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In the School Bus. If farce keeps rattling through the story, the reason is that Author Nabokov himself is an irrepressibly witty man who can see tragedy through laughter as clearly as he can see life's darkest side from its calmest vantage point. Nabokov teaches European literature at Cornell, is also a dedicated lepidopterist who has discovered about a dozen new species and subspecies. He disclaims all but a writer's interest in nymphets. To get sub-teen patter right, he took rides in a school bus. He obviously also learned much about roadside America. Says he: "I love motels. I would like to have a chain of motels—made of marble.. I would put one every ten minutes along the highway, and I would travel from one to another with my butterfly net."
Nabokov is resigned to the idea that Lolita will be attacked on moral grounds, but he humorously questions the moral standards of at least some U.S. publishers. One firm, he notes, offered to publish the book three years ago if he turned Lolita from a girl into a boy—homosexuality presumably being much more acceptable than nymphet-mania.
Silence in the Street. Some critics will reach for their nearest Dostoevsky, but Nabokov himself disdains comparison with the other Russian, whom he regards as a clumsy and vulgar writer. Yet, the suppressed criminal episode in Dostoevsky's' The Possessed invites analogy with Lolita. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky's moral monster, seduced an innocent. The difference is that Stavrogin told of his crime to prove he was capable of it; Nabokov's character tells his agonized story to show that he was incapable of not committing it. In Nabokov's world, crime is its own punishment, and the possessed are not possessed by devils but by themselves.
In the last passages of Lolita, as Humbert waits for the police, he comes to understand the true nature of his crime. He recalls how, on a dark hillside, he heard from below a "vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute . . . divinely enigmatic . . . and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord." Thus it was when James Joyce's hero Stephen stood in the school study listening to the voices of boys at play. "That is God,'' said Stephen, "a shout in the street." Nabokov also seems to be asserting that all of creation is God, and that Humbert, listening in vain for the laughter of a child, knew it at the bitter end.