslights, and eventuallt kills their victim. Through the lens of that story, the act of doing so is constantly glamorized. The killer is shown to have a great desire to kill, taking pleasure in the act of killing.
Say that you then discover that is the /only/ thing that the author writers about. That even the novels that have nothing to do with horror have the protagonist implied to have a desire to kill. Would you be trying to have this conversation about them? Would you be attempting to speculate on the morality of the authors personhood through their writings, or would you simply accept that theyre interested in writing slaughter fiction and horror?
While its not incorrect to say thay we as a society have a fixation on sex and purity culture, this fixation is a two way street. Trauma and abuse revolving around sex and sexuality, and the portrayals of it, are seen are more envelope pushing and taboo then portrayals of any other kind of trauma. When in reality, the disgust you get from the portrayal of CSA and sexual abuse in fiction holds the same moral weight as any other morbid portrayal of violence and abuse. That is to say - fixation and fascination of the topic itself is not a show of an author (or readers) moral character, and so a lot of the points being made here fall flat when its just a regurgitation of that idea.
Yes this "analysis" is just so bad
@@pinkrimmedazureeyes but it has the Video Essayist TM aesthetics, so it must be good 😤
i think it's always a red flag when anyone discussing anything requiring a great deal of media literacy fundamentally misunderstands the structure of writing, because typically it means that they are structurally inept at evaluating the content.
It's just frustrating, isn't it? Most of our social lives are filtered through detailed recommendation algorithms designed to saw off any unpredictable edges that might confuse the hyper-personalized advertising machine, tempting us into lifeless but marketable predictability with the promise of convenience, and rather than insist on our irreducible complexity as human beings, some people treat art that engages with that discomfiting complexity as a source of moral contagion, demanding in its stead the sort of comfortable, one-dimensionally "pro-social" media that companies would love to see one of their commercials next to.
Anyways that's my parody of what a pretentious person would say about the subject. Not me tho
you don't think there's a chance the guy writing borderline porn about children may have been into children? not even worth considering?
Paused this video to get some lunch and was shocked to realize id already consumed 35 minutes of it. Found you through your A Little Life essay and absolutely loved it-your style of building and weaving your main thesis through your essays is incredible. Thanks for posting!
these comments, jesus christ. i've just begun the video but this guy can't seriously be arguing that nabokov is a paedo himself. that would be unbelievably crass and shallow
I'm not like hugely interested in defending Nabokov here but I did find a few parts of this to be... Either dishonest or lazy. Like bringing up Pale Fire was weird when the passage in question was literally written by Kinbote, who is explicitly a pedophile (although for boys not girls). Which is to say it's weird to equate anything he says as from Nabokov. Similarly Ada is explicitly in the text a memoir that Van is writing, the way he writes about his past is all colored by that context (and Van is very clearly not a good person). Which is just to say equating these books narration with the views of Nabokov is genuinely bad reading. And I cant do a rundown of every single novel you discuss but it certainly makes me skeptical when you frame the works I have read in such a way that anyone who has read them would realize you just are not right. I think there's space to ask about the prevalence of CSA in Nabokov's work but I think it's kind of a gross leap to say hes a pedophile
thank you for this comment. i was wondering wether to read more of nabokov's works before watching the video
Thank you for adding this (assuming this is true and in good faith, I’ve only read a little Nabokov and couldn’t read much more due to his prose being insufferable to my own taste, so I can’t verify), while I still find the general tendency in Nabokov’s work towards depicting young girls in a sexual manner concerning, this definitely puts into question the worst of the examples in the video.
However, I think you do discredit the fact that Nabokov is an author who had decades and many books to explore sexual themes beyond the pedophilic and his tendency to unnecessarily return to implicitly or explicitly depicting such is frankly concerning at the very least.
I also find that it doesn’t really matter that he himself never stooped to actual pedophilia; The video is more of a critique on Nabokov’s depiction of pedophilia within his work, and how viewing Lolita within the context of his overall body of work puts into question just exactly what the books intention was and how Nabokov himself actually viewed such acts.
This may seem a bit critical and overly defensive of the video, to be frank, I would respect him a lot more if he revealed this despite how it may contradict his point, and I appreciate your extra info (and if there’s anything else you’ve since found that further contradicts, I would absolutely appreciate the extra info).
Ok, I'm a bit less generous after finishing the video. You give your viewers the impression that this stuff just hasn't been noticed before, and there can't really be another conclusion than that Nabokov was really into the idea of pedophilia, even if he never acted on his desires, ending the video with the dichotomy not between different scholarly positions on his work, but on whether or not one is personally comfortable with reading work written with the morals of "another era" (itself a bit odd, given we're talking about a modern writer, and given the values being discussed).
If you don't casually dismiss the possibility that Nabokov was sexually abused as a child, then we're left with three possibilities: 1. Nabokov wrote about pedophiles because he himself was a (probably non-offending) pedophile. 2. Nabokov wrote about pedophiles because he was a victim of child abuse. 3. Something else is thematically going on here, and Nabokov is using a horrifying recurring image to do-- something.
You don't consider 3 in the video, because you don't get into Nabokov scholarship. At one point you ask, "Why is this, from a storytelling point of view, necessary?" And then, instead of considering what people have argued about that text-- move on. What are the scholarly debates around "Ada or Ardor"? Why do scholars believe that that scene is in that book? What do they think it's doing there? Again, I understand that youtube videos should not be held to the same standard as professional scholarship-- but you're the one raising the question that you could go ahead and try to answer, and you're the one framing this video as making a serious argument about how people should read Nabokov. If you're going to approach the topic, you should consider the conversation that already exists rather than frame it as unknowable.
But it's the possibility of 2 that really strikes me here. You note that people can too-easily dismiss the pattern because so many of the examples are connected to Lolita, the text which might have an autobiographical scene of child abuse. If Nabokov was in fact abused, then what we see is a man throughout his life returning to the topic of abuse and trying to investigate the mind of the abuser, and potentially conflating the victim with the abuser is, to my mind, horrifying.
30:07 «It's like Easter eggs, but with pedophilia» i had to leave the room when i heard this...
In my very basic understanding of Nabokov, he does not take Literary Analysis lightly. That a story is not always "on the side of the perspective" and one must have grasp of the situation.
i.e : If you're listening to a story about an adventurer's trip to a foreign land, you should have an understanding of what that land encompasses (e.g: the geography, the culture, boundaries, etc). Nabokov is very "anti-vibe" on writing stories. Everything written should and must have realistic viewpoint.
Nabokov writing a story where the reader is extremely detached to the narrator/MC is, as far as I am able to understand his stance, very apt of him.
A story about a deranged man fantasizing about nothing but laying with a young girl, while very extreme on that category, corroborate perfectly to his "realist" view of literature. It's a testament on his position where you should not take the general bias of the story and indulge solely in it.
one of the reasons why I keep returning to Nabokov is exactly the reason that so many people hate his work: his constant pre-occupation with the gross and the obscene. I do not necessarily disagree with a moral argument against Nabokov, I've read a couple of works that you didn't mention here that, while didn't have any of the themes of Lolita, still had this undertone of gross misbehavior and unusual sexual ruminations. I even get a hint that that Nabokov never really *likes* his characters. There is always a hint of contempt towards them that I find fascinating. I think the fact that authors have consistently and throughout history managed to write truly obscene and incredibly gross things is telling about us as people, that we need an expression for the dark crevices of our minds, for the most obscene of our actions and the most disgusting of thoughts that we may have. That we need an outlet for what is utterly depraved and would never be socially acceptable. Everytime that I read Nabokov I am challenged and confronted by the full complexity of the human psyche. And I believe we are better off by having something obscene to look into than we would otherwise be.
How does that apply to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Pale Fire?
If I remember correctly Ada is written in the third person, however it is supposed to be written by the protagonists Van and Ada. So Van is writing in third person about himself
That tracks, especially considering Nabokov's "The Eye." He's basically tackled how a narrator can narrate from every possible angle.
@@Merlandese The eye is such a wonderful experiment in point of view
All the "I won't read this book after your essay, thanks" comments tho.
Putting Lolita and Nabokov aside; if your essay discourages *so many* people from reading the source material, then there's something off, isn't it?
A good, thought-provoking video essay should only be the beginning of the journey, not the last point.
The fact that this video pretends to be Progressive TM only makes things worse; who knows, maybe I'd fall for this too a few years ago.
Yeah, I had similar thoughts… :/
I disagree with this notion, Mr Owl clearly said he enjoyed the flowery language and the thing he just gets an icky feeling thinking about it. He clearly enjoyed the book just feels a bit weird that none of the critical reception acknowledges how he actively chooses to only write about touching children
@CamielLeake 1) I didn't say anything about the essay's author liking or not liking the book; I only said that there's something off, since many people (not everyone, mind you) in the comments are discouraged from reading the book / judge the book/Nabokov based on this video 2) uhm. He didn't "actively choose to write only about touching children".
"Every essay must be perfect or else it shouldn't be made"
How's that book coming?
@@Veltrosstho yes, that was exactly my point, that it must be perfect! The essay isn't even good.
... Yeah I dunno if a reader finds those passages you quoted 'not, not erotic', uhm... that's on them? 🙃
I've read Lolita thrice now, over a span of about 15 years: once as a teenager, in the midst of an abusive, CSA relationship I was groomed into around Dolores Haze's age, then twice, about a couple years apart, as an adult, who finally acknowledged her experience had, in fact, been CSA (I've also experienced incestuous molestation as a younger child, was semi-groomed by another adult as a teenager, and been in an emotionally abusive relationship as an adult). And it's my favourite general fiction novel of all time. From my perspective, the status quo amongst gen pop IS to view Lolita as a gross endorsement of paedophilic abuse, and to view its author as a 'paedo' by default. Because some people cannot separate art and artist.
Which might be part of the problem here as well? I mean, respectfully, I don't find your case particularly convincing in any case (writing teenage romances counts as pedophilia now, what? Paedophilia has a specific clinical definition, for one thing, so...), but also, at the end of the day... who cares? Even IF Nabokov had questionable fantasies/desires, why should that impact one's reading of the book Lolita (or any other of his books, for that matter)? I don't think Lolita endorses paedophilia and, quite frankly, I just don't see how anyone can have that take, unless they are themselves ALREADY inclined to molest children. The text, to my mind, clearly shows the reader that Dolores Haze is a victim, hell even freaking HH acknowledges this at the end of the book.
Now I don't think Nabokov SET OUT to write an "anti-pedo" book, either (also, I don't really care either way, because I subscribe to "death of the author" pretty strongly). The motif is almost incidental, in a way, to the book's theming on memory, manipulation, beauty or language (such as I read it). Like I wouldn't necessarily recommend Lolita to people looking to read about the experience of CSA/abuse/trauma, for instance. BUT, as it so happens, I found it incredibly useful on my own healing journey, because Humbert Humbert, as a character, is the perfect portrayal of a garden variety child predator. He is pathetic, narcissistic, and rationalising to the extreme, and goes through all these thought loops to absolve himself of his wrong-doing. I have studied the psychology of my own rapist extensively, at this point, through his old messages and police investigation transcripts (I'm suing him for damages), and the parallels are striking, even funny, to a certain extent, in a morbid humour sort of way. Because the fact is predators aren't, for the most part, monsters. They are human beings, they walk among us. My rapist, to this day, believes we had a beautiful love story, and that I'm the one who broke his heart, as a child and teenager. That I had agency as a disabled child (he met me in a hospital setting). Just like Humbert Humbert. But I don't think writing a character like Humbert Humbert says anything specific about the writer. I'm pretty sure I could convincingly craft a child predator character if I wanted, given the research I've done, and my own lived experience as a victim studying her abuser. Hell, author Sofka Zinovieff did so in her own book, Putney, which also portrays an experience of CSA from both the POVs of the victim and abuser.
