by Michael Maar
Vladimir Nabokov, aged seven, with his father; the young Heinz von Eschwege.
The path of the author, at any rate, he could easily have crossed. Heinz von Lichberg lived in the southwest of Berlin, as did Nabokov. As a child, Nabokov had often stopped in Berlin when his family was en route to France. A year after the family fled from Russia, in 1919, his parents and siblings moved to the Grunewald district of the city, where Vladimir visited them during his vacations from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Slavic and Romance languages. In March 1922 his father, a prominent liberal politician and publicist, was assassinated in the Berlin Philharmonic Theatre by a Russian monarchist. That summer Vladimir moved from England to Berlin, and – he least of anyone would have expected this – stayed there until 1937. In these fifteen Berlin years he got to know Véra Slonim, and married her; became the father of a son; and, under the pen name Sirin, became the outstanding Russian writer of the younger generation. There he wrote no fewer than eight Russian novels, and had almost finished the ninth and greatest, The Gift, when he began The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and, with it, his conquest of American literature.
None of which yet tells us whether Sirin–Nabokov could even have read the German ‘Lolita’. The question, like so many others among Nabokovians, is disputed. So far as his knowledge of matters German went, Nabokov always remained reticent, if not in denial. He let it be understood that, cocooning himself in the Russian exile community for fear of losing his mother tongue, he scarcely spoke any German, and read no German books. His German translator and editor, Dieter E. Zimmer, holds this repeated assertion to be ‘objectively somewhat exaggerated, but subjectively the simple truth’.13 Perhaps subjectively it was true, but objectively somewhat over- (or under-) stated. Nabokov indeed never mastered German – which he had learnt at school14 – anything like as well as English or French. But he was not lying when he asserted ‘a fair knowledge of German’ in his application for a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.15 Nor was it an untruth when he wrote to Princeton University Press in 1975 that he read German, but couldn’t write in it.16 Nabokov’s antipathy towards the Germans as a people – which later grew into real detestation17 – did not prevent his ‘fair knowledge’ of their language extending to their letters. Not only was he familiar with the German Romantics and classics.18 He treasured Hofmannsthal, honoured Kafka, whose translation into English he improved, and despised Thomas Mann (whom he studied with the aid of a dictionary). Of Freud, he remarked that one should read him in the original, which we must therefore presume he had done.19 The awful first German translation of Bend Sinister made him write to the publisher that it would cost him more time and labour to iron out all its howlers than a new translation would involve.20 As translator himself, he brought various poems by Heine and the ‘dedication’ from Goethe’s Faust into Russian. His opinion of contemporary German literature was low, but plainly not just based on prejudice. In The Gift (which also alludes to Simplicissimus, where Lichberg had once published poems) he mentions works by Emil Ludwig and the two Zweigs disparagingly, and in one of his stories he took a little sideswipe at Leonhard Frank’s novel Bruder und Schwester – after, we must hope, having read it.21
Someone who knew of Leonhard Frank’s incest novel could in principle also have run across a Lolita story by Heinz von Lichberg. Not as a novelist, but as a feuilletonist and travelling reporter for the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, Lichberg was permanently present during the fifteen years that Nabokov lived in the city. Assuming, then, that by one of those coincidences in which life is richer than any novel should be, the Gioconda book fell into his hands: what could have prompted him to leaf through it? A false gleam in its title, perhaps. Lichberg’s collection of tales appears to be about Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. That could have caught the eye of Nabokov, who was an admirer of Da Vinci. In 1940 Nabokov invoked the shining figure of Leonardo as an example of true human greatness, placing him, as the antithesis of Hitler, on the most glorious of all pedestals.22 Perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties Nabokov, who might have been interested in the spectacular theft of the Gioconda from the Louvre in 1911, picked up a book that promised to reveal her secrets. Lichberg’s title story was not in fact about Leonardo’s Gioconda, but an indifferent figure of the same name. This was something, however, that could be learnt only after opening the book. If one did so, the eye might have been caught by the silhouette of a very young girl – assuming that the theme had a certain allure.
LOLA’S FORMER LIFE
Could it have aroused a slumbering interest in Nabokov so early on? No doubt this curiosity was already wide awake: there are forerunners of Lolita in his work virtually from the start. In his short story ‘A Nursery Tale’ (1926), Nabokov had created a child-woman capable of turning the head of the hero. In the company of an old poet – in whom Nabokov retrospectively discovered, to his own astonishment, a prefiguration of Humbert23 – there sways past Erwin, who spins around to look at her, a child of around fourteen, in a low-cut black cocktail dress:
There was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl – the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt – one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice – and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.24
For his secret wishes are fulfilled by no less than the devil. Shining eyes, swinging hips – here, no doubt, is the first of a chain of pre-Lolitas that will henceforward be unbroken. She is still nameless, but already quite the fatal nymphet, as Nabokov would later term her.25 Next a child-woman leads the wretched Albinus of Laughter in the Dark to ruin. Not long afterwards appears the first sketch of the plot. He puts it into the mouth of an antipathetic secondary character in The Gift, the hero Fyodor’s landlord. ‘Ah, if only I had a tick or two,’ sighs the stepfather of the girl he will love – and the sigh is anything but innocent – ‘what a novel I would whip off!’:
Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog – but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness – gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl – you know what I mean – when nothing is formed yet but she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale with blue under the eyes – and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down, the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. …26
And here Nabokov did go on, writing five years later in Paris a short novel, The Enchanter, in which the germ cell of Lolita has already developed into a full embryo – certainly the most osé version of all. Ten years after that, he began the composition of the novel which, despite every temptation of the incinerator, he triumphantly completed in Ithaca in December 1953.
