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Fetishism, Obsolescence, and Disillusionment—Humbert Humbert’s Decorated Philistinism in Lolita
LYU Shuangning
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.03.003
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Vladimir Nabokov once criticized the “smug philistinism”, or poshlust, that emanated from the art of advertisement. For Nabokov, poshlust is phony depth, cheap imitation, and aesthetic falseness disguised as virtue, beauty, or sophistication that may lead to moral indictment. Such a pretense and brandishing of one’s “higher aesthetic taste” echoes the meticulous descriptions of the elements of consumerism in Lolita. Building on Nabokov’s definition of poshlust as a fusion of the falsely refined and the vulgarly sentimental, this article discovers that Humbert is inherently an “adman”, or a bourgeois philistine whose construction of the “nymphet” is not merely a personal aesthetic imagination and delusion, but a product of a broader cultural aesthetic—one shaped by advertising, popular media, and mass-market taste. This aesthetic imagination of Humbert experiences stages of fetishism, the realization of obsolescence, and ultimately results in Humbert’s disillusionment in finding the irreconcilability between “true art” and the décor of the desire of obsession and possession. Lolita thus parallels Humbert’s advocacy of art’s distance from real life and exposes the tragic consequences of commodifying beauty, reducing identity to style, and mistaking obsession for love.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, poshlust, fetish, obsolescence, disillusionment
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