Honestly, I wouldn't even care that much if Nabokov HAD committed criminal acts (but I've no reason to believe that given the dearth of evidence tbh), because he's dead and buried and, once again, I don't find Lolita (or the other books of his I've read, including Ada or Ardor, the other one I actually enjoyed) promotes a pro-paedophilia message in the slightest. Like my favourite standalone fantasy novel of all time is The Mists of Avalon, and there the author actually committed a crime towards her own child (at least, as far as the evidence points towards). But I don't see that crime endorsed, in the slightest, in the novel itself, and the author is also dead and buried so it's like... why should that stop me from finding all the beauty and meaning I do in the work, which I relate to on its own merits in any case?
As to the whole 'first person' v. 'third person' thing... I just don't know where you're getting that from. 🤷♀ I mean if that's how you interpret literature then fair enough, to each their own, I just can't make sense of it personally. I read Pale Fire (found it tedious, wasn't for me), Pnin (boring, wasn't for me), The Enchanter (which yes I simply viewed as a kind of early draft of Lolita, big whoop) and Ada or Ardor (thoroughly enjoyed it, but needs a re-read), and never got this sense of a 'hidden in plain sight' paedophilic motif. 🤷♀Yeah the siblings are weird in that book, but I just read it as that: weird characters, because Nabokov was interested in weird, obsessive, perverted characters for whatever reason. Like I've literally never read his stuff and gotten the impression that his characters were meant to be taken as aspirational role-models. In fact I feel like there's a lot of mockery going on in the texts I've read. Your interpretation is sheer speculation, which is fine, but you can't just state "he had gross predilections" as fact, in my opinion. 🤷♀Maybe he did, maybe he didn't; we'll never know. And maybe, as some have suggested, he himself was abused and was just working through some of that in his writing. 🤷♀Interestingly enough, that's the take of author Vanessa Springora, who wrote a memoir about her experience of being groomed and raped by another writer, as a teenager.
I guess I'm just bugged by this trend of armchair psychologising writers (especially dead writers, christ) based on A book, or even several books of theirs (which, on its own, is alright, I guess, as long as it remains a statement of opinion), and asserting the conclusions of said psychologising as undeniable fact, and then that LEADING to blanket demonising works of literature, and then anyone who enjoys them by association. Not saying you're doing that in your video, because I don't think you are, but it's what I see most of this kind of discourse feeding into, unfortunately.
I'm also a little tired of readers (speaking in general terms here), who haven't experienced these kinds of things, then acting as weirdo "defenders" of victims/survivors' and getting all outraged and pearl-clutching on behalf of us, at a book they haven't even read most of the time, as if they actually understand how triggers and trauma work, when it's very bloody clear they don't. In this comment section alone, there have been several victims of CSA who loved Lolita, or at least found it meaningful, cathartic, etc... but it's like our voices don't matter when it comes to discussing controversial works like these (again, not speaking about this specific essay, but more about discourse in general). Or when it comes to discussing the more uncomfortable aspects of sexual violence, and trauma (like falling in love with an abuser, orgasming from rape, discussing rapists as fucked up human beings rather than boogeyman monsters, etc...) with the nuance it needs.
Also... how exactly are you using the word pornographic? Because that wasn't particularly clear in the video. 🤔
I did read Lilith just now... uhm, I mean I don't really know what to make of it, tbh. The fact it's titled Lilith makes me think more about the whole "demonic" female figures motif than anything else, which yes is present in Lolita, but like... I dunno I find it difficult to extrapolate much more beyond that (also maybe the simple fact is I've read much worse in the 'this is obviously pedo shit, right?' department). I'll give you a point on the books covers thing, which I didn't know, but there again I don't know that I can extrapolate much more beyond the fact he was thinking about marketable covers and wanting to be marketed as high brow fiction. 🤷♀
The one point I agree with you on: we shouldn't dismiss critical analysis of works of fiction just because we (misguidedly, imo, as I hate the concept of genius and pointedly don't use it myself, anymore) label their creators 'geniuses'. But then I don't: I can call a work of fiction a masterpiece without calling its creator a genius - I hate adulation. But I profoundly disagree Lolita stands as some festering wound in the side of Literature (Lolita's legacy, as promulgated by Stanley Kubrick, however, that's a different story). And I disagree even more with your last sentence: I didn't read Lolita through Nabokov's eyes, I read it THROUGH MY OWN.
N.B.: I feel like the age thing is easily explained by it simply being the start, more or less, of the transitory, pubertal age. It's that transition that holds fascination, I guess, as the age during which one goes from being a child to an 'adult', on a biological level at least. Like that would be the same reason Will and Lyra are around that age in His Dark Materials, what with the theming on critical thinking, questioning authority, and how Dust works, etc... and the same reason why a lot of older YA stories take place around that age. I really don't think it's deeper than that, but eh, that's just my interpretation. 🤷♀
I completely agree with your points and find your perspective very interesting. Regarding Lilith, I just wanted to tack on that for me it’s pretty straightforwardly a tale of a child rapist who is being tortured by being humiliated in hell. The poem mentions a “remembered child” which implies that while alive, the man assaulted a child. Lilith is less an evil woman and more one of many demons who are punishing him for what he did. In many ways it reads to me like Nabokov was condemning the man for his sins, which got him put in hell, forced to be eternally sexually humiliated. The sexual details in that poem are just further humiliation, laughing at the man for finding this appealing to the point of public ejaculation.
I love this comment, its a genuinely nuanced and intelligent response to this video (far more nuanced and intelligent than the video itself)
@@rgw10810 Oooh okay that actually makes sense as an interpretation! I also kinda like it, then, given Lilith's association with cursed motherhood and sexuality in Biblical/Jewish/Western lore/folklore, feels like a good way to turn her demonic nature into something positive, if she's punishing a child molester!
love seeing all the people in the comments willing to utilize media literacy to assess the flaws in this video's presentation and perspective.
@@rgw10810 I mean, Lilith is rather famously Adam's supposed "first wife," she was kicked out of Eden for not obeying him and was treated like a demon thereafter. The theme of vilifying women for their own agency or failure to confine themselves to the strictures of male expectation (or, to zoom out, the theme of conflict between ourselves as subjects and other human beings, who insist on being fully-formed subjects themselves instead of objects for us to use or cast away as we see fit) seems pretty relevant to this discussion
I cant understand how anyone could feel anything other than seething hate for Humbert after that offhand line he had about Dolores crying herself to sleep every night.
Y'know. I used to say stuff like "Your My Hero Academia incest fic isn't the next Lolita." about people holding controversial smut fanfiction as sacred / above all criticism, but as it turns out I was apparently completely wrong in the worst possible way!
How about not comparing fanfiction to books that were published in the last century and discussed widely since then? And how about reading "Lolita" before commenting on it (because your comment suggests that you haven't read it)?
@@restlessdream8745 I think their just joking?
@@wiiqii6346 I hope so!
@@restlessdream8745how about you learn that a lot of great stories were fanfictions
Not saying that incest fanfiction shipping is great literature
I'm just a huge defender of fanfiction
Percy Jackson, the illiad, Dante's inferno, Romeo and Juliet
What you seem to want is for the author to tell you something is problematic-a sort of "hey, yeah, I know it's weird." More than anything, you want to know whether the author is on your team. For such a subject, you can't really be faulted for that. But a book is a thing on its own. The author is dead, and we have killed him.
I just hope that his questionable writing was his way of coping with the trauma he experienced as a child. Feel like you brushed over that pretty quickly. I hope it’s his way of breaking the cycle of abuse instead of perpetuating it in a way many people far too often do, but there seems to be a lack of critique of such thought processes throughout his work. I also feel as though the “hell” double entendre was skimmed over rather quickly but I haven’t read the work so I’ve got no clue how relevant it actually is. Anyways, great video
I was kind of thinking the same thing. Maybe he is the “12 year old” girl and the abuser having so many of his characteristics is a way to disguise the real nature of the dynamic. I am not sure if it’s true but it is a possibility.
I didn’t want to dwell on it too much since there isn’t a ton of evidence, and I didn’t want to start working backwards and assuming what happened to him. It’s a valid interpretation but not one I wanted to really focus on. Thanks!
The truth is that we will never know the truth (and I wish some people commenting on this video were aware how complex all of this is and that a one hour video with out-of-context quotes from books isn't enough to form a judgment; and to be clear, it's perfectly fine and normal to be grossed out by these, I'm just worried that people will now jump to conclusions upon learning that someone might enjoy Nabokov's prose, but I hope it's just my paranoia, lol). Maybe he was a closeted pedophile, maybe it was a form of processing things, maybe it was a mix of both, maybe it was a way of divert the reader's attention from other things that may be alarming; for example, many Nabokov characters were also murderers (HH included!), how about reading his prose from this angle? Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Nabokov was an intelligent trickster and, as far as I know (because everything he did and said needs to be taken with a ton of salt), hated generalizations and easy answers; some people try too hard to get into his head, and it makes them look like Charles Kinbote. Oh well!
Anyway. Lolita is still a brilliant portrayal of a destructive obsession; Dolores Haze, even when HH tries to steal her name, remains a very complex and well-written character (when people actually pay attention to the text, that is), and the consequences of HH's actions are painfully accurately described.
@@OwlCriticism good point good point
abuse very often self-perpetuates, I think it’s important to separate his trauma as a victim from his desires as an adult, even if it could be a method of coping.
weirdly this isn’t the first time I’ve run into an author in the same circumstance, there’s an artist in the Warhammer 40k community that’s…contentious, and personally I disliked how the people shielding the artist from criticism made other SA victims feel unsafe.
So, I'm a bit confused. around 13/14 minutes in, you've just mentioned and dismissed the common conclusion that Nabokov was sexually abused by his uncle, and that at least one scene in Lolita is autobiographical. I'm looking at your sources, and I'm not seeing any academic biographies-- or any biographies--- of Nabokov in your list. "People say this person was a victim of sexual abuse, *but actually* no one can really say if he was really abused or not" is a very bold statement; would it not be worth naming, quoting, and carefully refuting the scholars whose arguments you found unsatisfying in this area?
I know it's possible you didn't read any academic biographies of the man, or couldn't find pertinent peer-reviewed scholarship, and of course we shouldn't expect a youtube video to have to rely on often paywalled sources like that. But if you *didn't* do that kind of research, it feels a bit irresponsible to me to mention and dismiss the idea so quickly, when we're talking about a public figure being sexually abused as a child. I'm sorry if this is all a bit too blunt or rude, you do genuinely seem like a thoughtful video essayist, but I don't really know how to put this critique any less bluntly.
Are you of the impression that academic biographers seriosuly entertain the idea that this man was sexually abused? This is the first I've heard of such an idea.
