Lolita, Teheran e noi

Exactly twenty years ago, the Iranian writer Azar Nafisi published Reading Lolita in Tehran, which soon became an international bestseller. The book tells of a secret seminar the author held with seven of her students in her living room to read and discuss Western literature, including Nabokov's Lolita. It was easy for these girls to identify with the protagonist, who had suffered the confiscation of her life and intimacy: the same fate they had suffered at the hands of the regime established by Khomeini in 1979. Thanks to this seminar and the transformative power of literature, they learned to become fully aware of their own dignity and to glimpse a strategy for survival, if not outright resistance. Nafisi's story resonates today more than ever: the same regime is bloodily suppressing the revolt of young Iranian women who are no longer willing to let others, Islamic men, decide over their lives and bodies. Nabokov's Lolita and Reading Lolita in Tehran inspire the essays collected in this book, which approach the two texts by exploring their literary, legal, political or inherent dimensions of the dynamics of abuse and manipulation. And they challenge us, like the girls in that seminar, to become readers and interpreters not only of the written page, but of real life. Because great literature, when it has an impact on existence, is capable of unpredictable effects, it can enlighten the conscience, mobilise energies, inspire actions, in Iran as elsewhere in the world, where the present of women and also of men, so urgently called into question, is at stake.