Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

by Azar Nafisi

For the first time in many years, I felt a sense of anticipation that was not marred by tension: I would not need to go through the torturous rituals that had marked my days when I taught at the university—rituals governing what I was forced to wear, how I was expected to act, the gestures I had to remember to control.

Switzerland had somehow become a byword for Western laxity: any program or action that was deemed un-Islamic was reproached with a mocking reminder that Iran was by no means Switzerland.

Before the revolution, she could in a sense take pride in her isolation. At that time, she had worn the scarf as a testament to her faith. Her decision was a voluntary act. When the revolution forced the scarf on others, her action became meaningless.

It’s up to you, Nassrin said after a pause, looking down at her twisting hands. Do you think you should tell him? By now I could hear a note of desperation in her voice. Am I getting you into trouble?

Scheherazade breaks the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement. She fashions her universe not through physical force, as does the king, but through imagination and reflection. This gives her the courage to risk her life and sets her apart from the other characters in the tale.

Upsilamba become part of our increasing repository of coded words and expressions, a repository that grew over time until gradually we had created a secret language of our own. That word became a symbol, a sign of that vague sense of joy, the tingle in the spine Nabokov expected his readers to feel in the act of reading fiction; it was a sensation that separated the good readers, as he called them, from the ordinary ones.

What Nabokov creates for us in Invitation to a Beheading is not the actual physical pain and torture of a totalitarian regime but the nightmarish quality of living in an atmosphere of perpetual dread. Cincinnatus C. is frail, he is passive, he is a hero without knowing or acknowledging it: he fights with his instincts, and his acts of writing are his means of escape. He is a hero because he refuses to become like all the rest.

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive. We also instinctively recognized poshlust—not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity.

I think that was what drove me to create the class. My main link with the outside world had been the university, and now that I had severed that link, there on the brink of the void, I could invent the violin or be devoured by the void.

There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom. And like Lolita, we took every opportunity to flaunt our insubordination: by showing a little hair from under our scarves, insinuating a little color into the drab uniformity of our appearances, growing our nails, falling in love and listening to forbidden music.

Is she aware, Sanaz, of her own power? Does she realize how dangerous she can be when her every stray gesture is a disturbance to public safety?

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

was meant to make the girls ordinary and invisible. Instead, it brought them into focus and turned them into objects of curiosity.

It was as if the sheer act of recounting these stories gave us some control over them; the deprecating tone we used, our gestures, even our hysterical laughter seemed to reduce their hold over our lives.

in most of Nabokov’s novels—Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin—there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal.

The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another.

the evil implied in Humbert’s actions and emotions is all the more terrifying because he parades as a normal husband, normal stepfather, normal human being?

And more and more I thought of that butterfly; what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer.

Throughout, from start to finish, I observe that they have no clear image of themselves; they can only see and shape themselves through other people’s eyes—ironically, the very people they despise.

curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”—

But the magic comes from the power of good, that force which tells us we need not give in to the limitations and restrictions imposed on us by McFate, as Nabokov called it. Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance.

Humbert, like most dictators, was interested only in his own vision of other people.

“I mean, the censors, or some of our politicized critics, don’t they do the same thing, cutting up books and re-creating them in their own image?

“And what if we say that it is right to do what we want to do and not what society or some authority figure tells us to do?”

“After all, it takes two to create a relationship, and when you make half the population invisible, the other half suffers as well.”

Implicit in almost all their descriptions was the way they saw themselves in the context of an outside reality that prevented them from defining themselves clearly and separately.

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes. Dancing with your jailer, participating in your own execution, that is an act of utmost brutality.

Do you argue with a mad dog? someone later asked me.

the Nafisis were known for their contributions to literature and science. The men were called hakims, men of knowledge, and later, in this century, the Nafisi women had gone to universities and taught at a time when few women dared leave home.

One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me.

You didn’t think any of them would measure up to Fitzgerald, did you? Well, not in a literary sense. What other sense is there?

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

“The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.

My experiences, especially my teaching experiences, in Iran have been framed by the feel and touch of that aborted handshake, as much as by that first approach and the glow of our naÏve, excited conversation.

She resented the fact that her veil, which to her was a symbol of her sacred relationship to God, had now become an instrument of power, turning the women who wore them into political signs and symbols.

Even those who wished its death were obsessed by it. America had become both the land of Satan and Paradise Lost.

Later women were banned from singing, because a woman’s voice, like her hair, was sexually provocative and should be kept hidden.

We in ancient countries have our past—we obsess over the past. They, the Americans, have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

I could have told him to learn from Gatsby, from the lonely, isolated Gatsby, who also tried to retrieve his past and give flesh and blood to a fancy, a dream that was never meant to be more than a dream. He was killed, left at the bottom of the swimming pool, as lonely in death as in life.

“Such an act,” she explains, “can only be accomplished by someone who is engrossed in literature, has learned that every individual has different dimensions to his personality. . . . Those who judge must take all aspects of an individual’s personality into account. It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.

And so began the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran versus The Great Gatsby.

When I knew him—my magician—much later, I forced him to tell and retell it to me many times.

The reality of Gatsby’s life is that he is a charlatan. But the truth is that he is a romantic and tragic dreamer, who becomes heroic because of his belief in his own romantic delusion.

What we in Iran had in common with Fitzgerald was this dream that became our obsession and took over our reality, this terrible, beautiful dream, impossible in its actualization, for which any amount of violence might be justified or forgiven.

He wanted to fulfill his dream by repeating the past, and in the end he discovered that the past was dead, the present a sham, and there was no future. Was this not similar to our revolution, which had come in the name of our collective past and had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream?

At first the war seemed to pull the divided country together: we were all Iranian and the enemy had attacked our homeland.

All forms of criticism were now considered Iraqi-inspired and dangerous to national security.

Yes, I was given a choice, to immediately comply with the rules or be sacked.

One had a feeling, in revolutionary and intellectual circles, that they spoke from a script, playing characters from an Islamized version of a Soviet novel.

No, I could tell Mr. Bahri, it was not that piece of cloth that I rejected, it was the transformation being imposed upon me that made me look in the mirror and hate the stranger I had become.