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This was my takeaway as well, from listening to the audiobook (narrated by the fantastic Jeremy Irons, whose voice is now forever the canonical one of Humbert Humbert in my mind) a few years back. I could see how someone could construe it as pro-pedophilia, since people could construe any piece of text as being supportive of anything, but that's not the obvious interpretation. It also happens to be a masterpiece, merely on the quality of prose alone, IMHO, to the extent that I freely recommend it to people despite knowing the negative connotations associated with it.
A funny little anecdote: I was shopping for housing this past summer in the Boston area, and one of the places I was looking at in Cambridge was apparently in the building where Nabokov was residing when he wrote Lolita. The building has a little plaque in the lobby commemorating this, and the realtors pointed it out as well, presumably as one of those little intangible bonuses of a home. I have to wonder if this plaque and the information it concerns actually has a net negative effect on how attractive that building is for people to visit or live in. I ended up not moving there, but not for reasons relating to that plaque.
I'd also highly recommend Pale Fire: another masterpiece of his with top-tier prose, and it leans even more heavily into the unreliable narrator side of things and is more deeply textured. And you can recommend it to people without them thinking you're a pedophile.
Plus one for Pale Fire, such a creative and interesting book. I need to read the rest of his works at some point.
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