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To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own, turning Lolita into a reincarnation of his lost, unfulfilled young love, Annabel Leigh. We know Lolita not directly but through Humbert, and not through her own past but through her narrator/molester’s past or imaginary past. This is what Humbert, a number of critics and in fact one of my students, Nima, called Humbert’s solipsization of Lolita.

Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert’s attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses. Nabokov’s art makes these orphaned glimmers all the more poignant in contrast to Humbert’s all-encompassing obsession with his own past. Lolita has a tragic past, with a dead father and a dead two-year-old brother. And now also a dead mother. Like my students, Lolita’s past comes to her not so much as a loss but as a lack, and like my students, she becomes a figment in someone else’s dream.

At some point, the truth of Iran’s past became as immaterial to those who appropriated it as the truth of Lolita’s is to Humbert. It became immaterial in the same way that Lolita’s truth, her desires and life, must lose color before Humbert’s one obsession, his desire to turn a twelve-year-old unruly child into his mistress.

When I think of Lolita, I think of that half-alive butterfly pinned to the wall. The butterfly is not an obvious symbol, but it does suggest that Humbert fixes Lolita in the same manner that the butterfly is fixed; he wants her, a living breathing human being, to become stationary, to give up her life for the still life he offers her in return. Lolita’s image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

This is how I read Lolita. Again and again as we discussed Lolita in that class, our discussions were colored by my students’ hidden personal sorrows and joys. Like tearstains on a letter, these forays into the hidden and the personal shaded all our discussions of Nabokov. And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

11

I used big diaries for my class notes. The pages of these diaries were almost all blank, except for Thursdays and sometimes spilling over to Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. When I left Iran, the diaries were too heavy to take with me, so I tore out the relevant pages, and this is what I have in front of me: torn and scarred pages of those unforgotten diaries. There are some scrawls and references that I can no longer decipher, but my notes for the first few months are tidy and clean. They mostly refer to insights I gained during our discussions.

In the first few weeks of class, we read and discussed the books I had assigned in an orderly, almost formal manner. I had prepared a set of questions for my students, modeled on those a friend had sent me from her women’s-studies program, aimed at drawing them out. They answered the questions dutifully—What do you think of your mother? Name six personalities you admire most in life and six you dislike most. What two words would you use to describe yourself? . . . Their answers to these dull questions were dull; they wrote what was expected of them. I remember that Manna tried to personalize her responses. In answer to “What is your image of yourself?” she had written, “I am not ready for that question yet.” They were not ready—not yet.

From the beginning, I took notes, as if of an experiment. As early as November, just over a month into the meetings, I wrote: “Mitra: other women say that having children is their destiny as if they are doomed.” I added: “Some of my girls are more radical than I am in their resentment of men. All of them want to be independent. They think they cannot find men equal to them. They think they have grown and matured, but men in their lives have not, they have not bothered to think.” November 23: