We think the consequences of our actions are key to whether they are morally right or wrong. However, for Kant, acts of sacrifice, duty or courtesy are the most powerful testaments of freedom, because they are in opposition to what is consequentially good. No one understood this better than Vladimir Nabokov. His characters, especially in such infamous works as Lolita, are often labelled as simply morally repulsive. Yet Nabokov’s radical philosophical inquiry, as Dana Dragunoiu suggests, lies within his characters, who show moral excellence by managing to control their corrupt inclination, interests, or passions through Kantian acts of courtesy.

Freedom was a value of supreme importance for Vladimir Nabokov, the Russo-American writer who authored, most famously, Lolita. Nabokov’s achievement includes a massive body of work that includes fiction, poetry, drama, translation, autobiography, and even scientific writing. What is more, Lolita, while the best-known of his novels, is one of many masterpieces alongside The Defense, The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Pnin, Pale Fire, Ada, as well as his memoir, Speak, Memory.

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Nabokov’s philosophically complex account of freedom is a consistent seam throughout his major works – and it has also led to confusion in their popular and critical reception.

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Forced into exile in 1917 by the October Revolution, Nabokov had good reasons to champion freedom as passionately and consistently as he did. From his point of view and that of most Russian émigrés, the Bolsheviks substituted the tsarist tyranny with a tyranny of their own. For Nabokov in particular, this was especially painful because his father had been one of the “liberationists” who dedicated his life to transforming Russia into a modern liberal-democratic state. His father’s political activism and his murder in a bungled political assassination by far-right extremists is one of the most poignant chapters of Nabokov’s biography. Nabokov’s philosophically complex account of freedom is a consistent seam throughout his major works – and it has also led to confusion in their popular and critical reception.