As if it wasn’t enough to constantly have to appease “Lolita” from historical accusations of immorality and perversion! Now, as a fan of the novel, you also have to live with the fact that it was Jeffrey Epstein’s favorite book.
That the sex offender – a word that doesn’t quite fit Epstein, the man who became definitive proof that Stanley Kubrick’s conspiracy classic “Eyes Wide Shut” is a documentary – liked Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel certainly did not come to light in the recently released Epstein documents. (Coincidentally, it was the same Stanley Kubrick who directed the 1962 film adaptation of Lolita.)
The plane on which he and his powerful friends flew to Little Saint James, Epstein’s private trading island in the Caribbean, was known as the Lolita Express. Jeffrey Epstein reportedly had a copy of Lolita, possibly a first edition, on his bedside table. No other books, just this one.
Also recently published a series of images from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein showing a female body on which someone has written the famous opening sentences from “Lolita” – a line on the hip, one on the neck, one on the foot and one along the spine: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing, four feet tall in a sock. She was Lola in pants. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line.” Fattas only takes a picture of the last sentence of the piece: “But in my arms she was always Lolita.” Maybe it was on a part of your body that you couldn’t show.
One is depressed and infinitely ashamed of the childish nature of the measure. Because what is the reading comprehension of the one percent?
Couldn’t it be so completely stupid that Jeffrey Epstein simply identified himself with the novel’s narrator, Humbert Humbert? The middle-aged man with a lifelong erotic fixation on 9- to 14-year-old girls who kidnaps and exploits his 12-year-old hastily acquired stepdaughter, Dolores Haze?
In Dagens ETC, Selma Brodrej recently wrote about exactly this – she loved “Lolita” given the fact that Jeffrey Epstein also loved “Lolita.” “As a Nabokov fan, I have the feeling that the sexual predator is committing a crime of impunity against the great author,” she writes, also because the novel itself is suspect in the reporting: “The book appears as primitive and banal as Epstein’s own abuses. The journalists who write about it point out that Nabokov inspired Epstein.”
But that’s how it is of course not. Or rather, unfortunately it may well be so, but it’s nothing that can be blamed on either the novel or its author. It is not necessarily the case that the author of a novel is the one who understands it best, but one can note that many years after the book’s publication, Vladimir Nabokov felt compelled to explain that Dolores Haze was in fact not a seductress but “a poor child who was seduced.”
Most “Lolitas” readers probably do not interpret the novel as a textbook for pedophiles, but on the contrary as a sinister depiction of how a perpetrator justifies his crime to himself. Most people probably feel for 12-year-old Dolores Haze.
At the same time, it is common, especially among female readers of Lolita, then as now, to deny that the novel has anything sensual at all, given Epstein’s unfortunate aversion to it. I don’t want to do that. The book is full of, if not eroticism, then at least ambiguity. That is actually his strength. You begin well lulled into Humbert Humbert’s twisted world of thoughts, simply because He sexualizes the 12 year old girl to do the same. The conflicting feelings that arise are a testament to the great art experience you were a part of.
“You’re leaving from approval to rejection, from disgust to compassion, from smiles to the narrator’s peculiar humor to complete horror. “You understand him and you don’t understand him, you follow his madness to the end, you fear his victories and you rejoice in his losses,” writes Neige Sinno in “Tvingad Tiger,” published in Swedish last year.
It is a book about how the author was sexually abused by his stepfather as a child. When she read Lolita as an adult, she was struck by how similar the novel was to her own story.
And yet she writes about the betrayal of reading: “We allow ourselves to be intoxicated, even if we later regret it, because regret is the price of what Nabokov calls aesthetic ecstasy.”
There is a popular culture Tradition of aestheticizing and romanticizing the novel as a young woman, best realized on Lana Del Rey’s debut album “Born to Die”, which very well contains the title “Lolita”. Teenage girls identify with Dolores Haze. In the worst case, as with Neige Sinno, also with their experiences.
Perhaps the provocative “Lolita” aesthetic should simply be seen as a way of dealing with the apparent world and showing solidarity with a young and very vulnerable girl. At the same time, perhaps it is in the specific constitution of a teenage girl to want something Be the vulnerable girl. Discover that you have a special capacity for destruction and pleasure that you can only exercise during those turbulent years, never to come back again… Perhaps it is only for the teenage girl that it is truly so, that nothing human is alien to her.
But if we just Knowing Dolores Haze from the perspective of her abuser, do you give her amends to make her an icon and a role model? Can we ever catch a glimpse of the real Lolita other than through her recurring, resigned sighs and exclamations, “Oh no, not again”?
“Nabokov’s novel bears the girl’s nickname, but the view of her remains that of a man. His own term was the clinical ‘nymph fat’, which suggests that those interested in medicine should look for the symptoms not in the victim, but in the perpetrator,” writes Aris Fioretos in his volume of essays “Nabokov’s Backbone” (2023).
Such an understanding of the novel was probably alien to Jeffrey Epstein. He wanted her, plain and simple. He suffered the same fate as his literary cousin Humbert Humbert – he died in custody while awaiting trial. An irony of history and nowhere near the punishment they deserved.
Read more articles by Greta Schüldt and read more about books
