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RES: [NABOKV-L] Was Nabokov a Hebephile\Ephebophile?
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Eric Hyman: [ ] "On the other hand, take Chaucer. There is a surprisingly
large number of rapes in Chaucer's poetry, rapes that are not in his known
sources, so he must have inserted them. And Chaucer himself was accused of
a rape ("raptus" in the original Latin). The debate among Chaucer scholars
over whether "raptus" meant rape or simply some form of abduction and
whether Chaucer's connections at court enabled him to buy his way out of it
is irresolvable-I get the feeling that Chaucerians, like all of us, believe
what they want to believe.
J.Aisenberg: "Actually, I have always identified with Lolita, she's my
favorite character in fiction and if you check through the archives you will
see that I have always made the case for Lolita's remarkableness, her status
as hero and victim; Nabokov himself in interviews called her touching and
said that among all his characters he admired Lolita as a person second only
to Pnin, another sympathetic survivor."
Jansy Mello: Chaucer & "raptus" must flare up many debates since raptus
also means "seizure" and is a term found in medical texts and, in religious
manuscripts, it emerges in the sense that, in English, leads us to "rapture"
, the kind of ecstasy often associated to or found in VN's writings, as:
"Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the
gladiator. Don't stop to think, don't interrupt the scream, exhale, release
life's rapture."
"The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the
rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed
species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had
there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to
lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.";
VN's first poem of love to a woman, apud Vladimir Nabokov: Poetry and the
Lyric Voice by Paul D. Morris;
Lolita advertised as "the greatest novel of rapture"
http://www.worldcat.org/title/lolita-the-greatest-novel-of-rapture-in-modern
-fiction/oclc/441006143
"My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me. To know that no one before you
has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have
occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline
world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own
horizon, a blindingly white arena - all this is so enticing that I cannot
describe it (in a certain sense, in The Gift, I 'foretold' my destiny - this
retreat into entomology" (Letter to his sister, Elena Sikorski, November 25,
1945. In Selected Letters, p. 58-59).
http://www.d-e-zimmer.de/eGuide/VNonBut.htm
J.A: thanks for indicating the List archives for furthering searches about
"V.Nabokov/Lolita". VN never went as far as Flaubert, though, who famously
wrote that "Madame Bovary, c'est moi"
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