Lolita and the Banality of Evil

Okay, an obligatory post on Nabokov. I came across this interesting article on Lolita (link courtesy Arts and Letters Daily). It has nothing special, usual ecstatic celebration of the book in the 50th year of its publication, except for this very interesting trivia. Adolf Eichmann, of the banality of evil fame, was given this book to read when he was in prison in Jerusalem awaiting his trail and he apparently found it "very unwholesome":

As Kubrick was beginning to film, an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a copy of ''Lolita" to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ''a very unwholesome book." The sulphurous halo of Nabokov's novel was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann's guard gave the book to him as an experiment--a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov's creation.

Read the whole thing here.