SOURCE: “Nabokov's Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts in Lolita,” in Mosaic, Vol. 29, No. 2, June, 1996, pp. 73-89.

In the following essay, Anderson argues that in Lolita Nabokov alludes to the Nazi holocaust and to the potential nuclear holocaust.

Particularly since the end of World War II and the development of cultural studies as a critical discipline, the integration of fictional and historical work has become second nature to scholars of American literature. In the opening chapters of The Machine in the Garden (1964), for example, Leo Marx conjoins Shakespeare's The Tempest, Robert Beverly's History of the Present State of Virginia, and Tench Coxe's 1787 speeches to the Constitutional Convention as he constructs his case for a “pastoralism of mind” in American letters. In doing so, Marx reports that the economic historian Joseph Dorfman, writing in 1946, once described Coxe as the “Defoe of America,” a judgment which Marx himself stops short of endorsing...