Lolita the Butterfly. Nabokov's Private Aesthetics

Abstract

Abstract:The paper is dedicated to parsing out several conceptual threads in Nabokov's Lolita, such as human passions, the butterfly hunter's reckless infatuation and the artistic creative freedom. These motifs tend to interact, but they cannot be brought into a ship-shape equation or even seamlessly aligned; they shed a lateral light on each other but are not to be equated; they diverge and at times converge, crisscross, overlap and jointly reveal the unique pattern concealed in the narrative fabric of Nabokov's world. They mutually comprise not so much a conception but rather a hieroglyph whose meaning is untranslatable into any neat formula. This hieroglyph is of unique kind: it belongs to the interrogative modality. This hieroglyph has a silhouette of BUTTERFLY.