![]() ![]() Reading Lolita in Tehran is Nafisi's account of the years she spent in Iran trying to come to terms with the totalitarian regime that came to power in 1979. In the alternative world of Nafisi's apartment, where not the horrors and humiliations waiting in the street below but the mountains of Tehran were reflected in the antique oval mirror that hung on the far wall of the living room, Nafisi and her group of hand-picked students used literature, as Nabokov had, to transcend the unacceptable realities of a preposterous life and find a place where art, tenderness, and beauty prevailed. The slightest provocation, a hair out of place, a bared ankle, maddens Humbert just as it does their own tormentors. To them, the Islamic Republic was like Humbert Humbert and they were like Dolores Haze-controlled by an authority who confiscates their individual identities and replaces them with a cipher of his own imagination. Nafisi, who had recently resigned her position as Professor of English Literature at the University of Tehran, expertly guided a group of seven young women in discussions of works such as Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, and Daisy Miller. ![]() Nabokov could not have wished for more attentive students than those who met on Thursday mornings in 1995 at the Tehran apartment of Azar Nafisi to study English literature. ![]()
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