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SLPTWRK via Flickr/Creative Commons
lolita

Russia's Nabokov museum target of 'paedophile' graffiti

Earlier this month the museum had received letters accusing it of spreading paedophile propaganda.

THE WORD ‘PAEDOPHILE’ was scrawled on a wall of the Vladimir Nabokov museum in Saint Petersburg on Tuesday in the latest salvo against the Lolita author, management said.

“The museum staff discovered an inscription of an insulting nature on Tuesday morning,” Saint Petersburg State University, which owns the museum, said in a statement.

The university said the word in question was ‘paedophile’.

Lolita, about a middle-aged businessman’s obsession with a 12-year-old girl, has been controversial ever since it first appeared in 1955.

The campaign against the late Russian writer has been in full swing in Saint Petersburg since the local assembly passed a law last year punishing any public act seen to promote homosexuality and paedophilia.

Earlier this month, the museum called the police after it received letters accusing it of spreading paedophile propaganda.

One of the letters was delivered in a bottle that shattered a window as it was tossed inside.

And the producer of a play based on “Lolita” said three men attacked him on 13 January, accusing him of being a paedophile.

- © AFP, 2013

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