EDNOTE. Alexander Dolinin, University of Wisconsin, is the editor of the splendid ten volume Symposium edition of Nabokov's collected works. He has published voluminously  in both Russian &  English on Nabokov and other writers. His most recent book  is "Istinnaia zhizn' pisatelia Sirina: Raboty o Nabokove" (St. Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2004) [The Real Life of the Writer Sirin: Works about Nabokov].
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----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Dolinin
To: NABOKV-L
Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 8:41 AM

I would like to announce the publication of my essay "What Happened to Sally Horner? A Real-Life Source of Nabokov's Lolita" in this week's (London) "Times Literary Supplement"  (Commentary, pp.11-12).

In Chapter 33, part  II of the novel Humbert Humbert asks a question that so far has never been answered:

            "Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?"
            In my essay I answer "Yes, you had" to HH's question, reconstructing a very sad story of Florence Sally Horner, a brown-haired "bobby-soxer" from New Jersey, and demonstrating that it served Nabokov as a major source for the second part of Lolita.