The Morality of Lolita

People talk of the art of the future, meaning by art of the future some especially refined new art which they imagine will be developed out of that exclusive art of one class which is now considered the highest art. But no such new art of the future can or will be found.—What Is Art? (1896)

But the art of the twentieth century has been, by and large, of the kind Tolstoy declared would not—must not—happen. Nearly all our really brilliant literature, in Europe and America, has been of that kind and not of the kind he prescribed. And though there are many varieties within the huge body of modern art, the type Tolstoy would have most abominated, the type he was most talking about, is near enough epitomized in Lolita. This can be made clear in a direct way by referring to his descriptions of the literature he dislikes, and indirectly from those descriptions of what literature should be which occupy most of the space of What is Art? He defined that “art of the future” which he announced would come by making it the opposite of all we find in Nabokov’s work, which he can be said to have foretold quite accurately, by negation and by retrospect. And this is not such a paradox, nor such a wanton conjunction of the radically unrelated, as it may seem. Nabokov stands in immediate and intimate relationship to that symbolist tradition Tolstoy was denouncing, which replaced Tolstoy’s own tradition in Russian literature. He belongs to that branch of the tradition sometimes called decadent; Sologub’s The Petty Demon, for instance, has a good deal in common with Lolita, though it is incomparably less interesting.