It's easy to think you can judge a man by his fiction. Isn't the creation, at least in some part, the creator?

Keeping that question in mind, was there then a part of Vladimir Nabokov that was a monster? How else could he write the infamously famous "Lolita" and bring to life its exquisitely amoral main character Humbert Humbert? Surely only a twisted mind, a depraved heart could conjure up such a fiendish narrator, capable of the kidnapping and ravaging of a young girl, but still seemingly human. He maintains such an odd realism and dark humor that Humbert must have -- must have -- been based on a real man, or at least a slice of the author's psyche.

This assumption of Nabokov's perversity swirled in the public mind when "Lolita" was first published, and resurfaced with the release of the latest film version. Nabokov's depiction of pedophilia was so heartfelt and nearly sympathetic that some found it difficult to believe that any pure-thinking man could have written it.

But upon close inspection, Nabokov turns out to be just that: a wholesome man, a family man and a kind, erudite soul who collected butterflies. He was known more for his love of chess and paintings than any passion for preteens. Clearly, the convincing details of Humbert's personality sprung not from life experience, but artistry. That Nabokov was able to birth a character so different from his own persona is testament to his talent.

Also see:
Interactive map of Humbert Humbert's travels around the United States in the 50s


"Like any great artist," says Harvey Kerpneck, Emeritus Professor of English, University of St. Michael's, University of Toronto, "Nabokov tended to deplore the tendency of many people to go to literature 'for the wrong reasons,' as Virginia Woolf puts it. He once pointed out -- correctly -- that 'Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction.' If we detect a bit of petulance in that second sentence, we can understand it. People always want to learn about the author and always assume -- incorrectly -- that a work of art is somehow a topographical map of his (or her) soul."

So those searching for Nabokov in the persona were missing the mark. There are clues to Nabokov the man, buried within "Lolita" and many of his works. Though not the bloody smears of a rapist and murderer, Nabokov's fingerprints are indeed all over his fiction.

For example, there exists a connection between Humbert the Perverse and Nabokov the Collector. Humbert has two passions -- the worship and the possession of Lolita. But in pursuit of these passions, he also manages to study, capture and abuse her, eventually destroying that which makes Lolita desirable -- her innocence. Yes, Nabokov penned a bitter consequence to Humbert's possessive behavior, yet the author himself dallied in this admiration/murder game. A rabid butterfly collector, Nabokov adored these creatures that he found beautiful, rare and frail. He then killed, preserved, cataloged and literally, pinned them down.

Calculating control mixed with overwhelming emotion can be found in other aspects of Nabokov's life, as well as his work. The narrator of "Despair" is a man with a fanciful occupation (chocolate salesman) and a sentimental core. He begins chapter seven with the non sequitur, " ... let us take the following motto ... Literature is Love. Now we can continue." Yet this is the same character who, upon accidentally stumbling upon his "body double" and befriending him, casually murders him in a plot to collect life insurance.

Nabokov was as capable of calculation as he was romance. But rather than be torn between these two disparate aspects of his personality, he flitted easily from one to the other and often married them with great success. For instance, one of his publications is entitled "Poems and Problems," and it is just that -- a collection of 53 of his poems and 18 chess problems of his own invention. This combination of art and strategy is key to not only understanding Nabokov's body of work, but the workings of the man himself.

Memories and dreams also play a large part in many of Nabokov's writings. Humbert's passion for Lolita can be traced back to an intense relationship he had with a young girl, an infatuation aborted by her early death. His obsession with Lolita is in many ways a desperate attempt to reenact that memory.

The title character of the novel "Pnin" is likewise tormented by memories. An elderly Russian professor who's immigrated to America, Pnin is haunted by his love for his greedy ex-wife, who manipulates him for money. And he is resolute against his memory of the girl he loved when he was a young man, a girl who lost her life in the Holocaust. "In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself ... never to remember Mira ... One had to forget, because one could not live with the thought that those eyes, that smile ... had been brought in a cattle car to a concentration camp ..."

