The Case for Nabokov (author of the book)

Vladimir Nabokov escaped the Russian Revolution a hundred years ago, so there are several stories in the news.

Author of this article is also Russian exile. She notes SJWs have been defaming Nabokov in recent years.

https://quillette.com/2019/05/06/the-case-for-nabokov/

Vladimir Nabokov, whose 120th anniversary we mark this Spring, remains one of the 20th Century’s most acclaimed and enduring writers. He keeps turning up on various Greatest–Books lists, often more than once—for the novels Lolita and Pale Fire, as well as his autobiography, Speak, Memory. And yet in this day and age, Nabokov is clearly a “problematic” fave. Not only is he a dead white male of privileged pedigree, but the novel that made him a literary star is, in the scolding words of feminist essayist Rebecca Solnit, “a book about a white man serially raping a child.” What’s more, Nabokov, a Russian-born refugee from both Communism and Nazism who died in 1977, made no secret of his contempt for both progressive political causes and literature as a means to advance them. He was politically incorrect avant la lettre.
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There is, of course, a great deal to Lolita besides the subject of adult-child sex. It’s a tribute to America as well as a biting satire of suburban life, trendy intellectualism and much else. It’s an exploration of human consciousness and its relationship to reality—truth and fantasy, deception and self-deception, memory and illusion—which were constant themes in Nabokov’s work. And there is, of course, much to Nabokov’s literary legacy besides Lolita, though Lolita may well be his best book as well as his most famous.