The Danish paper Politiken printed a Danish
translation of the Lichberg short story (I'm sorry it is not available online).
Up till now, the Danish press has been
running a couple of ignorant items (VN was a professor of entomolgy;
Humbert is an old man seduced by a nymphet; the recurring word in all of them is
"plagiat"; and so on and on - ad infinitum and in absurdium...) suggesting that
VN somehow stole Lichberg's plot; but how you turn a 16 page long story
into a 300 by merely stealing has yet to be explained. Out of a
about 7-8 articles only 2 were decent.
Anyway, today the smoking gun was produced for the
Danish readers - and what a disappointment, it's full of
blanks!
First of all it is a
terrible Hoffmannesque piece of junk, the plot inexpertly mimics the
fantastic genre, if there ever was one, but reads more like a bumbling Baroness
Blixen (Isaak Dinesen) on a bad day. This of course was to be
expected.
Second - and far worse: that VN's Lolita in any way
should be inspired by this limping pedestrian prose seems to me to
be incredibly far fetched (still, to be fair, I have only read the
translation).
Lichberg opens his story by mentioning Hoffmann,
and VN has a story (isn't it "A Nursery Tale"? - my copy of the
short stories is at the office) where the protagonist ends up in
Hoffmannstrasse - the story has a young girl, and the devil too -big
deal!
Llichberg's narrator rents a room in Spain at the
inn of the young girl's father (!) - no Charlotte.
There's hardly any sex (no, not even that),
but only some timid romance, a few nightmare sequences, two brothers
fighting over her (cf. Hum. & Quilt.). Michael Maar suggests a
link to "The Waltz Invention" (which I honestly still haven't read), the two
brothers in Lichberg's story are named Aloy and Anton Walzer. I might be daft,
but I fail to see how this connects to VN's
Lolita.
It struck me, as I plodded my way through Maar's
article that he has to collect his evidence not from one place but all
over VN's work - well, at least: The Waltz Invention, the
Nursery tale, and Lolita - and still it doesn't add up. The only
thing that really links the short story with the novel is the title
- the Spanish for diminutive for Dolores?
Has Michael Maar read Dostoevsky's "The
Possessed"? Stavrogin's confession seems to me to be a much more obvious
candidate for "predecessor". And what about the links to Edgar Allan
Poe et al.?
Alexander Dolinin's article "Nabokov and "Third-Rate
Literature" (On a Source of Lolita)" (in Elementa 1993
vol. 1), has some far better offers than Michael Maars tempest in a tepid
teapot.
Best
Ole Nyegaard, Århus, Denmark.