A casual google seems to show up what you'd expect; no serious biographer contends the abuse ,it mostly stems from people online misunderstanding a line in Speak Memory. Neither Boyd nor Pitzer (his two chief biographers) contend it, both speaking about his actual written experiences of the time instead, and the lone academic who supports the idea (Grossman) cites no sources other than those two biographies.
@@conorkelleher2571 if the youtuber has a problem with Grossman, I think it's worth addressing in the video, not brushing over. It's deeply weird to mention it *at all* and then go "but anyway, actually he probably just loved writing about pedophilia"
It's crazy that he affirms no one can say for sure Nabokov was a SA victim since there is no concrete proof while trying to infer he was a pdfile without any concrete proof lol
*sighs* the story about the ape isn't a true story, it's another Nabokovian trick; many Nabokov scholars tried to find the original picture, and only found evidence that suggested this was a fictional tale inspired both by fiction and reality.
There isn't one "real" inspiration for Lolita.
... I'm starting to think that this whole video is one big provocation/trap like the ape story. Would be a banger if true, ngl.
Did this n'wah just say "sighs"??????? 💀
@@somerandommen You must be a child.
@@pinkrimmedazureeyes No, I'm just not a 35 year-old millennial who doesn't know how to use onomatopoeia 💀
@@somerandommen Don't ever read mangas then you're gonna get so confused when the unwords start dropping.
It's not possible to fully know who Nabokov was or what his experiences were, but when you say it doesn't matter if he was a victim of csa from his uncle but rather who he became... everything else that follows seems to imply the opposite.
A csa victim trying to understand the mind of their abuser and continually writing stories exploring the subject, who might even start to sound like they endorse it especially if they have a complex relationship with that past and that trauma, is different from someone who simply has an attraction to underage girls. There's no evidence that Nabokov ever assaulted someone, so even if he was a pedophile and wrote these stories from that perspective, all he did was write some fiction pieces from that, which makes it seem like 'who he became as an adult' is irrelevant.
But because 'who Nabokov was as a person' is unknowable and he seems to have playfully obscured a lot of it, it seems a bit fruitless to me to chase questions like 'why does his work always focus on incest and pedophilia'. To me, it definitely seems like reckoning with childhood trauma, and I understand that very well from personal experiences, as well as knowing the story of one of my best friends who experienced POCD and even after recovering from that a conviction that persisted into adulthood that she was attracted to children which she had to deprogram in therapy, all due to deep sexual trauma from her childhood. The way the brain responds to SA is veryyy tricky and complex, especially for the developing mind of a child, so sometimes people grow up with a need to explore what happened to them from the POV of their abuser or start to sexualize their trauma.
I'm not a pro literary critic or someone with a degree in literature and I just analyze things for fun so I'm comfy in a complete death of the author ignorance is bliss perspective so this isn't really for me to explore but it seems like a weird jump to condemning him here...
Highly recommend "Lolita Podcast" by Jamie Loftus if anyone i looking for a super deep dive into the novel, it's adaptations, and the wide spread cultural impact.
It's an actually thorough look at the novel unlike this lazy video essay
Was looking to see if anyone else commented this! Yes!!!! So good and such an in depth podcast!!!
Quincy? It’s Quilty
Babe, wake up. Owl Criticism just posted a new video essay.
I find it quite challenging to separate an author's personality from their work, particularly in this case, because it's essential to analyze the context in which Nabokov created "Lolita." The context is rather complex, as certain events in Nabokov's life influenced his creation of the character Humbert. It's likely that Humbert was modeled after his uncle and the views on young girls by Lewis Carroll in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." I would argue that "Lolita" is more a way to understand the mind of such a horrific person as Humbert-an abhorrent and troubled mind that Nabokov likely drew from his own experiences, perhaps from his childhood and later when he had a son of his own.
For those interested, I highly recommend a deep analysis of this work on the channel "Филолог всея Руси" - Вы не поняли Лолиту
God the whole thing about "he sat at his desk and chose to think about young girls" he such a pernicious, cowardly and quite disgusting way of saying it. What a nasty way of framing it, when the accusation in substance is meaningless... and then you shift this BS to "his fondness for sexualizing young girl" ! OMG
to anyone considering clicking on that link in the description and reading “lilith” out of morbid curiosity- it’s so much worse than he described. in both subject matter and quality.
oh man, agreed, but i would honestly recommend that folks (who are comfortable with doing so) check it out, if they're interested. there was a particular line that made my face twist into an involuntary frown, but i think it definitely adds context about nabokov's broader themes
No it's actually fine
@@Eve.v oh definitely! it’s like the final nail in the coffin if you were sceptical about the points made in the video
So I know russian and I checked both the original and the translation... and I gotta say that the translation is worse and more explicit than the original. No, honestly, this translation sucks and has some questionable choices of interpreting the text, and it doesn't do the original's justice at all, both lyric-wise and rhythm-wise, it's so bad... The original, *despite its content*, is genuinely a good poem? or at least well-written.
That said, I don't know how to view this poem. I could say that Nabokov was being edgy and that the pеdophile protagonist is punished cause duh he's in hell surrounded by imps and ultimately humiliated--but that's just an interpretation and I don't know if it matches the intention...
Ok I’ll start this by saying I try not to watch videos about lolita that I think will annoy me. As a person who was sexually abused as a child, I have formed a very deep interest in the subject of CSA on a lot of sides and it frustrates me immensely to see people spout shit about it. especially when it comes to predators themselves. But I gave this a chance cuz I liked some of your other stuff, and I’m glad I did cuz this video’s got a lot of meat to it. I just hope you don’t mind that I pour my guts out into your comment section because this is going to be very long. probably longer than a lot of the essays I've written for college hah. also content warning for like, CSA, incest, SA, pedophilia, all that kind of stuff. Also I had to break this up cuz it was too long :’)
So I don’t really know where you’re coming from with this third person = the author's opinions idea. I think it was the right choice for Lolita to be written in first person, but as someone who writes a lot of stories in third person myself, I’m confused as to why that would be more disturbing or indicative of the author's opinions. Third person writing often takes on the opinions of the characters it follows, or at the very least describes things through their mindsets. So you would still see the world through the eyes of someone who categorizes certain children as “Nymphets” as third person would be describing this guy who sees these girls as nymphets. I think this focus on if the story is in first or third person kind of weakens your video here because it makes it harder to take seriously, as I find it unconvincing that third person is supposed to be inherently neutral or factual. You can have unreliable third person narration as third person narration is just a different way of writing.
Side note this video made me very interested in reading Ada, as I’m always down for explicit stories about sibling sexual abuse cuz of my own experiences with sibling sexual abuse.
Another side note, and kind of a nitpick so I’m sorry, but I find it amusing as someone who is very aware of how normalized and common pedophilia, incest, and sexual abuse in general are, to hear you describe Ada as an alternate world where those things are normalized. I understand what you meant, but make no mistake, pedophilia, incest are absolutely rampant in America if not the entire world. They are also somewhat normalized, but getting into that would be an entire different rant.
I’d like to take a second here and compare Nabokovs writing to a book I recently finished called The Incest Diary. The Incest Diary is an anonymously published autobiographical story about a girls incestuous relationship with her dad. It's very explicit and blunt about what happens in it, it uses words like cunt, pussy, penis, cock, and dick. The narrator, who IS the author, describes being aroused just by writing about her trauma. It was, to me, a very refreshing and exciting book to read. Because something that happens with a lot of victims of sexual abuse is that they develop sexual complexes about it. This is often ignored because it would challenge a lot of people’s ideas around what is and isn’t ok, sexually, and about how they can support victims of sexual abuse. No one wants to admit that a lot of victims are going to have weird sexual complexes when they’re abused sexually. Because then you would have to accept that it's ok to have disgusting fetishes and no one wants to do that haha.
In the incest diary, she gets turned on thinking about her dad. Which makes sense, her dad was the foremost sexual figure in her life since she was like 3 years old. Being turned on by taboo shit like your trauma is one of the main ways people’s minds cope with sexual abuse. And it’s also a good example of how creating or consuming that kind of kinky content in no way reflects on if you’re a pedophile. Later in the book she gets turned on by a guy she’s dating describing how hot she looks in a picture as a child. But getting turned on by this kind of ageplay stuff doesn’t at all equate to finding real children attractive.
Here’s another important thing: I write a lot of stories. Most of these stories will include sexual abuse, child sexual abuse, or pedophilia in some way. Because those are the things I’m interested in talking about. I’ve always found it very confusing and annoying to hear that I’m supposed to write about these things without sexualizing them, because they are sexual. That’s kind of the whole point. I understand what people mean when they say this, but I don’t agree with it. I don’t agree that the only good way to write about sexual abuse is to make it seem as repulsive or sterile as possible. Because sexual abusers don’t see it that way, a lot of them take quite a lot of joy in it, and I don’t think it’s helping anyone to pretend otherwise. Rape is bad because it’s assault, because it’s hurting someone, it’s not bad because it’s gross. And there’s a lot of ways to show that, but I don’t think discounting the titillating or more sexually provocative ways of doing that helps anyone. Because if it did, it would discount that rape can occur and be pleasurable and still be rape. Kind of like the "if it was rape why did you cum?" victim blaming shit.
This gets especially hairy when it comes to child on child sexual abuse, as is portrayed in Ada. Because the scene you described of the two girls and the boy, with the kissing and all that shit? It’s similar to things that happened to me. We enjoyed it at the time, cuz we didn’t know any better. Nobody talks about how kids can hurt other kids that way, if they talk about sexual abuse at all. When I see things like that, I see myself, and I rarely get to see myself that way. It was gross erotic fanfic of a similar nature that actually made me realize I’d been sexually abused, because it portrayed my reality way better than anything else I’d ever read before.
Sidenote but I liked your joke about “easter eggs but with pedophilia” because I’m pretty sure I legit do that across my stories, since I’ll often include characters from one of them in another.
Anyway this video reminded me of an idea that’s annoyed me since I was 12 (haha, there’s 12 again!) and first began thinking about this stuff, is that if someone IS a pedophile in their own mind, who cares? It doesn’t matter if he thinks incest and children having sex is hot as long as he doesn’t rape anyone. I was worried I was a pedophile when I was 12 for a lot of the fantasies and things I’d have going through puberty, and I decided that if I was then there wasn’t anything I could do about it. It didn’t matter so long as I didn’t rape anyone because it was just in my mind. Which was easy enough cuz it turns out I don't want to rape anyone, or even have sex with anyone.
But my point is this: this video is interesting and clearly genuine and I truly appreciate you making it. I learned a lot of stuff I didn’t know before. I liked the way you debunked that whole “no girls on the cover” thing, because I’d heard that around before and totally bought into it.
But in the end, all I see is a guy who had a lot of weird taboo kinks. In many ways, his writing mirrors some of my favorite people’s writing. I’m friends online with a lot of victims of incest/csa, and a lot of us have develop incest and underage kinks. We’ll write stories about sexual abuse, both ones that are erotic and ones that aren’t, and ones that blur the line between those two things. And these are my favorite artists in the world because they make me feel seen and cared about in a way no other media about CSA does.
