The Two Lolitas

by Michael Maar

  But the latter refuses them, and the paths of the tale and the play separate. Nabokov’s continuation shows his hero’s rise and fall, his apparent domination of the world, and his final unmasking. For in reality, Waltz/Walzer has sat through all three acts in the Minister’s waiting-room (where Bobby had already waited almost two hours), and only dreamt of the action in the play. In toto Nabokov develops something that is entirely his own out of Lichberg’s scenario – assuming he knew it – and enriches it in an unpredictable way. His world-destroying weapon is no poison gas, but an early atomic bomb.73 His main character is a poor addled fellow who wraps himself in dreams of omnipotence, through whose holes bitter realities eventually whistle. In short, Nabokov’s play is a multilayered work of art, and his deluded inventor Salvator Walzer is no caricature, but a character. Yet that is just it: his name remains Waltz/Walzer, and Nabokov even gives him a double, as if he not only did not want to tear the seal of origin from the cousins, but in fact wanted to hang it around their necks for all to see – fifteen years before he wrote a novel on the child-woman who makes her début here as Annabella.74

  If we put all this together, we find in Nabokov, grouped around the Lolita-theme, not only the name of Lichberg’s brothers, elevated to title status, but also particular grotesque scenes and a sketch for a plot from their immediate vicinity. One has to be quite stubborn a champion of coincidence to dismiss these similarities as mere chance.

  All the more so as in Ada Nabokov finally lays his cards on the table – or so a proponent of this third hypothesis could argue. For in this novel there really is a work called Lolita that is attributed not to Nabokov, but to an author whose name ends in ‘berg’. This figure wins a court case because he can prove that passages from his book have been lifted in a film. In this film, which heralds the tragic climax of the novel, Ada plays a Spanish girl by the name of Dolores.

  In other words: we have a book, Lolita, which someone other than, shall we say, Vivian Darkbloom has written. We have the Spanish (not Mexican or American) child-woman of the same name. We have a court case of plagiarism. And we have as the real Lolita-author a gentleman whose name is – no, not Lichberg, but Osberg.75 Could Nabokov have been more unambiguous?

  But – opponents of this hypothesis can immediately point out – Nabokov was quite unambiguous, in the notes he attached to the novel. There he helpfully explains to us that the name Osberg is a ‘good-natured anagram’. For Osberg read Borges; and to this Borges, with whom he had been compared one time too often, Nabokov pays a somewhat tart tribute. That he really did mean Borges when he wrote Osberg is shown by his characterization of him in the narrative itself as a ‘Spanish writer of pretentious fairy-tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shrift thesialists’: which captures the Argentinian as Nabokov saw him accurately, if also maliciously, enough.76 So Osberg is Borges – as has been the undisputed reading since the novel appeared. It has the certificate and seal of the author, and the question remains only whether the matter is thereby settled. The supporters of the third hypothesis would answer no, and raise counter-questions. Just what did Borges have to do with Spanish nymphets? Only in Lichberg is there a Spanish Lolita, and only in him is there a male pair called Walzer, who as ‘Walter’ recur again in Ada.77 The one allusion, en plus, does not exclude the other. Lolita was already cryptic enough; Ada is a labyrinth. Any philologist who ventured to propose conjectures as remote as those of Vivian Darkbloom in his notes to Lolita would be accused of referential mania. Yet Darkbloom is still operating under cover. As Brian Boyd has shown, among the wild luxuriance of allusions in Ada, some have as much as a fourfold meaning. One cannot therefore exclude the possibility that the wizard Nabokov had more than one writer in mind when he invented the name ‘Osberg’ – which would even fit quite well, if we only think of Osram.78

  One can exclude it even less in that there is no end to name-play after Ada. In Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, the travesty of an autobiography, Humbert and Lolita appear under other names. The narrator, Vadim, is called Dumbert Dumbert; the eleven-year-old girl on his lap, with whom he meets and falls in love in 1933, is called, like Lolita, ‘Dolly’.79 Dolly’s surname is ‘von Borg’ – the aristocratic prefix von retained in the English original. Had it been Nabokov’s aim to divide his interpreters once again into camps, he could not have found a more appropriate name. For as naturally as the question arises – is someone juggling with the hot potato of a certain aristocratic name here? – comes the equally prompt retort from the other side: but no, ‘von Borg’ is once again Borges, this time not shaken into an anagram, but castrated.

