I recently read Lolita and was really conflicted as to whether I liked it or not. In one sense it was an uncomfortable read but I found I couldn’t put it down. I see a lot of people saying that they hate it because Humbert is such a monster but surely that’s the point? Nabokov makes it such an uncomfortable read through putting it in first person; we are meant to slightly sympathise with Humbert (because of his unreliable narration) and then feel disgusted with ourselves. Combined with the ‘American Dream’/Academia/Psychological Thriller aesthetic it’s almost as much a mockery of society and its romanticisation of crime as The Secret History. This is even proven by Lolita’s resurgence in popular aesthetics and romanticisation.
American authors tend to be pushed on the public quite hard if they are anti-communist, and they get pushed even harder if the are anti-communists who come from communist countries, as Nabokov did. He’s a pretty amazing stylist, the last gasp of 19th century symbolism and decadence, but his politics are abominable (he was pro-Vietnam War), and this is why his most famous work is about a child molester. Better Russian authors like Chernyshevsky and Sholokhov are unknown to American audiences because, unlike Nabokov, they are actually on the political left.