It makes sense to me that he would want strict control over how people perceived him, if he feared being made out as a kind of monster over his kinks/fetishes/desires. If anything, this makes me appreciate his work more, as I’m a staunchly pro-kink kind of person, and as far as I can tell this was a lifelong sexual obsession of his that never bled into real abuse. People who write about this kind of stuff are often survivors, like my friends I mentioned before, and will often face harassment and doxxing and all kinds of stuff for writing about this shit in a way more people don’t understand. Not cuz they’re too dumb to understand it, just cuz they dont have the life experiences to relate to it.
I mean, and this is getting a bit off topic in an already very long youtube comment but- even actual child rapists aren’t inherently attracted to children. Some of them are, but a significant amount of child sex abuse is done out of a desire to feel powerful by controlling or hurting someone else. I know this shit because reading about the facts of CSA is one of my main hobbies.
Anyway, I truly appreciate the effort you put into this video. I was worried going in that you were just going to look at his books, say they’re gross and that he’s probably a pedophile or something. I liked the part where you made it clear that these things, as far as anyone can tell, never crossed over into real life. Because that's the most important thing to me.
I really liked the part at the end where you mention how people often see whoever they claim to be a genius as above writing fucked up things Just Cuz They Want To. I roll my eyes at that kind of thing a lot. Firstly because I’m not sure I believe in the concept of geniuses anyway, and secondly because it enables a lot of horrible abuse to believe someone is Too Smart to be crude or cruel.
I also appreciate how you mention that before he got into all the weird shit that may or may not have been like, his kink or something, in Ada, the first book that really engaged with pedophilic stuff was Lolita. I don’t agree with how you framed it though, like it was a trick or something to get people inoculated. But I do understand how it could seem that way when all your concerns kept getting brushed aside as you not being Smart Enough or something. That can be really frustrating.
To me, I read him first fully engaging with these ideas in Lolita as him kind of laying down the morality of the situation before indulging in the stuff he wanted to. It’s like someone saying “Look just so we’re all clear this shit is bad if you do it in real life ok?” like laying down the rules of a fucked up kink scene before you do it.
I’m going to have to disagree with your conclusion, and your use of the idea of it as a festering wound of sorts. There are a lot of reasons people can be obsessed with taboo ideas, especially pedophilia. There’s a kind of OCD, for example, where one is obsessed with the idea of being a pedophile, and fears that they’re a danger to their loved ones. I’m not saying he has that of course, my point is just that there are a lot of reasons someone can have that kind of fixation without it being an inherently bad or dangerous or suspect thing. As I’ve said before, I don’t hold people’s kinks against them, no matter how taboo, because they aren’t real. He didn’t actually hurt anyone, aside from that affair with a college girl, and in my opinion that was sketchy because of it being an affair and him having a position of power over her.
I mean, my obsession with pedophilia and CSA in general comes from an attempt to heal through understanding it both through a sterile lens and through the less clean, messy, sexually charged lens of my own psyche.
So yea, I really can't agree the idea that him having this sexual fixation mars his work at all. If anything it makes me enjoy his stuff more, because it means we’ve both got weird sexual kinks. Potentially from trauma but idk I wont speculate further on his life. Because that's beside the point, I don't think people need trauma to write about fucked up shit. Mostly cuz that'd be a weird standard, but also because I think it'd be pretty gross to expect an author to have to tell you if they experienced horrific trauma to approve of them writing about fucked up things.
Anyway, if you actually read all this holy shit, thank you. And if you didn’t well. Thanks anyway, I liked the video and the amount of care you put into it. I wouldn’t have commented if I didn’t think there was a chance you might actually listen to me, hah.
Thanks so much for your comment (and i did make it to the end ha). I really appreciate your being respectful even when you disagree with some of my conclusions. I do agree that the whole first/third person thing isn't the strongest point, but I do think it's worth considering when talking about how his other works contrast with Lolita. As for the idea of CSA vs actions, I'm not sure how I feel about that in larger society, but I think Nabokov is a special case since his profile and status could be used to normalise that behaviour, harming people even if he himself never did.
Regardless, it's a complicated topic, and not one that has one simple answer. Thanks again for taking the time to comment!
FWIW, I really appreciated your long and thoughtful comment. What you said about the taboo of enjoying sex that was rape really resonated, because I experienced that myself: I was groomed as an older child, to fall in love with my rapist/abuser, who was a much older teacher. The very first rape was more 'stereotype-congruent' in that I had a freeze and dissociated response, but the others felt like normal sex at the time. The fact I experienced pleasure from those acts is more soul-destroying than the acts themselves, in a way, but that is so incredibly hard to tell people who, for the most part, can only imagine the super physically violent kinds of rape. I also like what you said about the distinction between child rapists and pedophiles (a medical term, first and foremost); I too developed a special interest for this stuff, over the years, to make sense of my own experiences of abuse and CSA.
And yeah Lolita is my favourite general fiction novel of all time as well, I have found it very useful on my healing journey.
Hey Imp, I know this is weird af coming from a total stranger but do you have any socials? Your comment struck me in a way that never struck me before and I never write comments but I made a throwaway just so I could express how much I wish I had someone like you to discuss these things in my life. I’m in the same boat as you-in my case I was incested by my ‘father’ and trafficked before that. I went to therapy to process my trauma and the severe disorders that came along with it, but even after reaching a point where my trauma no longer bothers me I’m left with so many thoughts on how society treats CSA victims and how we are constantly decentered and treated like freaks in conversations ABOUT US.
To me it feels like people only care about CSA because it repulses them and not because of the harm it causes-I’m often wondering how many of these people WOULD molest a child if they didn’t have that moral impulsion and had that kind of attraction. Like you, CSA and pedophilia became a special interest for me, and for a while I even wanted to become a psychiatrist specializing in counselling pedophiles who seek treatment (I have since realized psychiatry is not a field for me due to the amount of frustrations and injustices I would witness and endure.) One trope that I’m very mad about and my friends know I’m very mad about is the trope where the scene needs a scapegoat character for the audience to want dead, so they just make them a child molester. It turns my trauma into a fucking plot device and gimmick to manipulate the feelings of the viewer while simultaneously never giving space to the victims and survivors and THEIR story, and if that isn’t a representation of how society treats us then I don’t know what is.
The entire time I was reading your comments I found myself nodding furiously and screaming “YES!!” internally as you’ve put into words the thoughts that have been circling in my mind for so, so long. I’ve always had the urge to write about and discuss the social implications of this kind of abuse and how it impacts our lives even when everything is “all behind me.” We have thinkpieces and essays on every other social issue on this continent EXCEPT for this subject, where we’re constantly censored because people don’t like to think about us and process the reality of what’s happening in this world. Our sufferings and emotions are stuffed into a little closet, only taken out when people want to use us as a bullet point in an argument or a chance to morally grandstand. And it fucking hurts.
I would love to talk to you and your friends about this stuff. I know it’s weird that a stranger is asking for this, in a YT comments section of all places, but when I read your comment it just struck a chord so deep that I thought to myself “I have to talk to this person. I HAVE to.” Most of my friends are also CSA survivors, but they’re all at the stage where they’re either just barely aware of it or are struggling to process it and have just frozen it out of their minds, which leads to rather bland discussions because they won’t-CAN’T-add anything to the wider discussion other than just nodding along. I can make a burner discord and leave the tag here if you want to keep your social channels private, and if you don’t want to talk that’s totally fine too- I won’t hold a grudge, I know this is a terribly weird request. But regardless, thank you for sharing your thoughts here. Your words mean so much to a little stranger like me.
PS-I also use it/its pronouns. They’re technically my primary set that I feel most comfortable in, but because it’s so unconventional I just let people use any pronouns on me instead.
I still genuinely cannot put into words how much this comment means to me.
Thanks again🥲🥲
I love your comment so much... everything about it is how I feel exactly but put so eloquently and succinctly... Both of my parents each had their own special hand in molesting me and it's hard to struggle with... living with that.
I wish to meet you or your friends so badly because i never met a person who really GOT IT like you do,,, lol its kinda funny doing this in a youtube comments section but like, it would be cool to actually get to know you
If he was a victim of CSA, and as a result had an inappropriate sexual attraction that he explored through his writing, and refrained from acting on any minors… I mean, you can’t help what you’ve been through or what thoughts you have. You can choose not to act on it. I’m not saying he’s an amazing author, I’m just saying we don’t need to demonize him or anyone for passive gross thoughts if they aren’t acting on them? That just further stops people from wanting to open up and get help, and stigmatizes them even more.
not trying to undermine survivors nor the incredible, extensive research done for the video, but the screenshot of a page from "speak, memory" rubbed me the wrong way. this was not only because the wording leads to a disturbing conclusion but also because the memory of this episode somehow has completely escaped me.
scrolling through the comment section led me to believe that a lot of people jump to conclusions about that part of nabokov's life, so i decided to refresh my memory and look it up in "другие берега" (1954), the russian version of his autobiography and the version i was originally familiar with. the wording there does nothing to suggest any kind of abuse. obviously, the reality might be something different entirely, but this being the only "evidence" for the theory, one can't help but try and analyze it somehow.
the english and russian paragraphs are almost identical in structure, but lexically they couldn't be any more different. for example, instead of the verb "fondle," he uses the russian verb "ласкал," which in that instance is free of any sexual connotations and at the time was quite a widespread term describing tenderly playing with a child/non-sexual touch and caresses.
even though the english memoirs came first, in the foreword for the russian version, nabokov admits that it was hard to express some of his thoughts in english. for that reason, "speak, memory" took him so much time "because the memory was tuned to one key - the musically unspoken russian."
again, abuse happens even when the victims do not talk about it openly, but in my opinion, any scholarly deduction from something that could as well be clunky wording by a multilingual person doesn't fit any academic standards. for an author to use the themes of pedophilia in their work, one doesn't have to be neither a survivor nor an active predator - sometimes they are just a creepy guy with the moral compass of a fin de siècle russian aristocrat.
and he wasn't alone in that as well. i mean, even though nabokov is not traditionally associated with the so-called silver age authors, they had quite an influence on his writing, and it will be extremely hard to name a silver age author who hasn't addressed the topic of child sexual exploitation in their art or done it in good faith.
Thanks for the insightful analysis, I had always by second-hand sources taken it for granted that Lolita had been an autobiographical, in a sense, book of the author digesting their childhood traumas in the Freudian sense of working the conflict out through sublimation into the book - not that the book was an invented imagination of being in the paedophile's life from an author with no experience in childhood sexual traumatic occurrences personally.
This doesn't make the book any less of an interest or fascination for me, but more of it because of how it implies the imagination of the author outside their experiences. It has become almost a matter of cultural presupposition that I assumed it otherwise with Lolita's origins. Would you mention some of the silver-age authors in question that you cite implicitly at the end of your comment who deal in childhood exploitation or had proclivities towards it? I know Uranian (eroticisation of youth in sodomy) was prolific in many English verse up to Oscar Wilde, but am unlearned in the Russian realm of literature pretty generally and do not know the Silver-age author's theme and verse.
