Leonid Mozgovoy, the owl-eyed seventy-one-year-old actor, has played Chekhov (goatee), Hitler (mustache), and Lenin (goatee, bald cap), all in films by the famed Russian director Alexander Sokurov. And sometimes, in his natural hair, he becomes Humbert Humbert in “Lolita,” a one-man show featuring Humbert reading his own story out loud, that has played in Saint Petersburg on and off over the last two decades. When it was first staged, the monologue had to pass muster with the khudsovet, a Soviet censorship organ. It did. “They said I perform it rather chastely,” Mozgovoy recalled in an interview.

On a snowy night in early 2013, “Lolita” went up once again, unchanged, but it had suddenly become the most scandalous show in town. The performance had been postponed since last October amid threats to Mozgovoy and others. In January, three men jumped the play’s twenty-four-year-old producer, Anton Suslov, giving him two black eyes and a concussion while calling him a “pedophile”; a murky video of the beating was posted online. The same libel was slashed in spray paint across the walls of the Nabokov museum in St. Petersburg and the writer’s ancestral estate in Rozhdestveno, about fifty miles from the city. Anonymous activists had petitioned to have the play banned, the museum closed, and Nabokov’s books purged from stores. The author, whose novels thrum with ironic recurrences, might have been perversely pleased with this: thirty-six years after his death and twenty-two years after the fall of the Soviet Union with all its khudsovets, Vladimir Nabokov is, once again, controversial.

These events are some of the more alarming demonstrations of Russia’s rightward tack. Ever since the wave of urban protest that hit the country in late 2011, Vladimir Putin and his United Russia Party seem to have decided to cut their losses with the country’s finicky élites and focus on demonizing them as Western agents for the benefit of a poorer, older, more rural voter base. So far, this strategy has brought about a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children, harsh prison terms for the punk band Pussy Riot, new tools for policing free speech on and off the Internet, and the banishment of USAid on a fresh wave of anti-American paranoia. A simultaneous emphasis on “traditional values” has resulted in the whitewashing of Stalin’s legacy and the reëmergence of the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church as a major political player. (Nabokov once endowed some of his own characters with a similar vision. In “Pnin” he described the loathsome Makarovs, “for whom an ideal Russia consisted of the Red Army, an anointed monarch, collective farms, anthroposophy, the Russian Church and Hydro-Electric Dam.”) Everything blunt, homespun, and orthodox is in. Everything multifaceted, foreign, avant-garde, or deviant is out. “Lolita” didn’t stand a chance.

No United Russia member has been more active in whipping up this frothing conservatism than the St. Petersburg legislator Vitaly Milonov. Last February, he drafted a bill banning “propaganda of homosexuality and pedophilia to minors,” making it (whatever it is) punishable by a fine of five thousand rubles and up. The bill’s confused language, which blithely conflated gays, pedophiles, and transgendered people into one degenerate bunch, didn’t stop it from passing. The law’s first victim got fined for standing in the street with a billboard that quoted the actress Faina Ranevskaya, who is Russia’s Dorothy Parker: “Homosexuality is not a perversion. A perversion is field hockey or ice dancing.” Soon, a group of nine conservative organizations, with Milonov’s full support, was suing Madonna, who was due to perform in the city, for her gay-friendly stance (the case was eventually dismissed). The legislator had succeeded in making St. Petersburg, Russia’s cultural capital, a lair of reactionary politics.

It was roughly at the same time that a local organization calling itself “Orthodox Cossacks” started harassing the city’s cultural institutions for promoting deviant art. The activists, who possibly exist only online (the official Cossack organization denies any connection), sent a series of e-mails railing against the Hermitage for exhibiting work by the Chapman Brothers. They also criticized the producers of a musical medley show for including two songs from “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and the Museum of Erotica for being a museum of erotica. On Christmas Eve, 2012, St. Petersburg’s Nabokov Museum received a similar e-mail, full of bad spelling and signed by five people calling themselves the “free Cossacks of Saint Petersburg.” The museum made the e-mail available to me. After a respectful introduction addressed to the museum’s director, Tatyana Ponomareva, (“We ask you to consider this letter a request, nay, a plea, to a true Russian woman”), the faux Cossacks get down to business: “We believe that Nabokov’s museum cannot exist in St. Petersburg, and ask you to move it outside city limits…. Our goal is to rid our beloved country from the culture of Satan, depravity, and violence.” The museum, says docent Danila Sergeev, ignored that letter and two equally demented followups. Then, on January 9th, someone tossed a vodka bottle through the rightmost window of the museum’s living room, where objects like Nabokov’s game of Scrabble are on display. Curled inside the bottle was the same “pedophile” message. Four days later, strangers attacked the “Lolita” director, Suslov. None of the cases has been solved. On January 25th, a version of Milonov’s “anti-pedophilia” law sailed through the federal Duma.

If no direct line connects United Russia’s troglodyte policies with the recent instances of street thuggery, it’s hard to imagine that the former doesn’t encourage the latter. Nabokov is everything the country is being told to hate right now: a liberal (some Putin fans are incidentally fond of the slur “liberast,” which is a portmanteau of “liberal” and “pederast”); an élitist; an emigrant, a word that still carries a semantic whiff of treason; an unrelenting meritocrat; and, above all, a Russian who defies the idea that Russianness is a naturally sealed-off and esoteric thing. In the Russia of 2013, this is, tragically, a subversive notion.

One infuriating aspect of this backslide is the impossibility of gauging its actual level of support. When they’re not being actively wound up by the media about something—be it pride parades or Pussy Riot—Russians tend to be largely libertarian on social issues. Almost all of the anti-“Lolita” shenanigans could have been perpetrated by two or three disturbed people, or maybe even staged for the benefit of the media. The choice of target, however, in and of itself illuminates Russia’s ambivalence about Nabokov—whose love of the motherland was just as conditional: unlike, say, Solzhenitsyn, he often made a point of insisting that the Soviet Union meant nothing to him.

The centennial of Nabokov’s birth, in 1999, fell during the Yeltsin years, and some of the encomia made a curious attempt to reclaim him for Russia by sentimentalizing his exile and exaggerating his nostalgia. An essay by Dmitry Bavilsky in the respected Literaturnaya Gazeta advanced an image of a “warm” and “soulful” Nabokov. Another critic, Dmitry Bykov, mocked it mercilessly: “Nabokov is simplifying before our very eyes…. Whereas it was once fashionable to write about his style, precision, allusions, intertextualism, loneliness, now the vogue is for his anti-fascism, family values, filial love, intercessions on behalf of Soviet dissidents, and wide smile.” It didn’t take. As the same Literaturnaya Gazeta attested on February 6th, in a vicious essay by Valery Rokotov entitled “Icy Throne,” “[Nabokov] is once again becoming an emigrant, and his art once again feels endlessly alien.”

On February 22nd, Mozgovoy’s “Lolita” played to a full house. Suslov, having recovered from his bruises, excitedly directed latecomers to their seats. Three very young girls, not much over Ms. Dolores Haze’s age, stood at the entrance, sadly clutching their tickets; a gruff guard wouldn’t let them in. Perhaps as a precaution, there were no signs out front announcing the performance. The only mention of the play was on the venue’s monthly schedule, sandwiched between a discussion entitled “Problems of Meteorological Defense” and next night’s solo concert by the folk rocker Fedor Chistyakov. In 1992, Chistyakov had stabbed an acquaintance, claiming she was a witch, and served a year in jail before becoming a Jehova’s Witness. No one protested his show.

Photograph by Lily Idov.