EPISODE · Jul 6, 2026 · 58 MIN
Brian Boyd — Nabokov, Lolita, and a History of Censorship | Free to Speak
from Free To Speak · host Free Speech Union
New Zealand banned it. So did France, Australia and South Africa, and every American publisher who saw the manuscript in 1954 turned it down. Brian Boyd, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland and the world's leading Nabokov scholar, joins Dane Giraud to trace the censorship history of the twentieth century's most contested masterpiece. They cover Nabokov's extraordinary life in exile, why he wrote a confession narrated by a predator, the Paris press that finally published it, Graham Greene's satirical John Gordon Society, the French ban traded over Suez, the 1958 American release that outsold everything since Gone With the Wind, the Kubrick and Lyne adaptations, and what seventy years of banning Lolita teaches us: suppression sells, and the impulse to censor never learns. https://www.fsu.nz/ https://x.com/NZFreeSpeech https://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnzSupport the showhttps://www.fsu.nz/https://x.com/NZFreeSpeechhttps://www.instagram.com/freespeechnz/https://www.tiktok.com/@freespeechunionnz
Embed this episode
What this episode covers
New Zealand banned it. So did France, Australia and South Africa, and every American publisher who saw the manuscript in 1954 turned it down. Brian Boyd, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Auckland and the world's leading Nabokov scholar, joins Dane Giraud to trace the censorship history of the twentieth century's most contested masterpiece. They cover Nabokov's extraordinary life in exile, why he wrote a confession narrated by a predator, the Paris press t...
NOW PLAYING
Brian Boyd — Nabokov, Lolita, and a History of Censorship | Free to Speak
No transcript for this episode yet
Similar Episodes
No similar episodes found.
Similar Podcasts
No similar podcasts found.