@JingleJangleJam i am not going to use examples from silver-age poetry, because i believe that i am not qualified enough in that particular department, but among the prose there are at least two works that also have directly influenced nabokov's writing - "the petty demon" by fyodor sologub and "sulamith" by aleksandr kuprin
other prosaic texts that tackled the abovementioned theme from the top of my head: g. ivanov "распад атома" (disintegration of the atom), i. bunin "легкое дыхание" (light breathing), "зойка и валерия" (zoyka and valeriya), l. andreyev "в тумане" (in the fog)
but again, i can't and not really inclined to speculate whether or not the chosen themes of their body of work had anything to do with real-life offences - i suppose, one could start researching diaries and correspondence, but things like that are famously hard to get your hands on, unless they have been published, of course
i am not aware of any author having an actual criminal conviction, however for that period of russian history that's not saying anything
if you want to really dig deep and understand the whole mindset around sexual emancipation and taboos, i would highly recommend picking up anything on the subject from the main silver age philosophers vladimir solovyov, nikolai berdyaev or (most importantly) vasily rozanov
@@proustration Thanks, aside from academia discussions too - I have what I think is an interesting point I want to make about the literary terminology used to describe these actions or behaviours between adults and children.
In recent times the term ''sexual abuse'' has become most popular, in a new introduction published in 2010 edition of Sigmund Freud's 'the Psychology of Love', the English literary graduate and feminist writer Jeni Johnson writes, and I want to pay attention to what she writes in brackets and makes a critical point of Freud's writing style by using generous quotations of Joyce's critique of Freud seen in Finnegan's Wake;
''Writing in the condensed, portmanteau language of dreams, Joyce provides a pithy precis and implied critique: as Freud, inventor and arch practitioner of 'Sykos . . . on 'alices', listened to his patients, as they talked of their lives, their memories, their dreams, and as their symptoms manifested themselves in shades at once muted ('meiotic': understated), he noted their recurrent recourse to 'prepossessing drauma present in [their] pasts' ('drauma': drama, trauma, and from the German Traum: dream; and 'prepossessing' daddies who were 'not always undemonstrative relative(s)'. Joyce, writing later, generously applies litotes - 'not always undemonstrative'. Freud in 1896 thought his patients' fathers too, too demonstrative: they had 'seduced' (now there's a euphemism) their daughters.''
Now there's a euphemism! For the rest of the essay, she uses the terminology 'sexual abuse' instead of 'seduced'. The most common way many people, who claim that they aren't understood in it at all often, describe themselves is through sexual abuse survivor. I choose not to... The reason? I think that 'sexual abuse', in my opinion, as what is missed by the above author, is itself actually the greatest euphemism of all. I think it is euphemistic to call the things that occurred between me and adults as a child as ''sexual abuse'', and I think ''sexual abuse survivor'' is another euphemism in the sense since I find it to actually be a vague and mild designation, description or point.
So ''seduce'' someone, whoever, in its older and more historical context and literary use, was to ''Lead astray, tempt into sin or crime, corrupt; persuade (woman) into surrender of chastity, debauch. Hence -ible.
And I think people are more disturbed by the use of ''seduce'' for children than by the use of ''abuse'', an abuse might just be when I tell you you're an idiot, an abuse can be innocuous and ignored, it doesn't involve a loss or leading astray, and the word abuse can vaguely mean many things.
The word seduce from Latin ''Se(ducere duct- lead) and people are disturbed by Freud's language when he says the child is seduced in modern writing, because they can't admit that children are among the most easy people in society to lead, because they are taught to trust in and be led by adults all their life.
I think to call someone an abuser of a child is a euphemism of to call them a seducer of a child.
@@JingleJangleJamvery apt. abuse can describe many things. for example, one can abuse a customer service employee and although the word abuse can describe their actions, it does not have as loaded connotations, as let’s say, abuse of a partner.
@@candyfuntime184 I think because euphemisms help particularly embarrassing and shameful topics to become more plainly spoken in ordinary language, I think most people don't realise that the word 'abuse' originated as a euphemism because now the euphemism itself, like in the case of the Soviet Union where the euphemism ''liquidate'' replaced ''murder'', the euphemism starts to build up a reputation as a euphemism that gives it a darker or more controversial edge even though its actually vague in its expressiveness.
A masturbation can be seen as an abuse, in older definitions in the dictionary, the definition of the word is literally ''to practice self-abuse''.
A customer service line has a use, a function, an abuse is to mis-use the purpose of something, like when Larry David said the point of waiting in line and sampling a flavour of ice-cream before you buy, is that you only sample one type of ice-cream so the line isn't too long, otherwise you would be ''abusing your sample privileges.''
That the expression is vague is because it implies some normativity of value-use of something. A child as kind of like a utility to be served toward a practical use in being raised properly into the next stage of becoming a human being.
Lenny Bruce in his autobiography, writes about how masturbation can be seen as a form of self-abuse by children during the conservative times in which he made his stand-up act;
''One eventful day, I discovered self-gratification. An older kid conducted a school, and five of us graduated about the same time.''
Later his father finds him at an importune moment. . .
''I was propped up in bed, taking care of business. I was so involved, I didn't hear the door open. ''Leonard, what are you doing?'' It was my father! My heart stopped. I froze. He repeated: ''I said, what are you doing?''
To say it was a traumatic moment would be euphemistic. I had to restrain myself from asking: ''Would you wait outside for just a minute?''
He snarled, ''It's not only disgusting, what you're doing - but goddamnit, in my bed!''
He sat down and proceeded to tell me a story, that story we have all heard, with embellishments. Its grim conclusion left three of our relatives in state insane asylums - poor souls who had never been instructed in the wisdom of sleeping with their hands above the covers.''
And it goes for another page of writing on masturbation. . .
''Oh, what a cursed thing! I could see myself on a street corner, giving testimony for the C.B.W.A. - Crooked Back Whackers Anonymous:
Yea, Brothers, I was of mortal flesh. Fortunately for me, my father walked in on me the day I was having my struggle with Satan.''
Anyway, Lenny Bruce so aptly here with words portrays how in the past, masturbation was seen as a form of self-abuse, because the word ''abuse'' in its linguistic function can come to reflect the mores of a particular time, and can abstracts mean just to use a function of something other than its indended usage, which is a highly vague term with many complex social connotations.
Thank you for posting this. To be honest, I find it extremely concerning how people are so unwilling to even consider recontextualizing Nabokov. Some of these books are truly appalling.
I do however disagree that him be an CSA victim is irrelevant. Often childhood trauma can lead to unhealthy adult pathological love and desire. This has been studied already. My own experiences have taken a great deal of therapy to process and work on fixing. I do wonder if Navakov’s own writing reflects pathological and intrusive thinking patterns in his life. Something he would never act or even feel compelled to act upon but which he could not separate from attempts of contextualizing his uncle’s thoughts. One will never know, but I do remember reading some of his writings about Lewis Carroll specifically and he seemed to detest him. It may be that the truth is somewhere in the middle.
You bring up a lot of good points but it's difficult to take the whole video seriously with your pearl clutching.
As a victim of csa and a late bloomer, my first sexual feelings were very fucking weird and upsetting. Parental figures and members of the same sex- the first one obviously will never be not icky but as a believing christian in the midst of a very conservative christian community it was still very traumatic.
I just had to somewhat come to terms that my sexuality was just fucked up and I had to work hard to reach any place of healing.
Kinky erotica and porn and also lot of research on pedophilia etc was basically my obsession. I didn't tell anyone about it and maybe thank god I wasn't a literary genius who wrote and published things.
For the topics you're dealing with and implying some horrendous things about the author's actions and intentions- you really need to research and tolerate some truly uncomfortable topics. You seem to have completely left out how victims of csa can experience arousal and even positive feelings about their abuse and abuser. And that writing about these weird shameful but definitely horny things is what you will expect a csa survivor who happens to be a good author to do.
the issue of sexuality is difficult in this regard because in many cases, if you were harmed as a child, it can become an obsessive fixation as an adult, and most people tend to get suspicious of it because they simply were never in situations where they could have become obsessed in the same way. i feel many sexually traumatized people and survivors of grooming and csa are often scrutinized more heavily for their "abnormal" sexual fixations, when in actuality few people want to confront why it is abnormal. most people are terrified of how truly horrifying that is and also how completely normal it is, so instead of creating a place for people to confront it, they ignore the topic entirely and condemn mention of it even from suvivors.
no im sorry it passes the point of thoughtful exploration.
I'm sorry who's doing the pearl clutching here?
i would like to add that nabokov was heavily inspired by the kidnapping of sally horner to write lolita. As in humbert's MO is the same as the kidnapper and even how lolita tragically passes very young just like sally
Such a dreadful take. It's just not the same as Kipling being excused for colonialism - because Kipling did actually support the British Empire. Nabokov is totally different, he is making a point that aesthetically pleasing literature can be written that is totally disconnected from morality. The author stand-ins and self-references are there precisely to challenge people who didn't understand. He was against the idea that novels had to have a moral theme and so deliberately celebrated the most gross subjects.
I'd love to see the letters he wrote to you explaining his intricate thought process. Oh wait...
As far as what personal opinion I'm going for, I'll go with video-man's
@@atrustworthyfellow6887 Well, first of all, he wrote a lot of non-fiction describing his process. Second, you can come to your own opinion without parroting mine or the video man's you know.
having read only lolita, pale fire and despair, i feel unable to fully engage with this video. i still think my original interpretation of lolita as criticizing pedophiles stands regardless. and the passage cited from pale fire in the context of the overall book just feels irrelevant to me. i'd have to read the other works on the "a list" myself to understand if his works are covertly condoning pedophilia. but the usage of "nymphet" to describe a real life child is pretty damning to my opinion on nabokov as a person. ur videos really make me think, i just subscribed
also this is vibes based and not academic, but there's always been this "too good to be true" feeling around lolita for me. "it's controversial but actually it's not, it's 100% a perfectly written representation of pedophilia and its consequences". and if you question that you just read it wrong. it's one of the best books i've ever read, but critiques of aspects of the book are valid
While I can see Nabokov as legit harbouring some kind of secret unsavoury obsession, the portion of his work classified as sexually abusing minor girls seem a bit exaggerated (he definitely sexualized minors frequently, but I would not classify some of it as abuse due to the context it was written in). My personal opinion on him is that he likely wanted, but did not get a chance to “get with” girls his age when he was 14-18, a time when “love” supposedly was most exuberayting, maybe because he was socially awkward, held back by fear or simply didn’t meet a lot of girls his age. This plus a lot of pent up desire/emotion (he did have a very sheltered childhood, but as an adult writer liked to write about eccentric and morally questionable minds) stayed with Nabokov as a desire to frequently return to the idealism of young/infantile love. But he is probably not a pedophile in the natural sense, that we would classify pedophiles today. That is of course not taking into account he might’ve been sexually abused as a child because there’s no strong evidence. I’m open to interpreting him as either way because my favourite novel has always been Pale Fire 😂 not so much into the young girl stuff
Because young girls are a symbol of innocence, nothing more. Nabokov lost his home and dad early. His main theme is the loss of innocence. His books were always about trying to go back, to find the lost kingdom of his childhood, be it in the memories or in art. It was never about real girls, or girls at all really
The writer Mark Greif has an essay in n+1 called "The Afternoon of the Sex Children" that lines up a lot with what you're saying here
You just nailed a bunch of fanfic writers to the wall. 😂
@@daniels.9740 Maybe, Pale Fire does all of what you say without the young girl stuff 🤷🏻♀️ but he definitely got an unusually lot of work done that involved young girls
@@fanofrpgalore1546 Pale fire, as a poem in the story, exists only because a little girl dies, so not exactly without them, lol. But yes, he explores this theme in many other ways in his books
The people in the comments feels so detached from the content of the video somehow. Like, Nabokov doesn't have to politically correct, or a victim of an SA, to be appreciated. I dont think this is the point of the video.
