Racing on through, I've read the famous passage again, (which incidentally, most articles complaining about the sheer depravity of Lolita, reprint in full), where he manages to orgasm in his pajamas from the frottage of her sitting on his lap. It's all a bit yukky and erotic at the same time - as I think Nabakov intended, everything is going on inside HH's head, and the reader is being taken for the ride.
I just put "why did Nabakov write Lolita?" into Google ( which, completely off the point, said "Do you mean: "why did Nabakov wrote Lolita?" sic.
In a demolition of a self published book, Solving Nabakov's Lolita Riddle that says the key to Nabakov's Lolita is the fact that he was sexually abused by his uncle, the reviewer cites this quote from Nabakov:
"It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions. (SO 16)"
That fits with the chess problem comment I picked up from Wikipedia (see last blog post). And kind of gets me nowhere, reduced to the colloquial, the unknowing.
Another answer suggests (wonderfully) that Nabakov just liked writing, and was stimulated (perhaps the wrong word, perhaps the right word in this context) by Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee. Well both seem right, the second seems useful.
The New York Times obituary is good on Nabakov in general.
I'm not the only one to wonder why he wrote it. This compendium of reactions just about covers the whole lot from "wonderful" to "sicko paedo", with some intelligent comments inbetween.
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