Secret Lolita: The Confessions of Victor X (15 page)

I am now about forty. I have spent the last eight or nine years in an intoxicating voluptuous state. During this time, wallowing in physical pleasure, I have been very unhappy. I have had to give up the woman I loved and the hope of starting a family. At the whim of chance circumstances I have led an absurd existence, even though I was made - I am convinced - for quiet monogamous life. I have had venereal disease, which has made me suffer cruelly - physically and mentally. I have become a masturbator. And to think that the two things I most feared since childhood have been venereal disease and masturbation! I have fallen victim to shameful and ridiculous passions. My general health, since I stopped being continent, has become bad again. My nervous system has broken down. I often have insomnia and nightmares. Even intercourse has become for me nothing but a masturbatory stimulus. I despise myself. My life has no aim and I have lost any interest in decent things. I do my professional work with indifference and find it harder and harder to get through it conscientiously. Things that I used to find very easy to do nowadays cost me a painful effort. The future seems to me more and more gloomy.

My father died four years ago, a year after we made a journey together to England. He was disheartened by the English public's love of sport and by the moderation of the English so-called 'radicals'. When he died he left me no inheritance: the property he had owned had long foundered under the weight of second mortgages. As for what he had earned through his work, he spent it accordingly, in a way that was at worst only
partly
selfish. In recent years it so happens I have revisited Russia twice. I noted that trafficking in prepubescent girls is now almost as extensive in Kiev as in Naples. Only it is done less elegantly, since people's pockets are not so well-lined… 'Decent' families in that trade are not a Kievan speciality.

I have now finally left Italy and settled in Spain where I found a more rewarding job. I may have changed countries, but I have not changed moods and I remain as pessimistic as far as concerns myself and as fed up with myself as before. Thoughts of suicide haunt me more and more often. My health is weakening further, but my sexual urges are not, nor consequently my fondness for masturbation.

After reading your learned works, I thought I ought to add a few facts to those you have gathered. I felt that perhaps some of the information I gave could be of psychological interest to you. I think my sexual life in childhood has been rather unusual in its intensity. It would appear less abnormal if we had plenty of complete sexual autobiographies. But people are ashamed to talk about such things. Contrary to popular opinion, children are very reticent about certain things. I believe they hide more from adults than adults do from them. Moreover grown-ups often forget an enormous number of the events of their childhood. I believe that not many people have memories as precise or as full as mine about their first sexual impressions. But I have an especially retentive memory for anything to do with the erotic, perhaps because it has always strongly interested me and my thoughts have kept on returning to that sort of recollection. I have tried to be as exact as possible, and that may give my story some worth.

There is probably no better way to focus public attention on your identity than to publish an anonymous sexual confession. And yet Victor (as he calls himself) had the good luck or misfortune to stay in the shadows, even though he had written one of the frankest and most rivetting documents of his time and sent it to the pioneer of sexual psychology, Havelock Ellis, for publication. As a case history of sexual development and aberration, it is as explicit and as well told as any provided by Havelock Ellis' informants; but what makes it stand out is the powerful mind and quirky character of Victor, qualities which make his confession far more than a collection of events and symptoms and turn it into an extraordinary literary and social testimony.

What was the fluke that kept Victor buried in obscurity, and who was Victor? The fluke was censorship. Havelock Ellis had intended to print the confessions in an appendix to volume 7 of his
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, which was in preparation when he received Victor's testimony in 1908. But his American publishers warned him that to include such material could jeopardise the publication of the volume. Rather than abridge or alter Victor's story, Havelock Ellis discarded it. In the French edition of Havelock Ellis' great work, however, the translator and editor were untrammelled by censorship. Yet, once again, Victor was relegated to the background. His confessions were printed in barely readable type, unedited from his lively, correct but not quite idiomatic French, as an appendix to Volume 6, which was devoted to 'sexuality during pregnancy' and was perhaps consequently one of the less assiduously perused volumes of the series.

As we shall see, Victor did briefly resurrect when one or two readers came across him hidden in his appendix. But as far as the literary and scientific public are concerned he has lain dormant for nearly seventy years. Now that he has come back to life, the urgent question that arises is, naturally, who he was. We feel we need to know, if only to check that his extraordinary revelations about childhood, Russia, Italy, guilt are real and not the spurious inventions of a cynical imagination.

When I first read this document I too felt it essential to check whatever could be checked. Naturally, the sexual experiences stand or fall by their plausibility: 'That was in another country and besides the wench is dead'. But, if some of the public events in Victor's private life could be verified, at least the author's existence could be established. Naturally, there were immediate problems. If you want to write a truly waterproof anonymous testimony of any interest, then you have to eliminate clues to your identity and, at the same time, gnaw away at the truth. Firstly, names have to change. Victor gives no surname, but falsifies his Christian name. Even more important, he is forced to omit a great deal of very relevant material about his family, for fear of identifying them as well as himself. Thus, while there are no untruths in his confession, there is a grey area of untold facts.

To identify Victor I had to confine my researches to Russian reference materials available in Europe and to the records of the Italian cities where he claimed to have studied. I could hardly go to the Soviet Union and announce that I wished to identify a Russian sexual pervert, considering that the Soviet authorities frown even on any hint that Tchaikovsky was other than heterosexual. But it was not hard to find that Victor had indeed come from a respected, but somewhat feckless intellectual family of the Ukrainian gentry, and had studied in Turin. Perhaps more telling are the facts he does not tell us, (for instance that his family had Italian connections dating back over several generations and that this was why he found the transition to Italy so easy), back up what he explicitly reveals.

