Allen Barra, a fellow Alabamian, has an excellent piece in Salon called “Reading Lolita in Alabama,” in which he credits Nabokov with turning him on to literature and helping him to form his ideas about what good literature is: i.e., a work of artifice, not of ideology. He disagrees with Azar Nafisi’s (Reading Lolita in Tehran) take on Lolita as a deeply political text, citing Nabokov’s own words about literature as evidence that the master of modern prose wasn’t trying to make a political statement:

Here, again, is Nabokov from that 1962 BBC interview: “Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.”

Barra goes on to quote a 1964 Playboy interview with Nabokov:

“I don’t give a damn for the group,” he told Playboy magazine in 1964, “the community, the masses, and so forth … there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.”

Nonetheless, Barra ultimately concludes that while Nabokov’s brand of parody made for a great book, it would be unsatisfying as a genererally accepted literary aesthetic. He writes that “there is something ultimately depressing about Lolita:

I realize after all these years that it has to do with the author caring so little about the fact that he made his heroine so realistic to me that I could not accept her fate as just a literary device. And I deeply resented that her maker would have held me in contempt for feeling this way.