Seventy years ago Nabokov's Lolita came out. Today, his heroine seemed to suddenly speak for the first time herself.
“…When it was my turn to introduce myself, I said:
— My name is Vanessa Wye, and I, in general, from nowhere .
Mr. Strain leaned back in his chair.
Vanessa Wye, basically, out of nowhere.
Hearing how stupid my words sound from the outside, I laughed nervously.
— I mean, it's not a real city. It doesn't have a name. It's just called Village Twenty-Nine.
Is it in Maine? <…> There's also a lake with a wonderful name, Whale or something.
I blinked in surprise.
— Weilsback Lake. We just live on it. We're the only ones who live there all year round.
<…>
—Yeah? Mr. Strain thought for a moment. “Don’t you get lonely there?
…I was speechless. The question was amazingly accurate and painlessly cut to the quick. Although I have never used the word «loneliness» when describing what it is like to live in the wilderness; when I heard it from Mr. Strain, I felt: apparently, it is so, it has always been so … «
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Pedophiles, like sectarians, the difference is only in the age of the victims: they are looking for sad eyes, those who are lonely and feel their complete isolation even in the crowd. The 15-year-old heroine of My Dark Vanessa, having entered a prestigious private boarding school, remains incredibly lonely. Here, for the first time, she managed to make friends with a girl, but the friendship came to an end as soon as she fell in love with a classmate who reciprocated her. Now they spend all their free time without Vanessa, and she is very worried about the resulting emptiness. She literally has no one to talk to. The girl writes poetry, reads a lot, probably, any person endowed with a good intellect, who would show genuine attention to her, would capture her whole essence, but
“anyone”, unfortunately, turns out to be a 42-year-old Literature teacher Mr. Strain is a Lolita lover.
My Dark Vanessa is the debut novel by 38-year-old American writer Kate Elizabeth Russell, who has been working on her book for 18 years. The novel was released in March 2020, and, despite the pandemic, it was quickly translated into 35 languages at once, including, of course, Russian. It is already rightfully called a world bestseller, and celebrities of such magnitude as, for example, Stephen King, who recommended this book in such a way: “Sometimes it will hurt a lot, but you won’t be able to stop.”
This is the absolute truth — and I want to get out of this long-term «execution» of a 15-year-old girl whom no one can help, because not just horror happens to her, but horror, with which she herself is fascinated, with whom she is in love. But leaving is the same as letting go of the hand hanging over the abyss: you keep your attention and cannot turn away even for a second …
Surprisingly, this book hooked even those who reacted in their time to the high wave of the #MeToo movement with indignation, with some disgust, not holding back from insulting remarks about women who decided to come out.
Metoo Movement
Let me remind you that originally the phrase MeToo, which means “me too”, was the title of a documentary film by social activist Tarana Burke. She was worried that in response to the confession of a 13-year-old girl that she had been raped, she did not find the right words and said only: «Me too.» It was in 2005, and in 2017, actress Alyssa Milano proposed to show the scale of the tragedy and urged all victims of sexual harassment to tell their stories under the hashtag #MeToo.
Already in the first 24 hours on Facebook » there were 12 million posts with this hashtag. The main argument for disbelief in the tragedy of what was happening was an argument that seemed to be reinforced concrete: if this happened a long time ago, tormented you, did not let you sleep at night, why are you talking about it only now?
The same question hung in Russia in 2016, when a scandal erupted in an elite Moscow school. Former students spoke of teacher abuse 16 years after the incident. This figure then sounded like iron on glass, causing incredible irritation of the «deniers».
Most recently, a collective confession of rape victims of former students of the Moscow art school began, we are again talking about the distant past, when now adult women were students .
The novel «My Dark Vanessa» removes all questions, including the one that is associated with the many years of silence of the victims. It is better to discuss this most complex, subtle topic with a professional, and today my interlocutor is a psychoanalytic therapist Polina Rychalova. She says:
Pauline Rychalov. Photo from personal archive
— The novel «My Dark Vanessa» goes in two time planes, on behalf of a 15-year-old girl and from her, who has just matured, 32-year-old. And at this age, she continues to live with what happened to her at school, she seemed to freeze, does not develop, feels like an absolutely destroyed person. This piece is a very powerful statement that allows what was invisible to become visible.
— I was surprised by the critic who wrote in her review that Teacher Strain really loved the girl. The lover always protects, guards, guards the one he loves. He took care only of himself: as soon as the history of his closeness with the student was revealed, he cruelly framed her, created a situation in which she was guilty of everything. A trial literally took place at the school, where the child was humiliated, psychologically destroyed and expelled from school in disgrace.
— Can Strain's feelings be called love? He has an attraction, but he understands perfectly well that it is initially forbidden, and allows himself everything. This is an obvious abuse of power. It is understandable that a teenage girl may be seized with a fantasy that an adult man may love her, she may consciously or unconsciously try to maintain his interest — this can be flattering, and it happens. But there is a clear imbalance here — age, power —
he is not just some 42-year-old man. He is her teacher, and this imposes certain restrictions and obligations,
and it is obvious that his attempts to justify himself by the fact that she seduced him are attempts to defend himself, to shift responsibility, to remove it from himself.
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