We don't know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual's life by another.
Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her.
This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. And this perspective-such a bracing change from our conventional worried emphasis on pedophilia-is perhaps more easily come by in a state where virgins are raped before execution because the Koran forbids the execution of virgins where the censor cuts Ophelia out of the Russian movie version of Hamlet where any move that a woman makes can be construed as lascivious and inciting where goatish old men can be gifted with infant brides and where the age of "consent" is more like nine. Without exception, it turns out, they concur with Vera Nabokov in finding that the chief elements of the story are "its beauty and pathos." They "identify" with Lolita, because they can see that she wants above all to be a normal girl-child they see straight through Humbert, because he is always blaming his victim and claiming that it was she who seduced him. In Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which young female students meet in secret with Xeroxed copies of Nabokov's masterpiece on their often chaste and recently chadored laps, it is at first a surprise to discover how unscandalized the women are.
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