It is noticeable, however, that Lolita, although she emerges so early as a figure and a theme, as a name appears very late. Nabokov told Lolita’s first commentarist, Alfred Appel Jr, that he had originally intended to call his heroine Virginia and the novel Ginny.27 In the manuscript she bore the name Juanita Dark for a long time. It was only later that Nabokov discovered a thousand reasons why the name Lolita, with which the novel begins and ends, had become essential.28 This fact alone might suggest that he was not conscious of any predecessor to his nymphet, since if he had wanted to cover his tracks he would surely have done just the opposite – unless, of course, he precisely did not want to cover them.
In both cases Lolita is a diminutive form of Lola – in the one of Spanish and in the other of Mexican origin.29 Interestingly, there is also, as Appel noted, a German strain in Nabokov’s Lola. The femme fatale of that name in Sternberg’s movie The Blue Angel was played by Marlene Dietrich, to whom Humbert once compares
Lolita’s mother.30 On parting, he evens calls her Marlene, another time Lotte; while her surname, Haze, is close to the German Hase (Bunny), as Nabokov confided – perhaps merely to flatter the magazine – to an interviewer from Playboy.31 That Humbert once calls his Lolita die Kleine, and can pity her for a ‘rustic German’ look, belongs to the same astoundingly consistent background.32
The figure herself bears as much resemblance to her Hispano-German forerunner as one young girl may bear to another. They are in no way twins, and the likeness between them is fleeting – as fleeting as the scent of Spanish toilet powder that wafts from Humbert’s first love.33 The name Humbert gives this girl, taken early by death, offers another scent. He calls her Annabel, after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name on the dead child-bride Annabel Lee. Humbert’s unfulfilled passion for Annabel leads him into the arms of Lolita, who seems to him a reincarnation of this first nymphet. The very names of his two loves – ‘Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta’34 – blend and merge into one another.
Such fusion is a process found early in Nabokov’s work. Lolita has another and largely unknown predecessor called Annabella, a character in his play The Waltz Invention. The plot of this drama, which dates from 1938, is very close to the earlier ‘Nursery Tale’. Through a set of fantastic circumstances Waltz, its inhibited, demented hero, finds himself in a position to fulfil his erotic dreams. Lord of the world, he lets a harem be assembled for him, but rejects every woman he is offered in favour of Annabella. Although she is five years older than Lolita – Nabokov took care to specify the difference in a postwar afterword – ‘little Annabella’ is ‘a very young girl’, ‘less than a child’, but thoroughly eroticized by a series of ambiguities and risqué allusions.35 The lovesick Waltz is so smitten with her that he threatens to blow up the whole country if her father does not deliver her to him.
Nabokov’s play, though certainly no masterpiece, is carefully constructed. It seems all the more striking that he inserts into it a character who is a pure name, never appears on stage, has no function and is mentioned only once: an old, grey-bearded relative of the hero, supposedly the genius in the background, to whose imaginary invention the play owes its title. He is a cousin of the same name.
In Nabokov’s Annabella-drama there is thus an ominous male pair by the name of Waltz.36 In German, where it originates, the word for waltz is Walzer. The reader may well ask what the brothers in Lichberg’s Lolita are called. Here is perhaps the most striking of all the concordances between the two texts. Their name, too, is Walzer. Even the grey beard – in Lichberg streaked with red – recurs in Nabokov.
LOLITA AS DEMON;
THE SPANISH FRIEND
The subtitle of The Accursed Gioconda describes the stories collected in it as ‘grotesques’, which fits Lolita only partially. The tale is in fact a ghost story à la Hoffmann, whose theme, introduced in the first sentence, determines both outer and inner narratives. During a conversation among guests at the house of one Countess Beate, talk turns to the relations between art and reality: a conventional opening whose function is to introduce an inner plot.37 The lady of the house draws the young writer among her guests into a discussion. After half a page, a hitherto silent professor cuts in. He wishes to recount something that has burdened his mind for years – something that could be experience or fantasy, he still does not know which. So begins the real narrative: a highly Hoffmannesque story, whose core encapsulates the very theme which germinated in Nabokov’s fiction from the 1920s onwards.
