As a writer, I have an extremely vivid imagination. Same with my friends who are writers. We all joke that our Google searches have us on every FBI watchlist that exist and a few that don’t.

The same goes with many artists. Embracing creativity involves some degree of getting rid of self-censorship.

I can imagine entire worlds of horrible things. In my head, I can examine human nature unbound by cultural norms, design whole societies based on different rules.

There is an unfortunate belief that a person’s writing is representative of their personal beliefs and moral codes. Such things influence someone’s writing, of course, but you’re examine things from the wrong direction if you try to apply the writing back to the author.

That's not the intent of the author. Nabokov has absolutely no moral or social points to make.

I didn't realize this until I read Eugene Onegin, which I take as the genesis of Nabokov's general perspective. Onegin is funny and ironic while still being emotionally affecting. Nabokov is much more in the "art for art's sake" camp than most people today are comfortable with.

But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?

I think it's hard to square writing a book about a manipulative child abuser with being utterly disinterested in moral or social issues, because the book probes deeply into both (even if it is a little fantastical and hyper-real). I agree Nabokov has a very dry, aristocratic and distant style, but he wouldn't write about such things if he didn't want to provoke debate. Art has meaning and his has a lot more depth than surface. His position is of course very ambiguous but there is a lot of empathy for Humbert in Lolita, which is partly why it is so entrancing and discomfiting.

English Versions of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: https://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pml1/onegin/

It's hard to tell which one is the best, because I do not like the original ... too boring.

I've tried it again today and it's boring again but today I have found that a few primitive tricks were used many times when rythm doesn't work.

I think the common view about beauty of the poem is greatly exaggerated.

> But, you're citing a book by Pushkin (or the anti-hero within?) as illustrative of Nabokov's worldview? While he affected amused disdain I think Nabokov did care about the world. Doesn't Onegin too?

That's my view, yeah. The figure here is the disaffected noble (or intellectual) who disdains society, creates his own values, and eventually tragically fails partly because he can't totally leave society behind. I think Nabokov loves those characters. I don't think he's criticizing them.

I am of course not saying you have to agree with Nabokov.

Yes I agree he probably would have loved a character like that, though I think part of the attraction is the recognition of their inevitable tragic end (with the implicit recognition that they are mistaken about the world).

Humbert of course is not in that mould (or not entirely), and I'm not saying Nabokov would be so crass as to write himself into Humbert, but he shows a lot of sly sympathy for him in Lolita, and his other books also show a preoccupation with transgressive sexuality in children (Ada), it's a weird obsession.

Art (big A) is designed to make you feel and think. It is an experience.

What a particular work communicates is hard to pin down, and of course open to interpretation which changes over time (for example views of Alice in Wonderland have shifted due to revelations about the character of the author and his relation with his Alice), but it's certainly not possible to discuss whether a book sympathises with the central character if you don't engage with what the book says and instead talk in generalities.

Now I understand what he meant and I agree with him. I understand so much more of literature now that I am well into adulthood.

I honestly don't know if that really works, or if it's just cargo cult. I do know that I considered my English classes, and now I run a Shakespeare theater troupe. Much of my goal there is to present the Shakespeare that would have appealed to me at the time. I can't tell if I'm here because, despite, or totally disconnected from my education.

I think there's something to this idea. I remember we first read the apology in translation sometime in early highschool. everyone thought it was boring af and no one cared. totally different when we read it later in my ancient greek class. the teacher really knew how to play to her audience, and at every bit of (mostly untranslatable) wordplay she would stop to point out how socrates was roasting his interlocutors. to be fair, it's a certain kind of student that self-selects into highschool ancient greek, but the class definitely got a lot more out of it that time around. you might not like to teach the apology as "the story of socrates the chad", but you gotta meet your audience where they are.

This is an interesting situation, because it creates a reading list that is a "projected aspiration". We hope, I guess, that kids will read precociously. Education is, after all, the teaching of civilization's most important messages compressed into a fixed, very short time-span. School gets kids "caught up" on the civilizational conversations about things. But so much of the art and literature of humanity is like Lolita, in that it requires lots of actual living to appreciate (unlike algebra), so its position is...odd.

I wonder if, by being exposed to these things at a young age, we give kids a "shared coordinate system" to interpret and express their world, and so shape their choices in it.

Certain things like Shakespeare I'd contend will appeal at least on a surface level to children too. Something like Lolita not so much.