Censors in Soviet Union Ease Up on Literature : Special Edition of Russian Journal to Feature Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ This Spring

After 34 years of censorship, “Lolita,” Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest creation and Russian emigre literature’s most notorious scandal, will be published this spring in a special edition printed by the Soviet journal Foreign Literature.

The world has grown accustomed to the liberalization of culture in the Soviet Union.

But the case of “Lolita” is a landmark--not only of literature but also of morality.

As recently as 1987, a Moscow court prosecuted a young man for “copying and distributing foreign pornography.” The pornography in question was “Lolita.”

Longstanding Prudery

There has always been a certain prudery here, among the intelligentsia as well as the censors. There are stanzas from Alexander Pushkin’s poem “Tsar Nikita” that are still not published in Soviet editions. Leo Tolstoy denounced his own adventurous sex life and proclaimed that “a Christian marriage is a contradiction in terms.” One of the strangest stories in Russian, “The Kreutzer Sonata,” is Tolstoy’s expression of his sexual revulsion.

Nabokov’s story of Humbert Humbert, the emigre teacher who falls in love with a Middle American nymphet, was too much, even for one of the heroes of the liberal intelligentsia, Nadezhda Mandelstam. She approved of Nabokov’s Russian novels, especially “The Gift,” but in a conversation with the young poet Joseph Brodsky she used a profanity when describing Nabokov’s morals in “Lolita.”

“Please remember that in terms of sex, this country is analogous to the West, not just before the sexual revolution but the days before the Kinsey report and the main works of Sigmund Freud,” said Igor Kon, a sociologist here who has published pioneering works on sexual and family issues.

In the 1987 case, the young “pornographer” and his lawyer pressed the court, saying it was necessary to get expert testimony to determine that “Lolita” was, indeed, obscene.

The first witness, a representative from the department of sexology at the Soviet Institute of Psychiatry, found for the prosecution. The report concluded that since there was a “Lolita syndrome” in psychiatric literature, then the novel itself was perverted.

The defense attorney asked for more expertise, this time from three writers--novelists Fazil Iskander and Vladimir Soloukhin and poet Andrei Voznesensky. All three said no, “Lolita” was art--erotic art, perhaps, but art nonetheless.

The court then called on Kon to testify. He said that while one or two American libraries had taken “Lolita” off the shelves, such censorship was “sheer stupidity.”

Still the court was unconvinced. The defendant decided to appeal for expert testimony to Dimitri Likhachev, a brave and elderly scholar of ancient Russian culture who had spent years in the gulag and later became friends with, of all people, Raisa Gorbachev.

Underestimated Him

“I told the boy and his lawyer that I wouldn’t put too much faith in Likhachev,” Kon said. “He is old. Modern literature is not his specialty, and I figured ‘Lolita’ was probably not his thing. But I underestimated the moral qualities of the man.”

Likhachev not only wrote in favor of the defendant, he also called him in Moscow to reassure him and counsel him.

The case was quickly dismissed.

As the literary critic Lionel Trilling once wrote, “Lolita” is a story not about sex or young girls, but about love. The novel is something a great deal more complicated, more transforming than the obsession of its early pages. Even Nabokov writes that had his alter ego simply been the sum of his lust, he would have judged him as harshly as anyone else:

“Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert at least 35 years for rape, and dismissed the rest of the charges.”

The profusion of new publications here has not slowed down.

Book Review has brought out an excerpt from Zhore Medvedev’s study of Stalin’s corruption of Soviet science. Medvedev, the twin brother of historian Roy Medvedev, lives in London.

The longstanding hostility to emigre writers is loosening, though erratically.

While the Politburo has officially restated its ban on the works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a theater group in Leningrad recently staged an excerpt from one of his plays, and intellectuals here are convinced that some degree of publication of Solzhenitsyn is inevitable.

In this month’s edition of Youth, a writer for the journal has assembled a kind of collage-biography of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky before his forced emigration to the United States.

Using the oral history technique made popular a few years ago when Jean Stein and George Plimpton “wrote” the biography of Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgewick, Nikolai Yakimshuk intersperses trial transcripts and interviews with Brodsky’s friends in Leningrad to create a document straight out of the pages of Franz Kafka.

Judge: In general, what is your real work?

Brodsky: I am a poet and translator.

Judge: And who declared you a poet? Who put you in the ranks of the poets?

Brodsky: No one. And who put me in the ranks of humanity?

Judge: Did you study poetry?

Brodsky: What?

Judge: Did you study to become a poet? Did you finish college where they prepare . . . where they study . . .

Brodsky: I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think that such education could be obtained there.

Judge: From where, then?

Brodsky: I thought it came. . . . from God.

Brodsky lives now in New York’s Greenwich Village. His poems and interviews are now being published here after two decades.

For years, he tried to visit his parents in Leningrad or at least have them visit him in New York--without success. Now that they are dead, he says, he has no great desire to visit the Soviet Union. Nor does he feel the Soviet Union has done him a favor by publishing his work, comparing glasnost instead to a thief finally returning stolen goods to their owners--the readers.