Yes, this video is just a reaction on random other content creators saying Nabokov is a saint writing Lolita and that it's nature is good and moral, which is very simple minded.
Well, if there's one silver lining to all this, it's that after the novel came out and caused a stir, people started to kinda give more of a shit about child m*lestation. Kinda, but it was something considering no one gave a shit about children in the early 20th century, period. At the very least it got people actually talking about the topic of csa.
A total ahistorical generalisation. That doesn’t mean anything really, you’ve just made it up.
I don't disagree with your points, but Ada is still my favorite novel. I read it first as a fifteen year old girl and I found the description of young love and puberty, with the shame and secrecy and pure joy associated, profoundly resonant. I'm reading an excerpt at my coming wedding. I guess true emotions can come from books with problematic authors.
Also I loved loved loved the interplay of the three different languages, Russian, French and English. Coming from a multilingual family myself, it was the first time seeing it described in a true to life way for me.
Love your channel by the way! Keep up the good work. (Ah, just realized my username is pertinent to this discussion haha)
Exactly, if the book means something to you then where it came from shouldn’t detract from that. Congratulations on the wedding! (Also yes username checks out 100%)
the way you cherry pick and grasp at straws to make a point that's not very nuanced at all is making me reconsider your analysis of A Little Life (the video that made me found this channel)
Same honestly.
I think A Little Life is a book that is way easier to criticize; for example, the lack of research in A Little Life is obvious, and you can't say the same about Nabokov's work.
Ugh, I wish someone did a thorough response to this poorly attempt at psychoanalysing Nabokov; I've already seen people outside YT who referenced this video to "prove" that Vlad's work is inherently evil.
in the same boat 😬
I don't see how he cherry-picked; he acknowledges the merit these books have as works of art. He just also highlights the reoccurring themes in these works. In no way does he admonish or berate the novels or Nabokov and says, in no uncertain terms at the end, that the books cannot and should not be simply dismissed.
@@betzalelabrams2177 we must have watched a different video :/
Kingdom by the sea is also in the poem anabelle lee by poe. A poem about adolescent love
I think the implication of Nabokov being the victim of CSA by his uncle is relevant, because it raises the question of whether or not he was subconsciously working through his own trauma. It absolutely would not make it right - but it is still a valid angle to consider.
In the occasion that my other comment gets deleted for being too confrontative
Here is a copy of the lone full-length Nabokov ever gave, like two years before he died, on the talk show Apostrophes. He talks about his most infamous and controversial novels such as Lolita and Ada. If you can speak French or read Spanish, you’ll understand it. It starts at 10:31 and ends at 1:12:00.
th-cam.com/video/a0MHIBoWOQg/w-d-xo.htmlsi=6FMeYA5KSzSMnrF9
Who would you rather hear speak on the more suspicious, inappropriate parts of Nabokov’s oeuvre: the man himself or some guy?
For anyone who wants to read this interview in an alternate language with the help of Google Translate, The Nabokovian has a transcript of the original French, which can be found here: www.thenabokovian.org/node/25734
Google Translate can be a bit wonky (for example it turns ‘le phare’ into ‘beacon’ rather than ‘lighthouse’), so bear in mind!
For people who want a more exact translation into English, Brian Boyd translated this interview in the collection ‘Think, Write, Speak’ (pg.1,254) (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
Also bear in mind, as I mentioned in the video, Nabokov’s answers were prepared ahead of time (you can see him reading off cards), and as such his comments are fairly consistent with those found in Strong Opinions from 1973.
Thanks!
@@OwlCriticismhe prepared all of his interview answers ahead of time
I think it’s a very reasonable conclusion to come to after this video about Nabokov as a man widely renown as a “genius” could’ve been fully capable of recognizing his attraction to young girls and knowing it would be frowned upon in society. It’s not unreasonable to think that a man that intelligent could use a form such as writing as a functional outlet for those thoughts instead of acting on them.
I couldn't have said it better myself! Obviously we can't know Nabokov's intimately-held predilections, but if he really harboured an attraction to little girls, the healthiest thing he could've done with it (considering the time and context in which he lived) was sublimate that attraction into his art and steer clear of real-life children, which is by all accounts what he seems to have done.
Actually no, seeing that a man (who himself was a victim of child sexual abuse) wrote about child sex abuse and thinking it means he himself must have been a child sex abuser and chose to “hide” this fact by publicly writing about it is not intelligent.
@@damonhastings540you do realize that those who have been victims of sexual abuse as children are more likely to repeat the abuse into adulthood right? Also how would explain such flowery language used to describe such things through various works throughout his life?
@@Lxurelxi I consider this to be common knowledge. I'm also not in the habit of accusing victims of child sex abuse of being pedophiles simply because I watched some misleading youtube movie about books you haven't read.
@@d.hastings1779 neither am I but we also don’t even have confirmation that he was a victim of sexual abuse. Regardless of that the continuous appearance of viewing young girls in a sexual context is prevalent in many of his other works. That is fact. My opinion is formed based on the textual evidence that are in his books. It’s not just Lolita and there is something alarming about that.
Started watching, if this is going to be a “Nabokov is a pedo” take I’ll be greatly disappointed.
When you've written several books with the topic, and it's portrayed as a positive in several of them, yea... it's kinda undeniable
@@somerandommenimo it's kinda sad in his case, he was sexually abused as a child and i guess you could see his case as perpetuating a cycle of abuse.
Hopefully him putting his thoughts into words helped him deal with that shit without feeling tempted to hurt anyone.
@@somerandommenyou have a child’s comprehension of literature. Utter dullard
@@WillJL20 give your own interpretation instead of just throwing empty insults
@@somerandommenit is absolutely deniable. Anyone can write on anything if they have the imagination and skill to do so, as Nabokov did. This video essay is pure shit, it is nothing.
From Grammarist: “Daemons are good or helpful spirits. The idea of the daemon has survived today as a sort of guardian angel or an inner driving force. Remember, a demon is an evil spirit, a daemon is a good spirit.“
After watching this video, and reading all the comments. I’m left with all kinds of emotions, mostly disgust and uncomfortableness. Which, I think is the point. I think what you and other commenters said all brought up interesting points, even if I disagree. To be honest, I’m not sure if I can really comment something worth reading, because I’m feeling a lot of different ways. Which, I think is one of the most important things literature can do. I also haven’t read Lolita or his other works, I just knew of Lolita and want to check it out. I still do, but I do think it’s one of those books I’d have to read over and over to truly get it. I want to take Nabokov in good faith, but it does feel kind of difficult. From just a look at the comments, and discourse surrounding it as a whole. Lolita is important for csa survivors, that cannot be denied.
I do have to disagree with you just midly brining up his uncle, I’m just regurgitating, and you *did* bring it up. But it almost feels, ignored? If he was a victim of csa, it’s pretty common for csa victims, to write about csa. I mean, of course it’s disgusting, reading through some of these comments genuinely disturbed me. But, if csa survivors general consensus is “pedophilia in the fictional context can be used to cope, even if on the surface level it seems pornagraphic, a lot of us developed weird sexualities/kinks because of what we went through” then I think we ought to listen. I’ve met some who disagree and I’ve met some who agree. I won’t get into it myself, but I was a victim of being preyed on as a kid. Nothing happened thankfully, it mostly just stayed in his subtle actions, but it got scarier when I saw how he treated other young girls around me. Not that I have to state what happens to me to have opinions on this, I guess what I’m saying is I just genuinely don’t know what is or isn’t the right answer. It’s never that easy, it’s usually never that black and white. But, I’m just saying him potentially being a csa victim recontexualizes a lot of his work.
To be frank, I feel some are being really harsh over this. I’m not sure if it’s the kind of audience you attract, I’ve only one other video. But, you said you made this to inform others who aren’t as familiar with his work and I do feel informed. I absolutely would have a more educated opinion if I read his work, and I’ll never have the knowledge of the scholars who study him. But I feel gross, angered, amazed, weird, and enlightened. Literature is amazing.
fully agree here. his main point, which he totally failed to make because it was ultimately about lolita - one of his least morally grey works - is that there are way too much unecessary and graphic descriptions of young girls than need be. and that's enough argument for me personally, his ability to write doesn't makes it any less concerning. im sure there r better, clearer, and more representative works out there by women, at least. stuff more explicitly political and clearly meant for young girls/victims, for one. i can respect other people getting into morally grey authors/works but i think people getting on his ass for not being able to wrap his head around it isn't making his argument void as it's still about a man obsessively writing pornographic content sexualising young girls - as if we dont have this enough
@orca9781 Yeah, I have to agree with you. And I also genuinely agree with his main point and what you said, I myself do find myself respecting his work less with this knowledge. Of course there’s still merit, and I would never ever try to act like anyone who cares about his work is a bad person. But, my og comment did fail to address the nuance that there’s other works that tastefully cover csa. I’ve just seen some comments and other people say it’s an important book to them, to be able to see the perspective of the monsters who did that shit to them. In a way, it kind of calms me. Again, what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what others have went through. But, if I were to be “against” all his work as a whole, it would be because of what csa survivors have said. Of course there’s csa survivors who don’t like his work and i absolutely respect that. I’ve just also seen people say it’s meaningful for them, and I can’t just take that away from them. I find myself really on the fence here, because he isn’t alive and I can’t just ask him. But, on one hand him himslef likely being a csa survivor just simply recontextualizes owls entire video imo at least. But, also media doesn’t just exist in this nebulous vacuum and no amount of reasoning or explanation can change that. As you stated, plenty of old men sexualize little girls everday, and it’s a problem in our society. And, eh, intention just doesn’t change that. Sure, there’s a lot of those girls who grew up and felt comforted by his works but there’s some who also didn’t.
@@wolfieeeeeeeeeeee You said that perfectly & its how i feel too. I think this is the thing, i feel lolita belongs to the audience more than the author, so its okay to hold it dearly, but that doesn't make the author any less exempt from criticism. The inclination to assume that it exists in a vaccuum completely forgets the very real possibility that Nobokov himself didnt even try very hard to dispute. Lolita for SURE transcends the author, but there needs to be a middle ground met lest they totally disqualify the very real consequences of hailing problematic authors. i am alw more than certain that there are better works out there by better people and yet audiences are still dragged into the same list of authors - white european cishet men - always leaning towards a concerning level of moral abstraction that they profusely refuse to clarify in the name of the creative (good art is not morally grey art), likely because of the post structural ass inclinations of foucault & derrida who were also real tight with, you guessed it, pedophiles
I’m pretty sure I’ve said it before and maybe it’s being congratulatory for a benchmark, but beyond the well-written and -organized videos, thoughtful exploration of subject matter, good editing and just being a funny person on top of all that, I really appreciate your ability to tie everything together and have an actual conclusion to your videos. There’s a lot of popular youtubers that do long-form analyses that start off great, but then they get to the end of the video and it’s just like, “well, there’s all the facts, weird, right??” quit bluebаlling me with your nerd shוt and wrap up your ideas for christ’s sake 😤
Just going to plug Lola Sebastian’s video on Lolita for further watching/reading :) great dissection and discussion, thank you! Peeling apart western cannon is incredibly important, especially when more problematic elements go unacknowledged in larger critique.
