Centerwall convincingly argues that Nabokov was a conscious pedophile who acted out his perverse impulses through his writing. Further, he suggests that pedophilia served as a regressive defense against oedipal anxiety. The author examines both manifest and genetic origins of the perversion. He delineates the effects of oedipal anxieties on Nabokov's life and art, offering evidence from the pattern and timing of his various writings, as well as from biographies written about him. Aside from the strong evidence that Nabokov himself was sexually molested as a child and adolescent by an uncle, his early works describing pedophilic characters fit the pattern of what has been learned about pedophilia in recent years.