Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.

inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution.

Then I found myself beating my fists against a tree and crying, crying, as if the person closest to me had died and I was now all alone in the whole wide world.

the dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

My most radical students sit in the very back rows, with sardonic smiles.

CHARGES: Being Westernized, brought up in a Westernized family; staying too long in Europe for his studies; smoking Winston cigarettes; displaying leftist tendencies. SENTENCE: three years’ imprisonment; death

Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women’s dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is useful as bread.

In retrospect it appears strange to me only now, as I write about it, that as I was standing there in that classroom talking about the American dream, we could hear from outside, beneath the window, the loudspeakers broadcasting songs whose refrain was “Marg bar Amrika!”—“Death to America!”

This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.

Who will pay for all those ghosts in my memory? Who will pay for the snapshots of the murdered and the executed that we hid in our shoes and closets as we moved on to other things?

We were told about how the people of Stalingrad and Leningrad had survived the harsh siege of their cities on a diet of their comrades’ flesh.

The war ended the way it had started, suddenly and quietly.

The victims of this mass execution were murdered twice, the second time by the silence and anonymity surrounding their executions, which robbed them of a meaningful and acknowledged death

Every great book we read became a challenge to the ruling ideology.