Hmm I don't really agree with this at all. I see where you are coming from but it's a big misunderstanding of themes and plot. Lolita is about narcissism, and Nabokov was an edgy freak (and a genius) who obsessively circled around extreme themes, but expressed them in relatable ways. Cishet men often portray themselves as disgusting perverts in expression of sexual desire, in contrast to the delicate innocent pure woman - isn't this just a more extreme expression of that?
A lot of this focus is a little pointed. Nabokov, I think, is an edgelord. He is being edgy. The amount of times "being gay" becomes a text or subtext is also pervasive. I think his idea is to push the boundaries, and for him it's anything from being gay to being straight but attracted to young girls. If you ever do this video again, do it on some other taboo, and you'll probably find just as much to talk about.
I’ve been a compulsive liar basically my whole life, as well as having a penchant for creative writing and self inserts. No clue if this is the case for other truthless folks, but in spite of consistently lying about all sorts of things, big and small, short and long term, I can relate to the strong compulsion to find an outlet for the truth (a whole nother layer of self-destructiveness). Which is something I add aspects of to my writing a whole lot, but I will thank my lucky stars ten times over that my baggage makes me feel practically angelic compared to Vlad’s whole p*dophilic fascination.
Oh hell yeah, I was just telling a buddy about your a little life video, AND I just finished reading pale fire. I guess I'm gonna read Lolita before coming back here but dropping a like and comment for the algorithm 🫡 keep up the fire vids
omg homestuck pfp
This video sorta misses alot of stuff about the book and author so if anyone wants to know more, I'd recommend Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus. It's a real deep dive, 11 episodes, each around an hour long
You know, I really liked your analysis of A Little Life, and I do fully plan to continue to watch and support your videos in the future, but this one kinda pushed some buttons for me.
I think my biggest qualm is your equation of pedo- or hebephilic desire with total immorality. Assuming that Nabakov did actually have such desires-which, as you say yourself, we have NO evidence of having been the case based on his real-life relationships and the accounts of those who knew him-I don't think it's helpful to demonize him for obliquely expressing them through fiction.
There are non-offending pedophiles in the world who suffer tremendously because they understand that their desires are inherently harmful to the object of their desires and can thus never be acted on morally, and who already have to endure the constant feedback that they're the worst of the worst the world has to offer and inherently irredeemable scum because of desires they have no ability to rid themselves of. Not to mention that many actual child abusers who commit sexual crimes against children don't even meet the definition of pedophilia, because rape and assault are more often crimes of power than genuine desire.
With all of that in mind, I have to say that I find your take on Nabakov deeply uncompassionate on a number of levels-I think it's a topic worth examining, but I think you should have let this one percolate for quite a bit longer and done much more research into not just Nabakov and his books, but the accusations you're leveling against him here. I don't think just flinging "Nabakov was a pedophile and here are the cherrypicked quotes that prove it" out to the masses, who are bound to be repulsed by that declaration due to both the inherent disgust most of us feel towards the sexualization of children as well as to the pedophile witch-hunt that we as a culture are currently engaged in (and I will note that accusations of pedophilia are very often used by the right wing to demonize demographics they dislike, such as Jewish people and queer people), is a responsible move without further analysis of what that would mean for our understanding of his works or emphasis on the fact that this is strictly YOUR reading of his works, without any proof from life that he a) intended them that way or b) committed any crime beyond potentially feeling those desires, which is not a crime at all. A video like this could be used to point out red flags to look for in other works where the sexual abuse of children is being more overtly condoned, or to present a nuanced view of Nabakov as a person who may have been expressing some unrealized traumas and/or desires in his works, but having landed on "Nabakov was a pedo and his books are gross!" as a conclusion honestly feels shallow and rather below what I believe your analytical capabilities to be after having watched your video on A Little Life.
I would love to see you take some more time to develop your thoughts and come back to this topic, but as it stands, I honestly think this video is bordering on irresponsibly incomplete in its analysis. I'm sorry to say that as I'm sure it's hurtful to get that sort of feedback, but this is a topic I have trouble holding my tongue on due to just how much bad-faith discourse I see around "pedophilia" these days. I very much enjoy your whole vibe and this style of video, though, and I'm looking forward to the next one.
Thank you! This is why I called this video only pretending to be progressive; all the "yikes, gross" comments regarding the heavy topic that is pedophilia/CSA (a very childish reaction, if I have to be perfectly honest) are reactionary and it pains me to see that it's so common even in, uhm, leftist spaces.
Lolita, a book published in 1955, and written by a liberal coming from an aristocratic family (!) presents a much better understanding of the problem and of the consequences of CSA; too bad that this video's shallow analysis of it left many people with an impression that it's a "pedo fantasy".
Edit: perhaps this is Lolita's fate: to be shallowly read & misunderstood. Which is ironic, considering that this is exactly what HH did to Dolores Haze (but even he was able, at some point and to some degree, recognize it).
Great response to this video, I share most of your issues with it. I also really liked the video on A Little Life, but this one was... not it, to put it nicely.
There's a lot that could be said but Nabokov* had an affair with his student (Katherine Peebles), already an abuse of power before you consider their ages, 44 and 19. Power and sex are conflated for predators, they aren't somehow disjointed or mutually exclusive as often thought by the naive majority. It's rare for pedophilia to be an accidental aberration, a random "crossed wire" in an otherwise normal person - it's not a sexual orientation (and acting like it is is actually offensive to homosexuals and the like). It's a desire which is usually thought through and develops consciously, which makes the desire itself is inherently evil in most cases. Acting on it is a separate issue. Nabokov was obviously intelligent enough to either hide anything he did, or just skirt the line. Most pedos who don't offend, don't offend because they're fear the consequences, but they'll tell you along with a sob story that they don't offend because they have a conscience...and you people will believe anything.
why did you skip past the uncle thing so quickly? that's odd
Idk if i was more engaged with the content of your presentation or in waiting for the coffee to splash/spill. The way you flailed that cup around so recklessly, i had convinced myself it must be an empty prop. Until, of course, the Incident.
Damn, I didn't expect the video to be this bad, uninformed and manipulative, impressive work really
His conclusions truly are impressively terrible
Almost all videos about Lolita are horrible.
lolita is one of my favorite books of all time because i really thought he was making a point but this video sort of threw everything into question for me. i like stuff like this because it complicates lolita further and theres nothing i like more than a complicated puzzle. bad people can write great, even revolutionary, things, and while i dont think nabakov was a bad person per se his true views on children are genuinely horrifying and revolting. im not sure what to do from here. my brain is sort of frying over the implications of all of this but the way this was handled was incredibly thought provoking, even if it all makes my stomach turn.
I like this video analysis, but it suffers a little bit from being too fixated. They say if you look for something, you'll find it. Nabokov pushed more social boundaries than just pedophilia, and if we read his canon, we'll see that pretty clearly. If a video exactly like this focused on other Nabokovian patterns with the same intensity (incest, murder, homosexuality), we'd find a very similar conclusion about those things.
i would continue to question your thoughts because it seems you actually had a fairly mature takeaway from the book. i think this video is very biased in the hope that he can "prove" nabokov was "problematic" (something people have been trying to do for years because they're uncomfortable with his writing) and while it is good to question the nature of ideology around you and where that ideology comes from, i think it as just as good to question owl criticism's intentions as much as nabokov's.
People: Ban Novel
meanwhile Jeffrey Epstein and dozens of handlers.
1) I really don't understand why contextualizing someone's work is so controversial? It is just pointing out a pattern.
2) ffs people, watch the whole video before commenting. The amount of comments that point out something that the video does say (specially al later points) just shows how y'all are commenting as a gut reaction.
Too many people exclusively coming out of the woodworks to defend Lolita, while completely avoiding the topic of the sibling incest book
@@moving1ni think we should cancel gabriel garcia marquez for incest etc in 100 years of solitude!!!! (This is how you sound)
@@iris-vu8wk People are allowed to write whatever they want. “Canceling” people for works of fiction from years ago is silly; there’s no reason to place rules on what people are allowed to write, and when a book is so old it’s understood that weirdness that may be present in it was really just quota for its time period. But if you wrote something weird, you still wrote something weird, and Nabokov wrote several chapters of biological sibling incest intercourse including children under the age of 16. In a discussion about his morals, I think bringing up THAT book would kind of be more necessary than yet again bringing up the Lolita, when I’m more than sure that half the people in this comment section understand that Lolita was “problematic” with good reason to be.
@@moving1n have you read Adabor Ardor? Much like 100 Years of Solitude (and many other works) incest is used as a literary device. It is understood that in Ada or Ador that the two siblings are writing a reflection on their life together, hence the book being in 3rd person, and thus making the book unreliable and obfuscated, romanticising their undoubtedly traumatic pasts.
Theres an assumption in the video essay and in many comments that Nabokov’s self inserts in his novels begin and end at the perpetrators of the abuse he writes, but why the assumption he couldnt be identifying with the victims? Will we ever know if Nabokov was a victim of CSA for sure? No. Does his work often deal with CSA? Yes. Has anyone ever come forward about him abusing them? No.
I think, especially in the wake of Neil Gaiman being accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, this whole “writing about icky topics = more likelihood of being a bad person” just shows it’s fallibility. We have a man who wrote about pedophilia and incest who was never accused with the exception of speculation due to what he wrote about, but we have a beloved children’s author who wrote “wholesome” books who has been accused of brutally assaulting a teenager.
If he never actually hurt anyone in the real world, and all he did was right about these... "impulses," does that make him a bad man? I mean, is it wrong to write about it if you don't actually do it? It's not a gotcha, I'm actually thinking about this, idk.
To conflate the fictional work of a speculated CSA victim, to conflate a person’s art with a genuine crime, is not a valid critique. Someone who went through something traumatic has themes of his own trauma in his writing - this is common.
i also think it's usually people who have never experienced those traumas that tend to clutch their pearls and go "but this is (gasp) *problematic*!"
@@bouncingbuttons7441 Yep. People who haven't had to deal with the real horrors of this stuff are always the ones offended on us victim's behalf. But the reality is that therapists and psychologists around the globe agree that the creation of art is one of the best, safest, and most well-researched coping skill out there. Talking about our experiences through art is how victims survive and, hopefully, thrive.
there isn't enough evidence tho
I think its really unfortunate how many comments under this video seem to conflate "csa victim = someone who WILL grow up to have pedophilic tendencies" when that is a popculture bullshit theory that does nothing but harm survivors who arent part of that minority percentage. I think your analysis on all of of nabokovs work is relevant and necessary, and if we want to keep talking about his books, we should address all the themes and patterns in them clearly. Its completely fine to be bothered by his works; the notoriety of a work does not protect it from criticism.
I came here from your video on A Little Life and feel a bit stupider now for having enjoyed that video. It's like when I stumbled upon that podcast Your Favorite Band Sucks and got some laughs out of their episode on Kpop, and then realized how little substance their arguments actually held when they talked about media I enjoy.
