Nabokov's Cold War Novels and the Containment of American Sexuality

This paper focuses on the ever-present subtext of Cold War culture in Nabokov’s narratives and tries to identify the complex elaboration of “subversive sexuality” in Nabokov’s key novels of the Long 1950s. Both Lolita and Pale Fire speak against the grain of that decade’s pursuit of contained normative citizenship. In the latter case, the problematic presentation of homosexuality as politically subversive points to America’s most pervasive Cold War obsessions with Communist infiltration.