  The ambiguity is not to be resolved. Matters would remain there, had not Nabokov brought still other names into play. Dolly von Borg has a pseudo-double called ‘Dalberg’ – last syllable and stress as in the original.80 That seems, in total, a bit much: the names of the generals in The Waltz Invention that all end in -berg (at a time when Nabokov had never heard of Borges), then Osberg, von Borg, Dalberg, and all linked to Lolita.

  Supporters of the third hypothesis have strong evidence on their side. Yet the answer it delivers poses a cluster of new questions, the central one of which is: why? For a theme that pounded and gnawed within him for so long, Nabokov certainly had no need of Heinz von Lichberg. As for artistic respect for him, he had – or would have had – equally little. It is one thing to allude to Proust, Poe or Pushkin, to Shakespeare, Flaubert or Joyce, to quote half-sentences or whole plots from them as rich linings to your own work. But what would be the point of embroidering into it an unknown author, and so paying reverence to him? This is the trickiest question in this whole affair, and the right answer may still be beyond us. If we do not believe in the huge, hundred-legged spider of coincidence, there is scarcely a way of avoiding the supposition of a somewhat more definite acquaintance between Nabokov and the author of The Accursed Gioconda. There are many possibilities here – too many even to be delimited.81 Something may have linked Sirin to Herr von Lichberg, though it would certainly not have been sympathy. Just as in his novels he almost compulsively – and careless even of costs to his narrative – had to introduce gibes at Freud or Dostoevsky and a dozen more of his pet aversions – most of whom, in one way or another, were not so entirely distant from him – so again and again he seems to have reverted to this German who wrote about a nymphet. Yet, we may ask, would he really have condescended so far as to take over Lichberg’s names? Or was he so completely confident that he was a snow-white gazelle and the other a donkey that he enjoyed playing with his wretched predecessor and allowing himself risky, triumphant, semi-private jokes at his expense?

  This suspicion becomes almost irresistible, if we read the film script of Lolita that Nabokov wrote in Hollywood in 1960, into which he smuggled little details that are not to be found in the novel. In one scene Lolita displays her dancing costume to the new tenant and spins charmingly around in front of him, until Humbert admonishes her: ‘Hold it, Lolita. No waltzes.’ A stage direction lets fall another name: ‘In the early light, a smile plays over her flickering lips, like that of a little Gioconda.’ Damned little Gioconda! Or this scene: Lolita, sitting with two girls by a swimming-pool, is asked: ‘Aren’t you kind of Spanish, Lolita? LOLITA (laughs, shrugging her shoulders)’. Once again we may ask: who is really laughing at whom here? But, as we can see, with such surmises we gradually leave the terrain of philology for that of psychology, where no certainties can be expected – least of all in the case of a writer who was not just an incalculable genius, but a genius of deception to boot.

  We should not deceive ourselves, then, that clarity is to be had where more than enough cloud-banks remain. This is no tall tale, but a story with many unresolved questions – for the time being, and possibly for ever. If the first issue of textual genesis were to be settled by some unequivocal proof, once and for all, the second and third, more sublime and more interesting questions would finally come into their own: what the Ur-Lolita
means for the status of Nabokov’s novel (not so much), whether it diminishes Nabokov’s rank as a writer (but no), whether we need to correct our image of him (slightly), whether we learn something from the two Lolitas about the interplay between high and light literature (absolutely), anything about his relationship to Germans (that too), anything about his art of controlling and sometimes misleading his admirers (certainly). Only one thing is sure: this is the story of an ugly duckling and a proud swan – but if this image smacks too much of a fairy-tale, it can be expressed more technically. Heinz von Lichberg busied himself in his Lolita, rather awkwardly, with linen, wood, paper and string. Vladimir Nabokov used similar materials. But out of them he fashioned a kite that would vanish into the clear blue air of literature.

