When I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita – on the recommendation of my young, handsome English teacher – I was disgusted. It was paedophilia. Lolita’s “juvenile” breasts, her pigtails – it all repelled me. Then I completed my English Literature degree and was initiated to the bohemian-intelligentsia view that artistic expression was innocent, with total immunity from moral indictment. Moral disgust was childlike; aesthetic appreciation a sign of maturity. I came to adore Nabokov, with his gorgeous prose and invitations to “soar into the ravishing realm of inutile imagination”. He was a particular champion because of Lolita, which had demonstrated that even the worst moral evils could be redeemed by sufficiently beautiful expression. In the Epstein files, there are images of an unnamed victim with the opening lines of Lolita scrawled across her feet, chest, shoulders and neck. Each photo only shows a limb – one part of the whole – but they’re united by the handwriting, which is scrawling, messy, almost childish. “She was Lola in slacks,” the shoulder says. The words are written in a black ink biro. The victim’s skin is pale, and behind her a white, pleated blanket, the outline of a bed, pillows, a door. The spine is freckled. Down the backbone, in that same thin black, is written: “Dolores on the dotted line”, but the letters are horizontal, harder to read. The “t”s are lines and crossed haphazardly. That photo was taken from straight behind her, so she must have been standing, topless. The photo of her chest was taken from even closer, so that one strand of brown hair, wavy, falls down just beside the camera’s lens. Whoever was taking the photo was right in front of her, a breath away, and they lost focus, losing grip on the lens, so unlike the sharp grip of the others this photo is blurry. Written above the shadow of her slight cleavage is the same scrawl, even messier now: “Lo-lee-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” Finally, the foot, arched and delicate. “She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock,” it reads. Her toes are painted shiny black. She is lying down now, the pleated bedsheet surrounding her, and whoever was holding the book has opened it and laid it down on the bed behind her. It is the annotated version. It was the same someone who must have knelt down, a copy of the novel spread-eagled by their side, and written on this girl, carving that novel that is half horror, half erotica onto her flesh. Perhaps the person who did it thought it was funny. But that’s the problem with Lolita, a problem that its readers are taught to glory in. It dares you to forgive wrong, to delight in transgression, to pretend the unforgivable act is just beautiful words.
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Nabokov’s name appears 491 times in the latest batch of the Epstein files. Epstein chased down English professors who studied Nabokov and was warmly received by them. In 2012, four years after Epstein had been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and served time in jail, Brian Boyd replied to an inquiry with a list of recommendations that would provide “the best foundation for Nabokov”, including his own biography. In 2013, Epstein had his assistant seek tickets to an academic Nabokov conference in Paris. That same year he added a footnote to a draft of a Nabokov essay he received from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College. In another email, the writer Ed Epstein (no relation) sent a New York Review of Books essay on Nabokov to Jeffrey Epstein, mentioning that he had taken the authors course at Cornell University, which was “unofficially called Dirty Lit”. As well as correspondence with scholars, Epstein mentioned Nabokov while flirting with and grooming women. In 2011 he emailed the princess of Norway, “like sweetness, you can read the Nabokov story of Siamese twins.. two people joined at the hip, with different views”. A year later, in 2012, he was emailing his girlfriend, Karyna Shuliak, that he missed her. She replied: “Don’t go too crazy reading Nabokov;)”. At one point in the emails a woman mentioned that she was reading Lolita before asking him about his desires: “What would you like to get when you’re in Paris?” Epstein said: “you should read the annotated Lolita otherwise you will miss 80 per cent of the meaning.” Soon after, Epstein received an email from a blacked-out address with a link to a Jezebel article titled “meet the modeling agent who trafficked underage girls for sex”, alongside the line: “Imagine if they had a picture of me reading Nabokov.” By 2017, the references had darkened even further. Another presumed sex trafficker – name blacked out – wrote to Epstein of a girl found for him: “She is like Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature 🙂 So now I should send you her type of candidates only?” There was an Amazon order for “Lolita Heart Shaped Sunglasses”. In 2018, the now-disgraced Harvard Professor Elisa New wrote to Epstein: “ I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita.” A few months later, Epstein wrote to New on Nabokov’s home life “Nabokov reported crossing several states (all of them beauties).” Biography mattered to Epstein too: in one motel “the Nabokovs had their own unit with bath”, and “the cabins were built in Broadaxe Hewn Log style, with compound dovetail corner”. In May 2019, the month before he went to prison, Epstein texted himself “read something else, seneca on the shortness of life. see if it is Russian. Nabokov. Short stories. Russian”. He died that August. When monsters make art (Dalí, Eric Gill) we have a simple and personal choice to make: