Ruslan and Lolita: Nabokov's Pursuit of Pushkin's Monsters, Maidens, and Morals

Abstract:The previously unexplored Russian precursor to Humbert's "kingdom by the sea"—Pushkin's mock-epic Ruslan and Liudmila (RL)—permeates different layers of meaning in Lolita. An amalgam of Slavic and Western folklore that scandalized the reading public in its day, Pushkin's work underpins Nabokov's own transnational position as a writer, whose splash onto the Anglophone scene was accompanied by similar outcries of smut and pornography. In addition to a multitude of fairy-tale sources already documented in the scholarship, Lolita's cluster of mermaids, sleeping beauties, dark magic, invisibility, pursuit and captivity, physical topography, and "brother"-rivals finds in Pushkin's RL a synthesizing intertext. Moreover, Pushkin's play with genre in RL guides Nabokov's in Lolita, oscillating between the frozen fairy-tale moment and the passage of time in a novel. Finally, RL provides a model for simultaneously subverting expectations of moral lessons from "fairy tales" while engaging ethics in the artistic process more fully than any didactic literature can. It is here where we can begin to address the care with which the author keeps Pushkin away from Humbert's world of references; the intricate ethics-aesthetics fusion that the author soaks up through his greatest Russian mentor cannot be available to an impostor-artist such as Humbert.