  NOTES

  1 Stacy Schiff, Véra (Mrs Vladimir Nabokov), New York, Random House 1999, pp. 257–8.

  2 There follows this more detailed obituary: ‘Heinz von Eschwege-Lichberg was an equestrian. Horses were his great passion. He loved and had to ride. When as a cavalry officer he had to take off his uniform after the First World War, it was all but logical that he should have swung himself into the saddle of Pegasus to continue his charges. He went to Berlin, to Scherl-Verlag, where the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger offered him an ample arena in which to take his winged steed through every kind of exercise. Berlin and Berliners, with their brightness, warmth and cheek, became his journalistic loves; he depicted them with humour and sarcasm, but always with words from the heart and to the heart. He never denied the cavalier of the old school, who indeed exposed the many small weaknesses of his fellow human beings with the wisdom of a philosopher and made merry over them, but always had a forgiving smile to spare for them. He wanted to make people both gay and reflective. He took life extremely seriously – but not more seriously than was absolutely necessary. So he wandered as a humorous talker of ‘small things’ through the world of Berlin journalism, until the general call-up of 1936, when his vocation as a soldier beckoned him again. It was only after the collapse of the country that he mounted Pegasus again, this time in Lübeck, the town he thought closest to his Berlin. The reader of the Lübecker Nachrichten will long remember him as the author of many a local anecdote, vignette and report. Heinz von Eschwege-Lichberg never saw the city on the Spree he so loved again. Under its ruins there also lies a part of his heart. It may indeed be that longing for his old home deprived him of some of the resistance needed to overcome his last illness. …’ Lübecker Nachrichten, 16 March 1951.

  3 The Deutsche Bibliothek records his life-span as ‘1897–1937’, an error evidently caused by a confusion with the title Vier Jahrzehnte Typograph GmbH. 1897–1937. See Deutsche Bibliothek, Normdaten-CD-Rom: Personennamen, Stand: Juli 2003. His actual dates were 1890–1951.

  4 Heinz von Eschwege chose the pseudonym ‘Lichberg’ as one of the ancient aristocratic names of his family, connected to a hill near the town of Eschwege in Hesse called the ‘Leuchtberg’. Family legend had it that the hill was so named because it had once glowed with blood from battlefields around it (I owe this information to Stephan von Eschwege).

  5 Ernst von Eschwege was born in 1858 and died of wounds suffered in the first weeks of the First World War on 4 February 1915 in Cologne. In 1909 he commanded the Third Brandenburger Rifle Battalion in Lübben, in 1911 he served as lieutenant-colonel on the staff of the Graf Kirchbach Regiment in Poznan, and after 1913 as colonel in command of the Fifth Westphalian Infantry Regiment in Cologne. (My thanks to Professor Christian Scheer of Bonn for this information.) Heinz von Eschwege lost his mother when he was seven.

  6 Vom Narrenspiegel der Seele. Gedichte, Falken-Verlag, Darmstadt 1917. Three years later appeared Die große Frau. Kleinigkeiten aus dem Leben einiger Menschen, Schahin Verlag, Darmstadt 1920.

  7 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Penguin Books, New York 1997, p. 312; hereafter Lolita.

  8 Lolita has even been called a ‘meme’, in Richard Dawkins’s controversial neologism. ‘Every now and again, someone adds a concept to the human meme-pool. Many of these were first postulated in scientific works, but some spring from works of fiction’ – among them the pre-pubescent nymphet Lolita. See Sandy Klein, 25 September 2001: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/360/A613054.

  9 It even contains the note: ‘American copyright by Falken-Verlag, Darmstadt, Germany, 1916’.

  10 As late as 1975, you could still buy it for 50 pfenning in a second-hand bookstore in Berlin. In the 1920s and 1930s it must have been quite generally available. Today it is to be found only in a few university libraries. I would like to express my thanks to Herr Rainer Schelling, to whom I owe the first indication of the nymph slumbering in this book.

  11 Lolita, p. 39.

  12 See Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle; McGraw-Hill, New York 1969, p. 361. Van Veen adds: ‘ “Tell me”, says Osberg’s little gitana to the Moors, El Motela and Ramera, “what is the precise minimum of hairs on a body that allows one to call it “hairy”?’ We will hear more of Osberg’s gipsies later on.

