I  think the reason there is so much squabbling on this front is that Nabokov insisted to an unusual degree on his total originality, claiming that he was influenced by NO ONE! not Joyce's Ulysses, despite the incident with the lost key at the end of The Gift seeming an obvious joke on all the shennanigans with the lost key in Ulysses; not Kafka, whose story about a man arrested for no good reason supposedly bears absolutely no relationship whatever to N.'s story about a man arrested for no good reason--and maybe these resemblances (which Nabokov pretends noticing is a philistine manner of generalizing away individual work rather than the mark of the hawk-eyed reader) may only be coincidental. And perhaps Nabokov is right when he informed an interviewer that his stye was fully formed by the time he read Joyce and so therefore he was beyond influence--even though we may well wonder if "style" is as static as this suggests or if in fact one's literary tool box can always be added to over time. And maybe Nabokov really did make especially sure to learn nothing whatsoever from Gogol as he said, despite M'Sieur Pierre's in Invitation to a Beheading having a distinct resemblance to Chichikov whom  N. has discussed an awful lot in and out of fiction. And I guess it's possible Nabokov is right when he claims in the introduction to King, Queen, Knave that his little imitations of Madame Bovary do not constitute an "influence" because they are a deliberate form of homage, as if influence were defined as unonsciously aping the manner and subject matter of another author.

There's so much Anxiety of Influence in N.'s thinking that the subject of his borrowing a title and situation from another source is a bigger deal than it would be with other authors. N. is so freaked out by the idea we'll dismiss his artistic originality that he resorts in his denials to placing us into the position of the author's dysfunctional children, expected to ignore the parent's contradictions, forced to deny what we read with our own eyes, that there is a whole darn lot of influence in the work, because otherwise we're calling him a liar, and nobody wants to do that. But really everyone's influenced by everything. Nabokov was influenced for Lolita by the Prince Stavrogin confession in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, a real life kidnapping case in America, the case of a sex maniac in his favorite psychiatrist's ouevre whose name escapes me now. Lichberg, would be only one more. N. probably read this guy and didn't fess up about it--I'm skeptical of this cryptomnesia idea. What's the big deal? Hadn't there been other versions of Lear before Shakespeare? which no one much cares about these days. It'd be the same with this other Lolita, nothing would be taken away from Nabokov, yet Maar's reputation is being impugned when he's just trying to do an honest job, no matter whether one agrees with his conclusions or not--yet we're not we're not supposed to even entertain the idea Lichberg might make a nice footnote in papers on Lolita, because N. claimed he's completely original to such a literal degree that one sometimes wonders how he managed to invent breaking up narratives into chapters and figured out how to use quotation marks with attributions like "he said" and "she said," a very old fashioned device developed in parrallell to literature by the author apparently, since he never imitated one thing in his life. Obviously I'm being silly, but if you were to buy fully into N.'s bluster then things this basic come into question. The same with Vera Nabokov's claim that her husband never uttered one cliche or common place in or out of his work. Yes he did, though if you tone down the hyperbole you understand she means he was a great and unique artist and person. Who wouldn't agree with that? Instead the whole situation is being taken by some to say: Nabokov was a sneaky theif, when actually they're just starcrossed lovers of Nabokov's stellar masterpiece!