A similar scenario exists in "Speak, Memory," Nabokov's autobiography, in which he writes of the his young Russian love, Tamara. Though he eventually enjoyed a happy and long marriage with his wife Vèra, Nabokov recalls Tamara both fondly and painfully. She is Nabokov's own Mira. He recalls his accidental meeting with her with "crushing regret." He writes that even his attempt to analyze the details of the meeting was of little comfort: "... alien marginalia can dim the purity of the pain."

"Nabokov believed that, like nature (and here he simply picked up Oscar Wilde's idea), art is 'a marvelous system of spells and wiles,'" Kerpneck said. "And like Wilde he believes that the artist merely 'follows nature's lead' in making magic of mundane material."

Or as Victorian critic Matthew Arnold said, art is not "an allegory of the state of one's own mind," Kerpneck adds.

Nabokov succeeded with "Lolita" by taking human experiences and passions and turning them to create an inhumane character. But it was his intense mastery of words and ideas that brought his monster to life. The creation was depraved, but not the creator.

Amin Maalouf (1949 - )

Lebanese journalist and novelist, whose native language was Arabic but who writes in French. Most of Maalouf's books have a historical setting, and like Umberto Eco, Orhan Pamuk, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Maalouf mixes fascinating historical facts with fantasy and philosophical ideas. In an interview Maalouf has said that his role as a writer is to create "positive myths". Maalouf's works, written with the skill of a master storyteller, offer a sensitive view of the values and attitudes of different cultures in the Middle East, Africa and Mediterranean world.

"Is not one of the virtues of writing to be able to set down the trivia and the exceptional on the same flat sheet of paper. Nothing in a book seems any more profound than the ink in which it is written." (from The First Century After Beatrice, 1992)
Amin Maalouf was born in Beirut, Lebanon, as a Catholic Arab. His father, Ruchdi Maalouf, was a writer, teacher, and journalist. Odette, his mother, was from a Maronite Christian family. Maalouf attended French Jesuit schools in Beirut and after studying sociology and economics, he continued the long family tradition and became a journalist.

At the age of 22, Maalouf started to work for the leading Beirut daily an-Nahar and travelled in India, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Yemen, and Algeria, often covering wars and other conflicts. In 1975, frightened by Muslim and PLO strength, Christian militias attacked Muslims, which led to civil war. The horrors of war entered Maalouf's own homeland and in 1977 he emigrated with his wife and three children to Paris, where they have lived ever since.

Maalouf continued to work as a journalist, writing for Jeune Afrique and An-nahar Arabe et International. Maalouf's first book, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, appeared in 1983. Although Western research has scrutinized the religious zeal, and political and economic maneuvers behind the Crusades (1096 - 1291), Maalouf's book, in which he used Arab accounts, brought to the clash of Eastern and Western cultures a fresh and lesser examined perspective. In the first chapter Maalouf quotes Saladin who said: "Behold with what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war." Maalouf argued that from the Crusades the west became identified with the forces of progress and Arabs became identified as victims after their traumatic encounter with an alien culture. Maalouf's views have been reviewed by a number of writers dealing with the theme of crusades and the conflict between Islam and Christianity.

After moving to France Maalouf has travelled little. In 1994 he visited Lebanon - for the first time since settling in France. Maalouf spends part of the year on one of the Channel Islands where he writes his novels in a little fisherman's house. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Maalouf's characters often find themselves in conflict with the beliefs of their surroundings and time, as the Mesopotamian prophet Mani (c. 216-276) in The Gardens of Light (1991), who preached his tolerant doctrine of 'The Gospel of Light', or the restless traveller Hassan Al-Wazzan from Leo the African (1986), a geographer who roamed Africa and the Mediterranean lands in the 16th-century. Actually very little is known of the real person behind his myth. Leo's narration of his life, from Granada, his birthplace, to his residence in Fez, echoes Maalouf's own years in exile and the fate of his own native country: "Before Fez, I had never set foot in a city, never observed the swarming activity of the alleyways, never felt that powerful breath on my face, like the wind from the sea, heavy with cries and smells. Of course, I was born in Granada, the stately capital of the kingdom of Andalus, but it was already late in the century, and I knew it only in its death agonies, emptied of its citizens and its souls, humiliated, faded, and when I left our quarter of al-Baisin it was no longer anything for my family but a vast encampment, hostile and ruined." In Rome, Leo completed his magnum opus, the famous description of African geography. It is believed that he wrote the work first in Arabic. In 1550 it was published in Italian under the title Della descrittione dell'Africa et delle cose notabli che ivi sono.