  13 Dieter E. Zimmer, Nabokovs Berlin, Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2001, p. 140.

  14 See Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1999, p. 270.

  15 See Schiff, Véra, p. 59. Véra, who worked as a secretary and stenographer in Berlin, spoke fluent German; given the close literary communication between the couple, her command of the language should be borne in mind.

  16 Schiff, Véra, p. 93 and note.

  17 In February 1944 Nabokov wrote to Mrs Theodore Sherwood: ‘I have read with interest the account of your German studies – I liked the bit about Goethe – but the end has puzzled me greatly. I have lived in Germany for 17 years [sic] and am quite sure Gretchen has been thoroughly consoled by the secondhand, somewhat blood-stained, but still quite wearable frocks that her soldier friend sent her from the Polish ghettos. No, I am afraid we shall never see the Bernard statue in a German impersonation. It is useless looking at a hyena and hoping that one day domestication or a benevolent gene will turn the creature into a great soft purring tortoiseshell cat. Gelding and Mendelism, alas, have their limits. Let us chloroform it – and forget.’ Vladimir Nabokov. Selected Letters 1940–1977, ed. by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego/New York 1989, p. 47. What is remarkable in this letter is less the understandable hatred it expresses than the way Nabokov has adjusted mimetically to the mental patterns of those he hated. A group X is truly and genetically evil, belongs to the animal world, and should be wiped out. It is clear that the writer of such a letter no longer wanted to know – or to have known – much about the language and literature of those hyenas. In October 1945 he wrote to a school-friend living in Palestine: ‘Whole Germany must be burnt to ashes several times in a row in order to quench my hatred for it at least slightly, when I am thinking of those perished in Poland.’ (Communication of Yuri Leving to the Internet-Forum Nabokv-L [sic] of 16 May 2004; the original is in a private collection.)

  18 His book-length commentary on Evgenii Onegin alone reveals, time and again, a level of knowledge of them that not every Germanist could display.

  19 For Heine, Goethe, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Freud, see, inter alia, Vladimir Nabokov, Eigensinnige Ansichten, ed. Dieter E. Zimmer, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2004: Gesammelte Werke, vol. XXI, pp 172, 576.

  20 See Das Bastardzeichen, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1990, Gesammelte Werke, vol. VII, p 322. He who can, if necessary, himself repair the blunders in a translation must indeed have at least quite a good knowledge of the target language. Véra later checked the first German translation of Lolita, which she found too prudish, preferring – for example – to render ‘haunches’ as Gesäß rather than Hüften.

  21 The tale in question was ‘The Reunion’ (1931). See Zimmer, Nabokovs Berlin, p. 140.

  22 If Da Vinci were deprived of his sight, he would still be great, whereas if Hitler were deprived of his cannon, he would be a ‘mere nonentity’. See
Brian Boyd, The American Years, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1991, p. 99.

  23 See The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1995, p. 644.

  24 Stories, p. 170. ‘A Nursery Tale’ is not the sort of fable the brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen would have dreamt of. Its elegantly handled plot plays with a classic male fantasy. The devil offers to fulfil the timid Erwin’s secret erotic dreams. He has a day in which, by mental command, he can select an unlimited number of girls to be his playmates. The only condition is that the sum of those chosen must come to an uneven number. Erwin spends the day in pleasurable recruitment, but spoils it at the last minute by choosing the same girl twice, so shrinking his thirteen elect back to twelve. The object of his fatal mistake is the pre-Lolita.

  25 Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian Years 1899–1940, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1990, p 259. From the outset, with her first entrance in his work, the nymphet reveals demonic-fantasmagoric traits, to which the young author still unguardedly refers. At the end of the story Erwin is summoned by the devil at midnight to ‘Hoffmann Street’. There is no missing Nabokov’s allusion: the German Romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tales imperceptibly interweave dream and demonic reality. From this literary signal-mast there runs a silken thread to the German ‘Lolita’. In its very first sentence, Lichberg’s tale indicates the model in whose tradition it saw itself: ‘Someone threw the name of E.T.A. Hoffmann into the conversation.’ The thread should not be overloaded: the most probable time for a (hypothetical) reading of Lichberg by Nabokov is the early 1930s.