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Before we proceed with the main narrative of “Lolita” (after completing a blogging round with the other books), I want to bring out a fun little note on Nabokov’s biting antipathy to Freud and his theories. It is obviously an important part of the Nabokovian perspective on the world and enjoys some significant play in his writing and in “Lolita”.
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Asked in 1966 in a National Educational Television interview why he “detested Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”
When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he would rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”
-- Alfred Appel, Jr., “The Annotated Lolita”
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Asked in 1966 in a National Educational Television interview why he “detested Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.”
When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he would rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”
-- Alfred Appel, Jr., “The Annotated Lolita”
