Nabokov, Vladimir - Ellen Pifer (essay date 1999)

Ellen Pifer (essay date 1999)

SOURCE: “Her Monster, His Nymphet: Nabokov and Mary Shelley,” in Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, edited by Julian W. Connolly, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 158-76.

[In the following essay, Pifer argues that in Lolita Nabokov reworked fundamental themes found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.]

Knowledge of Nabokov's privileged background has tended to confirm, for many readers over the past half-century, their wary impression of his fiction: that it is crafted by a “virtuoso stylist” coolly presiding over his universe and serenely, even cruelly indifferent to the plight of his characters.1 To this familiar stereotype has been added, in recent years, the stigma of male chauvinism: Nabokov, we often hear it said, was a patriarch par excellence. The novelist's most widely read novel, Lolita, has only intensified the charges against him—inciting more than...

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