The Long 1950s

Nabokov’s time in America coincides roughly with the so-called ’Long 1950s’. The Long 1950s define an almost mythical period of American prosperity, coinciding with the economic boom of the post-war era, and are characterized¬ by a remarkable expansion of the American middle class, concomitant with a growing social emphasis on family and domestic values, normative sexuality, obsessive fears of Communism at home and abroad, threats of nuclear annihilation, and increasing U.S. influence in the world within the context of third-world de-colonization. Nabokov’s interest in sexuality and its social and political function in his novels written during this time and beyond – Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969) – reflect ongoing cultural debates of the Long 1950s and explicitly challenge conventional moral norms of the early Cold War period. This essay looks at the way that at least four of these novels emphasize so-called ‘sexual subversion’ as they plot sexual behaviour that lies beyond the normative middle class conventions of the age. Lolita is a tale of paedophilia; homosexuality plays a key role in both Bend Sinister and Pale Fire; Ada is a story of brother-sister incest. This explicit interest in sexually nonconformist behaviour can be read as Nabokov’s historically-conscious response to some of the central preoccupations in American society and culture at that time, an interest on Nabokov’s part to articulate, and capitalize on, some of early Cold-War society’s apparently most repressed anxieties.