Senior priest calls for ban on novels

A SENIOR Russian Orthodox official has claimed that novels by Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel Garcia Marquez justify paedophilia and said they should be banned in the nation’s schools.

Father Vsevolod Chaplin’s demand yesterday was his church’s latest attempt to impose religious norms in a country that once rejected religion altogether.

Chaplin, who heads the Moscow Patriarchate’s public relations department, discussed Nabokov’s Lolita and Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude on Ekho Moskvy radio, accusing both of “justifying paedophilia.” The priest later elaborated, saying the authors’ works should not be included in school curriculums as they “romanticise perverted passions that make people unhappy”.

Mikhail Shvydkoi, a Kremlin envoy for international cultural co-operation, disagreed, saying such action by authorities would badly hurt Russia’s image.

Nabokov published Lolita in English in 1955. The book, which describes the relationship of a middle-aged intellectual with his 12-year-old stepdaughter, was briefly banned in several countries. He translated the book into Russian in 1967, but it was banned in the Soviet Union as “pornography.”

Unlike Lolita, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in the Soviet era – despite references to incest and sex with minors.