Nabakov's Lolita day 2

It's an easy read most of the way,  if sometimes an uncomfortable one, but continually there are odd, very rare words, bits of French, lots of digs at psychiatry and psychoanalysis, pastiche .  As someone said in one of the reviews, he's written a pornographic novel without ever writing pornographically.  

We're never given any doubt that HH is a thoroughly nasty character, vis this bit of his thinking when his wife Valechka has told him she is leaving him 


"She had very vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very horribly as soon as we were alone."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 457-458). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

Like so much of his life this is an empty imagining, but we're given a clear indication that he might be capable of carrying through with it. 

I'm intrigued by what Nabakov made of this novel (after all he wrote it) - and the Google trail seems to suggest that he had a great affection for it.  he certainly wanted to publish it when he had written it. Most publishers of the day rejected it, so he was eventually published in France by an outfit that mainly published pornographic novels.

Of course there are as many justifications as condemnations in the reactions to the book: I am most in tune with Martin Amis's view that this is a view of a tyrant's world, entirely from the point of view of the tyrant. He goes on to say that this can be seen as an elaborate metaphor for the tyranny of Communist Russia, but I think that this is too fanciful.  It is a portrait of a tyrant, and if you read you undertake a mental complicity with the tyrant's world - but then you can step back. The book swings you in and out of these states - blissful prose, followed  by lists, like the list of Lolita's classmates,that force you to stand apart, thinking why this? But then, I thought, even if it was just a list someone somewhere will have done a semantic assessment of each and every name: the list explained!  Well thank you, Gavriel Shapiro, for doing all that work. But I can't help thinking that all that interpretation he has put in is rather like the statistical search for meaningful names and deaths that a certain sect claimed was the "secret" teaching of the bible, before proper statisticians pointed out that you could get very similar results from Moby Dick - correlation does not equal meaning (click here for this expose).

I found an odd quote from Nabakov, found in Wikipedia (of course) which goes someway to giving me a projected explanation for his writing Lolita:
"Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity."
(My italics)
I'm not sure what "splendid insincerity" means, but I feel it could describe the language and the art that has gone into portraying HH's obsession.