by Michael Maar
26 The Gift, p. 186. Those shadows under the eyes had also made an impression on Lichberg’s narrator. In The Gift, the landlord has not just stumbled on this Dostoevskyan story; it is his own. He has made approaches to the young Zina; his marriage is a failure; perhaps he only married the mother to be around the daughter.
27 See The Annotated Lolita, Edited, with Preface, Introduction and Notes by Alfred Appel, Jr, Vintage, New York 1991, p. 358; hereafter Appel.
28 In the foreword to the novel, the fictive John Ray explains that he has altered the surname ‘Haze’, but the first name was ‘too closely interwound with the inmost fibre of the book to allow one to alter it’: Lolita, p. 4. In his Playboy interview Nabokov declared: ‘For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L”. The suffix “-ita” has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita.’ Strong Opinions, Vintage, New York 1990, p. 25. There was another external reason for the name to be remembered: ‘Dolores’, as the baptismal name from which Lola-Lolita is derived, was also the toponym of the town in Colorado near which Nabokov caught the first female specimen of Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov: see Appel, p 333. Still, we get from Dolores to Lolita only if we already know the latter; and we do not get to Lolita via considerations on the lyricism of the letter L. Maurice Couturier, the editor of the Pléiade edition of Nabokov, points to two French texts in which the name Lolita likewise appears: En villégiature. Lolita, by Isidore Gès (1894) and La Chanson de Lolita, by René Riche (1920), related to Pierre Louys’s nymph-celebrating Chanson de Bilitis (1894). An astounding anticipation of Humbert’s opening passage can also be found in Valéry Larbaud’s Des prénoms féminins (1927), where the names Dolores, Lola and Lolita are declined in their specific connotations. (Communication of 2 April 2004 to the Nabokov-Forum Nabokv-L.)
29 Charlotte Haze spent her honeymoon in Mexico, hence Lolita’s name. For the white, Protestant middle class of 1935 the choice of name remains unusual. This was also the view of Charles Kinbote, who annotated John Shade’s lines ‘It was a year of tempests. Hurricane/Lolita swept from Florida to Maine’ with the comment: ‘Why our poet chose to give his 1958 hurricane a little-used Spanish name (sometimes given to parrots) instead of Linda or Lois, is not clear’: Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, Vintage Books, New York 1989, pp. 49, 191.
30 See Appel, p 332; Lolita, p. 37.
31 Strong Opinions, p. 25.
32 Lolita, pp. 135, 180.
33 Ibid., p. 15. A Spanish aroma also, of course, surrounds Mérimée’s Carmen, often evoked by Humbert. In Ada Lolita appears as an ‘Andalusian gypsy’ (cf. Appel, pp. 328, 358 and below).
34 Lolita, p. 167.
35 Annabella enjoys sunning herself, like Lolita; there are male jokes about her talent at riding (p. 17); she is called a ‘tactless virgin’ and ‘the hussy!’ (p. 70); ‘a promised kiss’ emerges: ‘open mouth and closed eyes’ (p. 70).
36 The invention of the infernal machine that gives its title to the play ‘is the work of a cousin of mine, a grey bearded man, also called Waltz, Walter Waltz, Walt Waltz, a genius, a super-genius!’. The name Walzer appears, of course, in the Russian original as Vals and in the American as Waltz. Izobretenie Val’sa was published in November 1938 in the Russian exile journal Russkie zapiski. Dmitri Nabokov translated his father’s last play in 1966 under the title The Waltz Invention (Phaedra, New York 1966). On both occasions the double meaning of the name, as also the term for the German dance, was preserved. ‘The name is only good for a dance’, says the Minister as he listens to Waltz. In his later English foreword Nabokov underlined the double entendre of the title, ‘which means not only the invention of Vals (or Valse), but also “the invention of the waltz.” ‘
37 A device from which the young Nabokov himself did not always abstain, as the beginning of ‘The Passenger’, a tale of 1927 – Nabokov was then three years older than Lichberg when he wrote The Accursed Gioconda – shows: ‘ “Yes, Life is more talented than we”, sighed the writer, tapping the cardboard mouthpiece of his Russian cigarette against the lid of his case. “The plots Life thinks up now and then! How can we compete with that goddess? Her works are untranslatable, indescribable.” “Copyright by the author”, suggested the critic, smiling …’: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, p. 183.
