TImes Literary Supplement April 23 2004, Letters
to the Editor (p. 15):
Nabokov and the lending
library
Sir, - Michael Maar is not to be blamed for the
widespread allegations of plagiarism levelled against Vladimir Nabokov that have
followed German and English publication of Maar's researches into "the first
Lolita" (Commentary, April 2). But he should have foreseen what would happen,
and should not have emphasized the vague parallels between Heinz von Lichberg's
and Nabokov's Lolita without emphasizing the much greater differences.
Lichberg's Lolita Ancosta is a young woman of, I would guess, between
fifteen and eighteen, working as a housemaid in her father's Alicante inn, not a
child of eleven. There is no hint that the age difference between her and the
narrator is a problem for anybody. There is no mother to marry in order to gain
access to the daughter. Her father does not seem to mind her having an affair
with his lodger. The narrator enjoys her lovemaking for a few weeks but is not
exactly infatuated with her and quite glad to get away, obviously because her
crush on him has become a nuisance. In the end she dies, but not because the
narrator interfered with her life either directly or indirectly.. He does
not rob her of her childhood, or of anything. It is rather the other way
around. Even if she bites, she is no demon, no witch, no belle dame sans
merci, not in her own eyes, nor in the eyes of her lover, but rather the poor
victim of some sort of Gothic demonism. Mr Maar has offered three possible
explanations for the "resemblances" between Lichberg's and Nabokov's Lolita
stories: coincidence, deliberate plagiarism, or some sort of unconscious
fermentation. Excluding plagiarism and coincidence, he himself opted for
the third hypothesis, arguing that Nabokov must have known Lichberg's story and
that somehow it worked its way into his 1955 novel. It eludes me how the fact
that for some time they both lived in the same city of 4.5 million people should
have facilitated their meeting or the reading of each other's books. Brian Boyd
tells us (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian years) that Nabokov remembered meeting
Kafka on the Berlin tram he used when he went to see his fiancée Miss Siewert in
Lichterfelde: "One could not forget that face, its pallor, the tightness of the
skin, those most extraordinary eyes, hypnotic eyes glowing in a cave. Years
later when I first saw a photo of Kafka I recognized him immediately." However,
Kafka arrived in Berlin only after Nabokov's engagement was broken, and lived on
Grunewaldstrasse, which was not on the way from Nabokov's pension in
Lichterfelde. That reminiscence was a fabrication, perhaps a deliberate one. I
am wary of all allegations that Nabokov purposefully misled his readers in
maintaining that his German was poor while it actually was fluent; he may well
have been influenced by all kinds of German writers (this claim was made by
Nabokov's first biographer, Andrew Field). But, certainly, it would have been
sufficient to get the gist of Lichberg's story (which is mercifully short). But
I don't see Nabokov avidly reading a story so shoddy that he wouldn't have read
it even if his German had been better. Nabokov simply was not interested in
German literature or in Germany as a whole and would not have wasted his time on
a third-rate piece of German writing. So it seems unlikely to me that he knew
the story. Maar claims that he perhaps did and then forgot about it, but that it
somehow survived in his subconscious and some thirty years later the memory rose
towards the surface and made him work a few elements from Lichberg's plot into
his novel in progress, renaming his "Juanita" Lolita. The unconscious, of
course, is a very pliable medium. You may fill it with anything you wish, and as
nobody can ever prove the contrary, you're always on the safe side. It's hard
enough to prove that somebody knew a book he never talked about, but it is
utterly impossible to prove that he did not know it. I am surprised nobody so
far seems to have thought up a fourth possibility, one that would be much more
in line with Nabokov, especially with his ideas on mimicry. It would go like
this: one day Nabokov was laid up with the flu and somebody brought him a pile
of ill-assorted German books from the Russian-German lending library he
frequented on Passauerstrasse. As at that moment he had nothing better to do, he
sleepily and disgustedly browsed through them. When he got to a story entitled
"Lolita" by one Heinz von Lichberg, however, he was alerted. It struck him so
deeply that he decided to write a Lolita of his own. To this purpose he
preserved all its detail in his (perfectly conscious) memory for future use.
When he finally carried out the plan thirty years later, after hinting at it
several times in various other works, he thought it only fair gratefully to
remember the originator of the idea. There would be an acknowledgement, not an
open one but a Nabokovian one. So he purposefully called his girl Lolita, hoping
that some day somebody as clever as Michael Maar would discover the resemblance,
along with a number of other much subtler and slighter resemblances he had
wilfully planted. For Nabokov considered the discovery of overlapping patterns
arranged by some higher creative force a sublime joy, and was intent on
delivering his readers this kind of aesthetic bliss wherever he saw the chance.