Posted on 02/28/2013 3:55:14 PM PST by Borges
Vandals spray-painted the word “pedophile” on the wall of a museum dedicated to famous writer Vladimir Nabokov in St. Petersburg, Fontanka.ru city news website reported on Tuesday. The wall was spray-painted by the same group of self-styled “St. Petersburg Cossacks” who broke the museum’s window on January 9 and have been sending ominous letters to the museum, accusing the writer of propagating pedophilia and threatening “God’s wrath,” Fontanka.ru said. The Nabokov Museum is located in the mansion on Bolshaya Morskaya street where the celebrated writer and poet was born in 1899 and lived until November 1917. Nabokov is best known for “Lolita” (1995), a story with pedophilic connotations, but was never accused of child abuse himself. A one-man show based on “Lolita” was canceled in St. Petersburg by its author in October 2012, after he received threatening letters from the anonymous “Cossacks.” However, the performance took place in December and January, and its organizer was beaten by three unidentified attackers.
That book by Nabokov.
Wow. who would desecrate the shrine to pedophilia?
Was the author shaking and coughing?
Nice Police/Sting reference...
It’s not a shrine to pedophilia. Are you being sarcastic?
The coloring book edition was stolen.
It was the apartment of Nabokov’s father, a great opponent of Communism and tyranny, so it would have been better not to have trashed it.
Pussy Riot II - Electric Vibaroo?
Uhh..no. The book did NOT come out in 1995. Maybe 1965...not sure exactly.
Movie in '95 maybe. Most def not the book.
Nabokov himself was a staunch anti-Communist and pro American. I suspect it’s that part of his legacy that’s causing problems as well.
I'd guess he was not.
It is a shame that a prolific author with such a long and distinguished bibliography should be associated with only one work because it is controversial. But that is how the world works...
He starts to shake and cough just like the old man in..............
1955 actually.
Quite interesting, because Nabokov figures prominently in Stephen Hunter’s latest Bob Lee Swagger novel, The Third Bullet.
1955. Nabokov spent a lot of time poking fun of psychology and modern literary thought in his American novels. The novel Lolita was actually a murder story told by a pedophile who explained why he killed another pervert known as Quilty.
Part of the genius of the work (mostly lost in all of the Hollywood attempts to make it, even the original in which Nabokov himself participated in writing the screenplay) is the portrayal of disgusting evil in the guise of a more-or-less otherwise ordinary person, not some dumb@ss comic book character caricature.
My favorite of several political quotes from Nabokov, a fantasticly understated putdown of an academic "fellow traveler:" 'Yes, he was one of those professors who somehow believed that only American nuclear tests produced fallout.'
Nabokov was a singular talent and easily one of the 20th
Century’s greatest writers. I once used a line from the great Pale Fire as my FR tagline. When I was 19 I visited
a friend of mine in the hospital who was laid up with a broken leg—I handed him a copy of PALE FIRE and advised him to read it. I said “Now THIS is humor!”.
He was profoundly anti-Communist—he hated the Bolsheviks
and the movement that came before them for (among other things) ruining his childhood and adolescence. He also had NO regard for his great creation, Humbert Humbert,who he saw as a pathetic individual, and was happily married to the same woman his entire life, while he happily chased butterflies with his net all over Europe and America, and in fact his researches added quite a bit to the study of Lepidopterology.
From this story, it looks like contemporary Russian PC is even more fudge-brained than ours.
Anyone who wants to bathe in a great mind should read Vladmir Nabokov.
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