In 1993 Maalouf received the Prix de Goncourt for his novel Le rocher de tanios (The Rock of Tanios). The acclaimed story-within-a-story was set in the 19th century Lebanon. Its central characters are Sheikh Francis, a Christian Arab, and the sheikh's illegitimate offspring, Tanios. Through their fates and legends Maalouf creates a historical romance filled with local myths, worldwide political games, treachery, and love. The title of the book refers to a peculiar rock formation, looking like a great stone chair, that dominates the Lebanese village of Kfaryabda.

In Samarkand (1989) Maalouf spins fact and fiction around the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, created in Samarkand in 1072 A.D. The manuscript is claimed to have vanished on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Maalouf gives the reader an exotic and vivid picture of 11th-century Persia, with assassins and intrigues, and returns to it 900 years later through the eyes of an American academic searching for the manuscript.

Maalouf has regularly used fantasy elements in his novels, but The First Century after Beatrice (1992) was his first full-length futuristic tale, in which female birth has become increasingly rare due to a new fertility drug. The scarcity of girls and women upsets the balance of sexes, and baby girls are kidnapped to be sold in countries where there is a shortage. Maalouf touches on several themes - the antagonism between the rich, technologically advanced Western countries and the poor South, corrupt science and sexual discrimination. "And the journalists? Where does his passion lie? Is it solely in the observation of human butterflies, human spiders, their hunting and their love affairs? No. Your job becomes sublime, incomparable, when it allows you to read the image of the future in the present, for the entire future is to be found in the present, but masked, coded, in a dispersed order." (from The First Century after Beatrice) Ports Of Call (1999) was a bittersweet love story which dealt with the troubled history of the modern Middle East. The protagonist, Ossyane Ketabdar, travels in the 1930s to Paris to study. When World War II reaches France, he abandons his passivity, and becomes a Resistance hero, fulfilling his family traditions. After returning to Beirut, he marries Clara, a Jewish woman. But now the wars tear families apart.

Behind the story of Balthasar's Odyssey (2000) is the number 666 and the year of 1666, the "year of the Apocalypse", which Maalouf explores through the experiences of Balthasar Embriaco, an Italian bookseller. With his companions he tries to track down a book, Abu-Maher al-Mazandarani's The Unveiling of the Hidden Name, which may contain the hundredth name of God. In Islam there are 99 names for God. To know the 100th, the name that may be missing from the Koran, is to ensure one's salvation. Balthasar is a Catholic but he views organized religion sceptically, and with his observations he comes close to a modern intellectual. Balthasar finds the book and loses it, twice, and almost perishes in the Great Fire of London. "What is common to Maalouf's wide-ranging works... is his apparent belief that through examining and understanding a particular historical period we can gain a better understanding of our present time." (Ian Sansom in The Guardian, October 12, 2002)

The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho based her first opera 'L'amour de loin' (Love From Afar) on Maalouf's libretto about a distant love of a 12th-century troubadour, Jaufré Rudel, for a countess in Tripoli. The opera was produced in Salzburg (2000) and in Paris (2001) at Chatelet theater, directed by Peter Sellars. - "Idealized love is a well-worn theme," wrote Anthony Tommasini in his review, "but Mr. Maalouf has found a fresh way to revisit it. Mr. Maalouf's words invite music, and Ms. Saariaho has provided a lushly beautiful score, structured in five continuous acts lasting two hours." ( The New York Times, August 17, 2000) Maalouf has also written lyrics to Saariaho's songs, 'Quatre instants', which were performed by the opera singer Karita Mattila in April 2004. Saariaho's second opera, based on Maalouf's libretto Adriana Mater, is premiered in 2006 in Paris.