Lolita Makes the News in Relation to Epstein.

I have in front of me a November 18, 2025 article by Travis Andersen. The caption is as follows:  

“Elisa New, wife of Larry Summers, mentioned “Lolita” in email to Jeffrey Epstein.” Dr. New, an emeritus Harvard literature professor, is identified in the article as the wife of former Harvard University President, Summers. From a 2018 e-mail released last fall in 2025, it sounds as if Elisa was going to look for her copy of Lolita for Jeffrey Epstein in response to his request for it. Would the literature professor’s copy have been the annotated Lolita? I assume, yes. 

I don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein read Lolita but he named his private plane The Lolita Express. This perverted man, whose name is heard and seen daily, must not have realized that Lolita was published in 1955. Which means a reader will not find overtly sexual and prurient language in the novel. After all, it wasn’t until 1960 that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was allowed to be published in the USA. Nabokov did make a statement that  “my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert.”

I try to imagine Jeffrey Epstein with the annotated Lolita, a book of 457 pages, with only 300 of it as the novel. The other pages are notes to explain literary allusions, endless word play, cross references, and other devices that Nabokov uses in the novel. Was the brilliant Vladimir trying to out-do James Joyce whose Ulysses requires a separate book to explain it? Nabakov, born in Russia, had written many novels in Russian. But in Lolita he used the English language with brilliance, displaying formidable knowledge and creating dazzling effects. No question about that.

Picture a thick file with all that Nabokov weaves into this novel, which purports to be Humbert Humbert’s jailhouse confession. (Yes, he uses the two names.)   If Epstein did read Lolita, would he have thought of it before his death in jail in 2019? As so much emerges about the world of those in this man’s sphere, it is impossible for me to believe Epstein’s death was suicide.

I now leap from one Epstein to another… to Joseph Epstein, a prolific writer and author of The Novel, Who Needs it? On page 50 of his 2023 book, Epstein calls the novel, Lolita, “the most overrated work of the past century.” He claims that “absence of largeness of heart” kept Vladimir Nabokov from being a truly great writer.

So much to shudder over these days related to absence of heart, especially from those wearing tiny gold crosses on their necks like the Attorney General.  I don’t know who said, “repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. But shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

Next week: Evelyn Waugh’s warning for us in Brideshead Revisited