A very quick, very rough translation of the Norwegian text. It’s hardly flattering…

Apologies to any Norwegians on the list.

TA Colquhoun

BERLIN (VG) It was not a Russian, but a German Nazi who invented the Lolita character.

There is much to indicate this, it seems – from information dug up by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian writer in exile, wrote the novel Lolita nearly 50 years ago for which he became famous. But it seems now that there is much to suggest that the Russian was engaged in plagiarism.

The newspaper has discovered that the novel, which is about a man who becomes infatuated with a 12-year-old girl, may be based on an unknown, 18-page German short story from 1916.

Same plot

Both writers call their characters «Lolita», the plot is the same and the cast of characters is largely identical.

This means that the Russian has plagiarised or at least been strongly inspired by a short story by Heinz von Lichberg. The main difference between the two works is reputed to be that the German described the erotic obsession more (in)discreetly? than the Russian did. This is not pleasant considering the fact that it was written 40 years earlier and that feelings of public decency at that time were stronger.

Von Lichberg was really called von Eschwege and worked for many years as a journalist. Among other things he is said to have covered the Zeppelin’s flight over the Atlantic in 1929. As a radio reporter he is said in gripping terms to have described the triumphant nazi progress after Adolf Hitler was elected kansler in 1933. He also worked for the Nazi paper Völkischer Beobachter and afterwards made a career in military intelligence. He was a prisoner of war in Britain before he died in 1959 – five years before Nabokov’s Lolita was published.

Filmed twice

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, but fled Russia after the October Revolution. Among other places he lived stateless in Berlin for 15 years from 1922 to 1937 and spoke perfect German. Lolita from 1956 became a great success, so great that the Russian later lived permanently in a hotel in Switzerland. He died in 1977.

Lolita has been filmed twice.. Sue Lyon – then just 13 years old – had the lead in Stanley Kubrick’s film from 1961, while Dominique Swan played Lolita in Adrian Lyne’s version from 1997.

The State Film Board gave the film an 18 certificate, when the latter film came out in Norway in 1998. Many feared a romanticisation of paedophilia and some even thought that the film should be banned. The film’s sex scenes are not explicit, but there is no doubt about what is going on.