Leading Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd says he’s appalled to be named in newly released Epstein files. Photo / Supplied
By Nights of RNZ
“Lolita will never cease to shock,” wrote Brian Boyd in the introduction to his two-volume biography about Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov.
Fourteen years ago, when he spoke to Jeffrey Epstein about funding to write a book about the novel, the billionaire financier’s child sex abuse conviction “was not well-known at all”, he says.
“If I’d known he’d been convicted, the last thing I would ever have done would be to suggest a book on Lolita,” Boyd tells RNZ’s Nights.
The University of Auckland lecturer finds it “appalling” that his name appears in the US Government’s latest dump of files related to the deceased paedophile.
“I really didn’t think that my name would emerge in the Epstein files. I thought I was too much of a minnow to feature against all the big names that are there.”
The 73-year-old met Epstein in 2012 after giving a talk on literature and evolution at Harvard University’s Centre for Evolutionary Dynamics, which Epstein sponsored.
The next month, after the financier contacted Boyd, they had brunch and later a Skype call, during which he offered funding for Boyd’s next book.
At the time, Boyd says he had three book ideas knocking around in his head, including a follow-up to his 2009 book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction and a book on Shakespeare.
The book he was “most itching to write”, though, as he told Epstein, was about the novel Lolita.
“I think his eyebrows went up and he asked me, ‘why that’? Of course, I didn’t know [about his crimes], or I would have, you know, recoiled and said, ‘let’s not talk about funding’.
“I have spent thousands of pages defending Nabokov’s magnitude as an artist, and Lolita is the one thing that people who know practically nothing else about Nabokov hold against him. To have Lolita tied up with this revolting paedophile would have been the last thing I would have wanted to do.”
After years of teaching Nabokov’s novel to university students, Boyd says he sensed it contained “a puzzle that I haven’t yet fully solved, but that I can see is there and solvable”.
“That’s why I wanted to write the book, and I told [Epstein] that in less elaborate terms.”
A “passionate sense of the importance of the innocence of childhood” was what motivated Nabokov to write the controversial novel in which a 30-something professor becomes obsessed with and then abuses and abducts a 12-year-old girl, Boyd says.
“He was very, very interested in psychology, and he read a lot of studies about child sex abuse before he began the novel. He always did his research.
“He also would sit on school buses and eavesdrop on young girls’ conversations so that he could get their slang right. He wanted to get things right, just as he did with the psychology of a sex offender.”
In very tightly buttoned 1950s America, Lolita’s appearance was “extraordinary”, Boyd says.
“Nobody had treated, certainly from a literary perspective, child sex abuse frankly, or at all. It just wasn’t considered.”
Boyd says he’s been contacted by child sex abuse therapists around the world who’ve told him how useful they find the novel as a resource because Nabokov gets so deep inside the mindset of a perpetrator.
“Paedophiles do seem to have taken [Lolita] as a licence, but it’s utterly perverse that they should do so.
“Even though it’s the perpetrator’s voice that you hear all the way through the novel, there are little glimpses of what Lolita says. [Her abuser] Humbert reports ‘her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep’, which is just so awful. It’s a very charged book.”
– RNZ