whether to relinquish the art or not. What Epstein’s archive reveals is something harder to reckon with: not art that survives monstrosity, but art that services it. There is less instruction for when art makes monsters, when a work’s brilliance, its cultural prestige, its reputation for moral sophistication becomes part of the infrastructure that allows violence to rationalise itself. Lolita rationalised Epstein’s sexual abuse. It provided an aesthetic framework and meaning for what he was doing – but also a disguise. His fascination with it had the effect, for many of the men around him, of letting a paedophile hide in plain sight. After Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019, Ed Epstein – the writer of many of the Nabokov emails – wrote an essay for Air Mail about his surprise at Epstein’s conviction: “I couldn’t conceive that he would consider having sex with underage girls.” Really? The man who told Ed he loved Lolita so much he always kept it on his bedside? Epstein’s Nabokovian habit – his plane being called the “Lolita Express” and so on – has been known for some time. Anyone who visited his office saw his green first edition of Lolita proudly displayed there. The literary establishment has one basic response, the same one Nabokov scholars trade around: that Epstein didn’t understand Nabokov like they do. This kind of logic was obvious and patronisingly displayed in a December op-ed by Graeme Wood in the Atlantic titled “What Epstein didn’t understand about Lolita”. “I doubt that Epstein ever read Lolita,” Wood wrote, “or that he understood it if he did.” His eroticisation of the text, to Wood, was just a silly reading, a critical error. “To find Lolita sexy would not only mean finding child-rape sexy. It would also mean finding Humbert Humbert sexy,” he joked. “And that is a level of perversion probably beyond even Jeffrey Epstein.” But Epstein didn’t misunderstand Lolita. It might even be said he understood it better than the academics who study it. They analyse Humbert Humbert. Epstein lived like him. Didn’t the opulence of his style lead people to overlook his evil? Didn’t the private planes, Caribbean islands and the glamour sugar the pill of Epstein’s dark reality to the global elite? He even articulated the power of art to neutralise morality: when “the aesthetics of language” were “deeper and more elegant than the story”, he wrote, “every story was the same”. What mattered was not what was told, but how, and luxury forgave all manner of sins. Close reading of Nabokov’s work, which Epstein undertook, hints that style is not so independent from morality as we might like to think. In the early novels, the baroque voice feels almost lost, like it needs something to deceive or enchant the reader about. He wrote masterpieces when that voice finds a reason to deceive, when the subject is as evil and cruel as in Lolita or Pale Fire. The seductive prose doesn’t just dominate and redeem the iniquity: it needs the iniquity. The two are dependent, interlocked, and inextricable. Nabokov himself has never been found guilty of any major crimes, and was by all accounts a good man. In politics, he was a permissive liberal. He once wrote, “my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old grey rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art.” We cannot blame the dawdling genius for what he unleashed. But we also can’t deny that his “free art” has inspired evil. “Loli” is a code word for those seeking child porn online. Russell Brand gave a copy of Lolita to a 16-year-old he dated, whom he called “The Child”. Until a few years ago, “teen” was the most popular search globally on PornHub. I have never been catcalled as much as when I wore my school uniform. And yet this was the same world in which I learned to read Lolita as a triumph of style, not as an indictment of that violence. In my final university exam on Lolita, I remember admiring critics of Nabokov’s style for their analysis of the word “impregnated”. It captured what had so compelled me about the novel, how Nabokov gave inanimate objects life, bringing his America into vivid vitality. The real pregnancy of the “girl-child” Lolita, I knew, was a metaphor, an aesthetic trick to Nabokov’s wider project of “giving birth to America”. Even then, I was aestheticising the “impregnation”, moving quickly past the fact that the opening page of Lolita tells us how its subject has died in childbirth, still just a teenager, killed bringing young life into the world. Jeffrey Epstein and his friends knew all about the unvarnished reality of Lolita’s child pregnancy. The grimmest email I read in the files – related only in content, not in name, to Lolita – was one Epstein received. It’s from someone called Terry Kafka and it instructs: “Jeff/Warren: Go directly to photo #9. Terry.” It’s a forwarded email of “extraordinary photos”. At number 9 is a photo, blacked out by the FBI, with the title “the youngest mother”. A description follows. “Lina Medina, born on 23 September, 1933, was the youngest woman ever to give birth. She did so when she was just 5 years-old. Turns out Lina was born with a rare condition called ‘precocious puberty’, a condition where sexual development happens at an early age. Lina gave birth on May 14, 1939, via a Cesarean section, since her pelvis was too small. The child, named Gerardo, was born completely healthy but the father was never found out.” Spare a thought for the 5-year-old Medina, raped and impregnated, photographed by her doctors – only to be sent, almost a century later, to the emails of three Humbert Humberts. [Further reading: Talking to Jeffrey Epstein]
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