ABSTRACT
Tales of abandoned and lost children, or of children taken away from their families to be ill-treated, fill the pages of a very extensive and terrifying literature of which Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer and Victor Hugo's The Laughing Man are just two unforget-table masterpieces. Gustav Aschenbach, in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912), is an intellectual in his fifties from Central Europe, tormented by a crisis of creativity and by his fear of ageing and physical decay, goes on holiday to Venice. Aschenbach clear-headedly perceives the two aspects of his paedophilic falling in love, one of Apollonian nostalgic and fantastic heaven, the other of Dionysian hell. Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), the book in which Marguerite Yourcenar composes an extraordinarily poetic, magnificent historic fresco, contains the story of the Roman emperor's love for the youth Antinous. Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita (1955), is a divorced, quite lonely, melancholic university professor in his forties.
