Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita turns fifty this year.

Those who know the novel understand that there is no such person as the enchantress "Lolita"--only an ordinary American girl named Dolores Haze, fond of pop music, chewing gum and roller skates, encumbered with a nickname too exotic for her to inhabit. The book's title is an artful misdirection: it points not at its putative heroine, but at her representation in the narrator's mind. And while Humbert Humbert works hard to beguile his readers, he never seduced his creator; in one interview Nabokov called him "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching'." The closest Nabokov came to an expression of sympathy was in the foreword to his own translation of his 1936 Russian novel "Despair." Both Humbert and Herrmann, the narrator of "Despair," are "neurotic scoundrels," Nabokov wrote, "yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year." And while Nabokov's afterword to "Lolita" asserts that the book "has no moral in tow"--that is, it's not a didactic work--he told the critic Edmund Wilson that it was "a highly moral affair." ...

Men, beware: reading Lolita--in Tehran or elsewhere--will turn you into a pedophile.