38 Ada also wears such a Spanish shawl, which certainly goes with the airy black skirt called a lolita in the novel: Ada pp. 77, 488–9.
39 Humbert Humbert, par contre, has no blossom in mind when he recounts his first night with Lolita and inquires rhetorically of his jurors: ‘Did I deprive her of her flower?’ (Lolita, p. 135) There is an obscene variant of the bloody flower in the scene of Humbert’s last evening with Lolita before her illness and flight: ‘I undressed her. … Her brown rose tasted of blood’ (p. 240).
40 As had been an earlier dream of the narrator, in which he foresees, while still in South Germany, the pension in Alicante. This micro-theme, too, would have greatly interested Nabokov. Prophetic or synchronic dreams are a theme he repeatedly wove into his fiction, and sought to research in life with the same seriousness as J.W. Dunne, whose Experiment with Time he took as an example in keeping a dream diary.
41 Appel is right to call Lolita a book ‘about the spell exerted by the past’ (Appel, p. xxiii). The mythic succession of Lolas–Lolitas projected by Heinz von Lichberg also lurks in Humbert’s thoughts, as he imagines Lolita’s granddaughter, Lolita the Third, as a future playmate: Lolita, p. 174.
42 Lolita, pp. 55–6.
43 Ibid., pp. 16, 139.
44 In Lichberg there is even a precise time-span for the working of the spell. When the narrator parts from Lolita, she bites him in the hand with all the strength of her little mouth. ‘These scars of love’, confesses the casualty to his listeners, ‘have remained indelible even twenty-five years later.’ We encounter the same interval when Humbert, in a shock of anagnorisis, sees Lolita for the first time – his re-embodied first love, from whose spell he has never escaped: ‘The twenty-five years I have lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.’
45 Nabokov confirmed the unreal, oneiric character of Humbert’s murder scene privately, in a letter that speaks of its ‘dream-distortion’: Selected Letters, p. 408.
46 Lolita, p. 297.
47 ‘Then I pulled out my automatic – I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me to do it’: Lolita, p. 280.
48 Lolita, pp. 161, 163–4.
49 The other reporter of this historic experience was the SA-Sturmführer Wulf Bley, http://www.swr.de/zeitenwende/galerie/moments/1930–1939.html: Moments of History. Eine Komposition der Erinnerung. http://www.jacobasch.de/artike17.htm: 75 Jahre deutscher Rundfunk.
50 Letter of 1 February 1934 to the editorial board of the Völkische Beobachter, for the attention of retired Captain Weiss; original in Bundesarchiv.
51 A brief exchange of letters between Lichberg and Grimm, author of the notorious novel Volk ohne Raum and later President of the Writers’ Association under the Third Reich, together with whom he had served in the Naval Artillery during the First World War, is preserved in literary archives at Marbach. Von Eschwege was a direct descendant of the Grimm brothers (his father, Ernst, was a grandson of the painter Ludwig Emil Grimm), but he was not related to Hans Grimm.
52 For just a small impression: Von Lichberg’s first-person narrator, Peter Andresen, walks through the streets of the Jewish district. ‘Against the doors of the dirty shops leant Hebrews, old men with ringlets – one grabbed at my sleeve, wanted to take me inside and blabber something at me. Scarcely had I freed myself from him than the next one seized on me, a young grinning Galician with gold incisors and a greasy tie. I looked at his grubby hands, sausage-like fingers with their torn, blackened nails. I did not really want him to clean his filthy fingers on the sleeve of my light-coloured suit. “Let go!” I said. He grinned still more pressi
ngly. His mouth widened from one ear to the another. Two of his upper right molars were missing, only blackish stumps were to be seen. But his eyes became sad. He did not let go. A waterfall of words, and a repulsive sort of smell, flowed from his mouth. “Let go!” I said. “Immediately!” He squinted quickly at my hands, and when he saw my fists, released me. But when I took a step further, he unleashed a flood of venomous curses at me. Out of every door men like him immediately appeared’ (Nantucket-Feuerschiff, Scherl-Verlag, Berlin 1935, p. 92). Elsewhere a certain Carsten, who has moved to New York and is praised for his decency by the narrator, confesses his nostalgia for Germany: ‘I would really like to go back, if I had the wherewithal to do so. Here nothing’s happening any more. There will be one crash after another and then everything will go bust. The good times are over. The big-shots are in the saddle and are completely wrecking the country. There’s nothing but bribery, blood-sucking, intrigue. All that flourishes are artificial flowers. What we need here is a very strong man – if one here were even enough – to put all the stockjobbers and the rest of the rabble against the wall.’ Andresen replies: ‘Whom are you talking to? What we need in Germany is the same strong man – though we have to struggle not only against the riffraff in our own country, but the crazy arrogance of our enemies abroad. When one just thinks of disarmament and Versailles –’ (ibid., p. 135). This is supposed to be said in 1930, and so, apart from anything else, has the haut-goût of prophecy after the event; by 1935 the strong man was in power and the firing squads were at work. In 1934 even a close relative of Lichberg had fallen victim to the regime: Von Papen’s press spokesman Herbert von Bose, who was betrayed in his attempt to get Hindenburg to oust Hitler from his post as Chancellor of the Reich.