It was Havelock Ellis' policy, like that of any respectable investigator in the field, not to reveal informants' names without their express permission. In his testimony, Victor expressly asks for his anonymity to be kept. I shall do so. There is no conceivable public interest to justify betraying him. Victor, as his despairing conclusion forebodes, was to leave no further imprint on the world and, as far as I can tell, no offspring. His sexual autobiography, written in the middle of the path of life, is his sole posterity.

If we look through Victor's story for details that we can link with the outside, historically verified world, the first clue he gives is that his mother popularized scientific books, such as the writings of the English physicist John Tyndall. But a check reveals that no fewer than three women and one anonymous author produced Russian versions of Tyndall in the 1870s, and the names given could be the maiden, not the married, names of Victor's mother. But, once the scene changes to Italy two thirds of the way through the story, we can profit from the meticulous records kept by the northern Italian universities and polytechnics. In Turin both the university and the
museo industriale
published full lists of every student on every course with his father's name and his date of birth. Since in the whole of the 1890s there was only one Russian student (excluding Poles who were then Russian nationals) in Turin, and that student, like Victor, had matriculated in mathematics and physical sciences in order to study electrical and industrial engineering, I could be reasonably sure of having pinned him down. Given the surname, which we shall retain as X., one could link him with his nomadic family, only one of whom achieved any modest fame: an uncle who was a respected astronomer and moved around the Ukraine trying, in vain, to establish a line for a new meridian from St. Petersburg to Turkey that would replace the Greenwich meridian.

More convincing than these meagre clues is the internal evidence of the confessions. For instance, Victor has a number of weaknesses, quite apart from his sexual problems: one of them is boastfulness. He is not boastful like a sexual athlete: he rarely boasts of his genitals and not at all of his seductive powers or virility. He is, however, vain about his intellect. Perhaps he is right to be vain, for he is an accomplished polyglot. Quite apart from his native Russian and his fluent French, he is impressively casual about his command of Latin, Greek, German, English, Ukrainian and Italian. He is inordinately proud of his abilities at the age of ten and eleven and boasts about the impression made by his Latin translation of Lermontov on a university professor. After, however, he moves to Italy and once more becomes a student, one is struck by the laconic brevity when he speaks of his success. To matriculate in a foreign country and to become an electrical engineer in the 1890s would be worth boasting about. In fact, on closer inspection one realises why Victor said so little. In Turin he took only two courses and was never formally qualified. His name does not appear among the graduates of either Milan or Turin, nor was he registered with the Lombardy Institute for engineers. Clearly, he preferred to pass over this mediocre record as quickly as possible.

There is plenty of other internal evidence that the confessions are at least a genuine framework. The material was simply not available in 1912 for anyone but a southern Russian to talk with such familiarity about family, school, political and intellectual life in provincial Russia. The masses of detail that Victor sketches in his digressions and reflections often contradict as well as reinforce our image of Russia at the time: this is what makes the confessions such an important social document, quite apart from suggesting their autobiographical veracity.

As to the sexual encounters, the question of truthfulness is far more hazy. In the absence of a searching interrogator, a disinterested observer or a hidden video-camera, the pursuit of honest recollection is, as all of us must admit to ourselves, a hopeless quest. Victor is clearly far more coldblooded than most of us. His pecularity is not so much a perverted preference for little girls as an almost reptilian detachment in the midst of his pleasures. We can trust him perhaps better than ourselves. The very fact that he does not repeat all the pornographer's stereotypes is reassuring: his experiences are not just a catalogue of conquest or a set of variations on one theme. Yet there are some elements that might lead one to doubt him. First of all, he has the puritanical reactions that turn a sexual being into a pornographer. He tends to emphasise the insatiable sexual greed of the female and the vulnerable expendability of the male. He describes female genitals with the pedantry of a pathologist and a chromatologist. But these elements are not really pornographical. Victor's puritanical mistrust of women is part and parcel of his entire make-up, of his upbringing, which is more deprived than his casual recounting implies. His mediaeval differentiation between the sexes stems from a wider disgust with all modernity and Russian modernity in particular. His forensic descriptive tone is due to a forensic, pedantic mind that loves to classify and order the most intimate disorder.

If Victor is insatiable, then it is in his reading on sex. He obviously read everything Havelock Ellis had published before making his own contribution. He appears to be at home with everything ever written on the subject from Ancient Greece to contemporary Vienna. The question arises: how much feedback from his reading colours Victor's recollections? The answer is: very little, since much of Victor's experience is so specifically Russian that the conventions of pornography and sexology could not be mechanically translated into it, so coloured is it by peculiarly Russian social and mental traits.

Besides, so many of Victor's encounters become studies in irony that they take on the ironical, pessimistic stamp of his own personality. They simply never remind us of Apuleius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Krafft-Ebing: they are clearly Victor's experiences and acts, not adaptations and imitations from the literature of the subject.

The reader can be pretty sure now that he or she is going to read a genuine autobiographical document. If they have already begun to read Victor's confessions, they will be enthralled enough not to wonder why they deserve publication. But if, like Victor, you feel impelled to justify your pleasures, then we might profitably explore the real value of the confessions under three headings.

Firstly, as a human document the confessions are not only a psychological case-study: they amount to a peculiarly twentieth-century work of art. There is existential despair in the absence of any fixed or absolute values, in the way illusions are stripped like an onion skin to end with nothingness. There is a tragic shape (artfully fashioned by Victor) in the hero's ending with the two things he most feared: venereal disease and masturbation. Most striking is the courageous honesty which is concomitant with Victor's sexual and intellectual exhibitionism. He gives us a three-dimensional self-portrait which is quite merciless, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. The result is as much a work of art as a scientific curiosity, a combination worth enlarging on.