With Nabokov against the Ayatollahs

With Nabokov against the Ayotollahs
by Klara Obermüller, NZZ am Sonntag translated by Kristen

In totalitarian systems art and literature are usually the first victims. It was no different when the Ayotollahs took over in the end of the 1970’s in Iran. Like others before them they tried to gain control and started to prohibit books, destroy great works of art and force intellectuals to leave the country (some of them died). To engage with literature had become something dangerous. However because of that, literature gained a status which it doesn’t hold in other countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted.
Azar Afisi, a female professor for English literature at the University of Teheran was not allowed to give lectures anymore because she refused to wear a veil. From then on she held her lectures about Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen secretly in her own home. Two years she taught the most talented students about the famous protagonists who had
come into conflict with the norms of society (like Afisi herself). This silent form of rebellion empowered the women and they learnt to admit their feelings and needs, although this was something which women shouldn’t do according to the Islamic priests.
‘As the Iranian regime forced us to submerge, we became more interesting, dangerous and paradoxically even more powerful’ writes Azar Nafisi in her memoir ‘Reading Lolita in Teheran’.
‘Every great piece of art is a form of disobedience against the betrayal, the cruelty and the disappointment of life’ she told her students over and over again. ‘Like in fairy tales the power of great art comes from the promise that we don’t have to accept the constraints with which destiny confronts us.’