The narrator is a student in a South German university town who frequents the tavern run by the Walzer brothers. Lichberg already scatters some small hints of a Spanish background. On an armchair lies a black silk headscarf, ‘of the sort Spanish girls wear on days of celebration’.38 It occurs to him that something odd may be going on in this place, which seems to be open only for him, but he wastes no further thought on it. One night, passing by the tavern, he hears angry, youthfully transformed voices, a violent quarrel and a terror-stricken cry from a woman’s throat. But the next morning everything at the brothers’ establishment seems so unchanged that he doubts his experience and is ashamed to ask them about it. Soon afterwards he sets off on the trip to Spain whose announcement so agitates the brothers. Lichberg has thus prepared everything for a finale in which the mystery’s solution will be revealed. It lies in a picture. In the pension in Alicante hangs a drawing that seems to depict Lolita. The impression, however, is deceptive. It is Lola, the grandmother of Lolita’s great-grandmother, ‘who was strangled by her lovers after a quarrel a hundred years ago!’.
Here is the solution to the mystery, and the crux of Lichberg’s plot. Lolita is not just any enchanting young girl. She is under a curse, and a demonic repetition compulsion. The narrator learns of this haunted background, once he finally – now in fear of Lolita’s dangerous love – decides to leave. Lolita’s father explains to him what has happened since the Ur-Lola drove her lovers mad, and paid for it by being murdered. Since then the women of the line would always have just one daughter, and then die insane a few weeks after the birth of their child. He predicts the death of his own daughter, and on the same evening the narrator finds a small red flower on his pillow.
‘Lolita’s farewell gift, I thought to myself, and took it in my hand. Then I saw that it was really white, and red only with Lolita’s blood.
‘That was the way she loved.’
The blood-drenched blossom in a bed, given as a love-token, seems to be a classic symbol of deflowering, if not of demonic nymphet-love in general, even if the author, later explaining that the blood is from a cut on Lolita’s arm, perhaps really had only a flower in mind.39 It is in any case a farewell. That night her father’s prophecy is fulfilled.40 Towards midnight the narrator is visited by a vivid dream. He is witness to a phantasmagoric scene of murder, as he sees the Ur-Lola – ‘or was it indeed Lolita?’ – driving two lovers into a white heat and finally being strangled by them. In the murderers he recognizes the twins Aloys and Anton Walzer. The next morning he discovers that Lolita has died during the night.
‘My beloved little Lolita lay in her small, narrow bed with her eyes wide open. Her teeth were clenched convulsively in her lower lip, and her fragrant blonde hair lay tangled.’
The diminutives underline once again that this is no woman, but a child, of whom the narrator takes leave with a broken heart. If he takes Lolita’s soul with him, in the words of the tale, this is an ambiguous consolation that implies he might not escape her.
Curse, demonism, repetition compulsion: these are undercurrents in the other Lolita too. Nabokov’s child-woman is also a revenant, the reincarnation of an earlier, fatal gamine sans merci. Annabel, his first love by the sea, burns desire for nymphets for ever into Humbert. She puts him under a spell that he can escape only by allowing her to rise again in Lolita.41 Nabokov’s novel, one could say, is about not paedophilia, but demonism. Humbert is under an erotic-demonic compulsion. Thirty years earlier, in Nabokov’s ‘Nursery Tale’, it was the devil who supplied the earliest, still nameless Lolita to the hero. That has not changed in the chef d’æuvre. According to Humbert’s caustic complaint, it is the devil himself who leads him on and makes a fool of him, who charms him with Lolita and then whisks her away from under his nose, and who must eventually give him some respite, if he wants to keep Humbert a while longer as a plaything.42 Humbert knows very well under whose spell he has fallen:
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac).
Lolita is the ‘immortal daemon disguised as a female child’.43 The same is true of the Lolita of 1916. She too is half demon, half victim of a curse, and, like her lover, under the compulsion of the past.44 What compulsively repeats itself over the years always ends by exploding in violence. It is not only Lichb
erg’s tale that leads into the dream-like scene of a dramatic, grotesque murder. The finale of Nabokov’s novel is also a dream-like, phantasmagoric killing.45 Humbert and Clare Quilty, the two lovers of Lolita, intermingle in this scene, becoming the twins they were from the start in Lichberg. Lolita’s seducer, Quilty, is Humbert’s dark shadow and second self. In their tussle they lose even their grammatical identities:
We rolled all over the floor in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.46
Finally Humbert succeeds in killing his alter ego – no easy task, since the bullets in Quilty’s body, instead of destroying him, seem to jab him with fresh energy. With the death of the billy goat, his own fate is sealed. A few weeks later Humbert too, the tragic satyr, is a dead man.
In Lichberg’s tale, it is not the rival but the woman who is murdered. Nabokov time and again plays with this variant too. Not only does a leitmotiv of quotations from Carmen, suggesting that the betrayed lover may finally shoot his faithless beloved, tempt his reader along this false track to the very end. Even at his farewell to Lolita, Humbert flirts with the image of drawing his revolver and doing something stupid.47 As we know, the pregnant Lolita is spared this end. Indirectly, however, the curse still seems to radiate from the Gioconda. Lichberg’s Lola is murdered shortly after the death of her daughter. Nabokov’s Lolita dies in the weeks following childbirth, having given issue to a stillborn girl.