I feel like it's your responsibility as a creator to do better than this. If a topic is particularly unsavory, that doesn't mean that the author has to feel the way his characters feel. Which PoV he uses in his writing doesn't somehow change that. Borges writes pretty much exclusively in third person, but I don't think that he encourages things like crucifying people or becoming a murdering outlaw. Authors like Stephen King exist, and people haven't accused him of doing anything but too much cocaine, even with that scene towards the end of IT.
I feel like there is a fundamental misunderstanding of Nabokov's works that had to go into this video. Have you read any of his novels besides Lolita? The age difference/pedophilia is never portrayed in a positive light, even if a character writes about it that way. What's right in the mind of one person is totally nightmarish and unthinkable in another. I actually hold Nabokov in similar esteem to authors like Poe, who pioneered the use of the unreliable narrator. Even their prose styles seem similar to me. Taking any character at face value in a Nabokov novel is a mistake, and then this attempt to hold the author to account for those ideas? Come on man, is everything okay to write about or is nothing? Do we think that Poe was murdering people, removing their hearts, storing them under floorboards, and then suffering hallucinations while being questioned by the police? I mean I'm pretty speechless here...
Lolita is one of my favourite books, i hate how it’s misunderstood
Personally, I think Lolita really ties together the rest of his work, rather than being an exception. You don't write Lolita if you think pedophilia is a _good_ thing.
In that specific context, it feels like he was a man that _knew_ how abusive a lust for children was, and struggled intensely with the fact that he felt it strongly nonetheless. I don't think that detracts from his character by itself, since I don't believe in thought crime.
The man vented his objectively harmful fetish that he clearly didn't find acceptable to act on by writing problematic erotica. That probably can't be called a _good_ thing, but it's at least much more noble than the alternative.
Not the drake line 💀💀
also i can't believe nabokov practically said "To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Lolita. The artistry is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of French literature most of the themes will go over a typical reader's head."
Didn't most French intellectuals support pederasty?
yeah seriously😭😭 bro would be drawing people he disagrees with as ugly wojacks if was alive today
yeah, he did. the book is a very engaging book and while the idea of iq is a colonialist and a racist one, you do have to have a lot of media literacy to read any of nabokov's books. perhaps it's a statement of pretension, but i also think that he has a point. he is engaging with elevated language and very taboo concepts and that's something people with poor media literacy cannot handle unless they are seeking to expand their taste.
@@bouncingbuttons7441 i agree! i say this not to denounce the genuine literary merit and depth in his work, but merely to make a silly little youtube comment by altering a copypasta, since it was the first thing that came to mind when i heard him express this idea!
@@Eve.v okay i've never seen that copypasta! slay for real, my autistic ass just loves to take things too literally. i now see the joke and it is quite hilarious how pretentious he was.
Love your videos man. Please don't stop, you have great style
Did you read the paper, "Hiding in Plain Sight: Nabokov and Pedophilia" by Brandon Centerwall? Published by the University of Texas press. I'm seeing some similarities in your argument (and, of course, the titles are identical). Just curious, as I was immediately reminded of that particular paper as I listened to this video.
This is the first I'm hearing about it, but it seems to cover many of the same points (at a first glance). I'll have to give it a read. Thanks!
Could you tell me what the book is about?? It sounds interesting, I mean not in a good way I mean in a bad way
"why does it matter what happened to him as a child?" ok i'm out lol
For what it’s worth, the idea that people who were abused as kids are more likely to abuse someone else in the same way in the future, has been disproved. That was a myth. Do what you will with this info.
@@Zythryl interesting. i'm just saying it's extremely relevant to the topic of why he wrote about the subject. so dismissing it made me dismiss the video
@@Zythrylnot really. From my memory, it's pretty much unclear. I'm pretty sure the study was done on the incarcerated SA child abusers, and the results are pretty much 50/50 on whenever they were themselves abused in childhood or not. A lot of then also report to not be attracted to children outside of the abuse which imo only further proves that SA is not about attraction at all.
When it comes to abuse overall, I'm pretty sure neglect was proven to "cause" the most abusers.
Though all of this is pretty unreliable if you ask me because it has to come from a self report. A lot of people will lie about whenever they were abused or not, either because they're in denial, or because they want to gain sympathy.
I understand the impulse because it can easily be twisted into "abused people will abuse" ideology but I would rather prevent harm than demonize people tbh.
@@DGarrettDG good for you, to be honest. He proceeds to use writing as a way to justify his opinion that the author was a pedo.
As someone who is a CSA survivor and is associated with a lot of others SA survivors, that is honestly offensive to me, and only shows his ignorance.
@panonymousbloom5405 i'm so used to "good for you" being an insult on the internet i'm not sure if you're agreeing with me. but if i follow right i'm sorry for your experience and agree. people need to understand fiction is not endorsement. tbf i didn't finish the video so that might be harsh
this is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. keep at it, youre doing great!!
Bend sinister has a very similar plot to invitation to a beheading, including the hope to be rescued from prison by a child who's related to the person who's the reason for his imprisonment.
Okay, I'll never ever have Impostor syndrome again about projecting too much of myself onto characters I write loool
Hm, maybe you really didn't "read Lolita properly" if you think there's a character called "Quincy" in there ;)
Honestly, I initially thought this was just a joke referencing the fact that we don't know *any* of the real names of the characters in Lolita, but oh well.
Yeah , it’s one of the most on the nose puns in the book as well😂😂
i'd actually never heard in depth about all the points you made-- one person told me about his uncle and i thought "oh okay"... the reality is, in my opinion, pretty disgusting. though the book was one full of interesting uses of language and effective at controlling the reader, considering the author now just makes it.. ew. of course, one cannot just forget good writing, but i suppose we should all watch how we speak about the author. thank you for making this video!
I also had 3 stages when thinking about reading Lolita:
1 - this book is weird and creepy, Im not reading that.
2 - wow, that unreliable narrator stuff seems interesting. And the book actually condemns Humbert? Nabokov seems to be a good writer with normal opinions. I should read that.
3 (after watching this video) - nope.
You should still read Lolita. Maybe even Pale Fire. They're moving, beautiful, and it seems he developed some self-awareness for those two.
the 3 stages of watching controversial book video essay reviews
i think you're a bit too easily swayed
I’m sorry but if the only books your read are one you deem are written by author with ‘normal opinions’ I doubt you’ve read any very interesting books
Re reading it with my mother right now. You should read it.
I now feel less bad about not being able to finish Lolita due to it making me literally nauseous. Great video!!
I highly recommend everyone listens to Lolita Podcast by Jamie Loftus! She goes over the various adaptions of Lolita and “Lolita fashion” and how the culture consumed Lolita. She also goes over Nabokov’s personal life and what inspired him to write Lolita. She also talks about … the failed Lolita musical LOL. It’s just a really good podcast that is only about 10 episodes long.
so happy i stumbled upon this channel! you speak so eloquently and articulate your points so well, i really hope to see more content from you in the future!
Yay, new video! You're seriously my favorite TH-camr right now. Keep up the great work
+
Nabokov's proclivities are smeared all over his other work (which do not have the same excuse that Lolita does). See also his fondness for both Lewis Carrol and Balthus-it's basic Occam's Razor. If it quacks like a duck...
…it’s probably a semi-aquatic predator with dubious morals and a penchant for baked goods?
He was critical of Lewis Carroll’s obsession with little girls where are you getting this information
@@yeehawneehaw5215 "Nabokov noted when interviewed by Alfred Appel in 1966, 'I have been always very fond of Carroll'.
He also said this-
"In answer to the question: what scenes one would like to have filmed...Lewis Carroll's picnics..." iykyk.
Nabokov loved writing unreliable narrators in fiction, so naturally, we must conclude, he himself is an unreliable narrator in fiction. If it quacks like a duck...
@@Merlandese Unironically yes! See the two comments above yours
another great video! enjoyed it very much. i was thinking all throughout the video about amis' article and ofc you bring it at the end :) I am curious though, do you just not enjoy nabokov's writing at all? I say this because I read Lolita not knowing too much about its controversies (pre-facebook age) and as a high school girl myself, enjoyed it SO much because it's a beautifully written, at points hilarious, truly ecstatic book. I note my age to say i'm not one of those who say 'oh you just didn't get this complex work.' I'm saying, in my innocence, I loved the book and that Lolita as well as Pale Fire, Pnin etc,, truly enhanced my mind and soul when I was a younger, less competent reader. I think he's unparalleled among english prose writers and his writings just brought me so much joy. for you, did you just not see the literary values, or do you see the literary value but think that the moral issues void or lessens it? I'm probably a pretty amoral reader (I'm perfectly square in my personal life i swear) so I'm intrigued by the more 'interrogative' mode of reading that you seem to show here. Not saying nabokov didn't have GLARING issues, and maybe i'm just trying to justify enjoying his writing so much, but truly, I'm curious-- all his books you so comprehensively read, did you not enjoy them? or is it that the moral implication just clouded over your enjoyment? Is it that you are recommending that people adopt your more 'ethical' mode of reading nabokov, i.e. being aware of the ~~implications of his gaze~~? really curious as again, probably a more 'amoral' reader here.
or i guess i should ask like what would be the difference that having this ethical approach to reading nabokov have? do you think if people had this ethical mode on they would automatically enjoy the book less? or can people enjoy the book/see its literary value just as much and still have the ethical mode reading on? and in this case, i guess, the real difficulty for relatively amoral readers like me, what practical good would it add to the world if I enjoyed the book just as much but were just consciously aware that I have the ethical mode on??
I don't think he is prescribing anything. At the end of the video, he talks about the current narrative surrounding the author. Owl talks about how this author was skillful in controlling his public image. There was an obvious and disturbing pattern of pdf-ilia in so much of his published work but thanks to his masterful manipulation of his own public image, no one is allowed to point out the obvious due to the fear of being marked as an unintelligent buffoon. Idiotic internet essayists have spread actual misinformation about the author. Multiple booktubers have wrongly stated that the author despised the covers for Lolita because of his moral objections to the sexualization of minors. In reality, he was more concerned about the marketability of his book.
I think Owl just wants people to face the reality about the person Vladimir Nabokov is. He even says we should read whatever we please.
I love reading books written by Oscar Wilde but I am under no false impressions about who he is as a person. He was a disgusting creep who entered into relationships with teenage boys. It doesn't ruin his books for me when I acknowledge his creepiness.
I hope acknowledging the fact that Nabokov is a disgusting creep doesn't ruin his books for you. You should keep reading them if they mean something to you. I know I will.
@lucyferdakool has summarised pretty well. I did enjoy the writing, but I didn’t want to praise it too much since it’s pretty well-known how excellent a writer he was. Personally, his style isn’t my favourite, but I did enjoy the writing overall.
If it brings you joy then by all means read it, but there are people who read it without having the context you had and so don’t know how to feel when the more problematic scenes appear.
Hey, I love your essays! Hope your channel grows fast
Thanks! (Me too)
Badgers and owls can be friends!
Nabokov was a victim of CSA himself. He wrote Lolita, hoping people aren't too dense and realize how deep the book is. Sadly, people were too dumb and thought he was sympathizing with the MC, who was narrating the book, when he was actually on Lolita's side the whole time. He even asked his publishers to stop putting images of girls in the cover because it's not an erotica, but they said "screw you" to him and still continued.