Azar Nafisi.(Teaching western novels in Tehran)(Interview)

For two years in the 1990s, Azar Nafisi taught Western novels frowned on by the Iranian regime to a group of six women students in Tehran. From this experience, Nafisi, now a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C., drew the inspiration for "Reading Lolita in Tehran," an account of the secret home-schooling sessions during which the group discussed Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Both an intimate portrait of life in the Islamic Republic of Iran and an exploration of the act of reading as rebellion, Nafisi's book is a moving tribute to the power of fiction in the face of fascism. She spoke to NEWSWEEK's Carla Power last week about reading, repression and Iran under the mullahs. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Why was "Lolita," in particular, such a crucial book for your class ?

NAFISI: Of all the novels we read, "Lolita" was the most metaphorical of the situation in Iran. I felt the regime was imposing its dream on us. As women, it confiscated our reality. It said, "Don't be like this, be the way we think you should be." In Humbert's mind, Lolita had a precedent, a girl he meets when he's younger--Annabel Leigh. Every girl he sees, he imposes his dream of Anna- bel on the reality of Lolita. The poignancy is that, as Humbert says, "Every night she had to run back to my arms, because she had nowhere else to go." My girls, in the Islamic Republic, where else did they have to go?

There's that great description by one of your students of feeling that she was leaving her cell of reality behind as she approached your door. Can you talk a bit about what fiction meant to you in Iran?

The everyday things--things that you think of as real or concrete--are taken away from you. The way you dress and the way you walk out of the door, all this becomes public. The way we dressed was to put on a face- -as Eliot says, "To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." And you do things indoors that in other places you would ordinarily do out of doors: you take off your makeup to go out, and you come inside to put your makeup on. Reality--everyday living--had become unreal. Fiction became real.

How can fiction and the imagination assert order under a totalitarian regime?

When a revolution happens, you lose control of reality. Everything you take for granted is taken away from you. Through fiction, you reassert your control over reality. You tell it your way. Everyone talks about the political repression of the Islamic Republic. But for me, the confiscation of ordinary life was what mattered. When they come into your ...