53 Lolita, p. 76.
54 An indication is that Lichberg’s membership of the NSDAP lapsed on 23 June 1938; this was customary on transfer to service in the Wehrmacht, where officers could not be Party members. Canaris had created Abteilung II of the Abwehr just three weeks earlier. This section – responsible for sabotage, provocation, liaison with Volkdeutsche groups, and propaganda – was headed by Colonel Helmut Groscurth.
55 In Groscurth’s service diary, the entry for 5 December 1939 notes: ‘Conversation with Major von Xylander and Captain von Eschwege about propaganda against North Africans’, presumably in the detachments of the French Army: Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers 1939–1940 (ed. Helmut Krausnick and Harold Deutsch), p. 314.
56 Service data kindly supplied by the Deutsche Dienststelle (WASt), Berlin.
57 My thanks for this information to Jürgen von Bose. Martha (Tilly) Küster, born in Charlottenburg, Berlin, married Heinz von Eschwege in 1921. See Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels. Adelige Häuser A, Limburg an der Lahn 1960, vol. iv, p. 344.
58 The possibility of some oral report of the book to Nabokov, raised by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in Der Spiegel, is not very plausible (still less the grounds advanced for it, which betray a certain déformation professionelle, namely the idea that on his arrival in Berlin Nabokov’s German was not good enough to read it – forgetting that non-reviewers can even read books that are ten or twenty years old). If someone had merely recounted the story to Nabokov, they would certainly not have entered into its details, would have ignored the names in it, and would have been unlikely to single out the nymphet as its core theme. To register the latter, which can be overlooked, a sensibility like that at work in ‘A Nursery Tale’ was required.
59 In earlier articles, the enumeration of possibilities above differed – the second and third being explored in reverse order from that here. Through constant sifting of further grains of rice – that is, small, hard beads of evidence – the balance of the argument almost imperceptibly shifted.
60 In the very nature of things, cryptomnesia is hard to prove after the event and still harder to refute, so arguments appealing to it do not meet an important Popperian test. The world would be simpler if it permitted only phenomena that fitted snugly into falsifiable theories; unfortunately, not all phenomena take the trouble to do so. Cryptomnesia is seldom retrospectively provable, but the Musil scholar Karl Corino has recently given us an attested example. After a third reading of Jacobsen’s Niels Lyhne, Robert Musil came upon a passage in his own Man Without Qualities, a conversation between Ulrich and Agathe, that was plainly influenced by the work of his Danish colleague. ‘Rereading Niels Lyhne, Musil had completely forgotten the plot, but on a closer analysis was forced to acknowledge that an analogous situation in the Danish novel “had served him as a model”, without him being aware of it. “So if we exclude a coincidence, we might say that some twenty years later this memory worked its effect”, commented Musil in his diary.’ See Karl Corino, ‘Die doppelte Lolita’. In Thomas Mann’s diaries there are similar scenes of re-recognition. That rediscovery of what was forgotten is itself typically a matter of chance makes proof of cryptomnesia in general all the more difficult.
61 Eigensinnige Ansichten, p. 46.
62 There are, of course, mixed forms. At point in time A, Nabokov could have been conscious of source X that had trickled away by a later point, B.
63 A nice résumé of what is to be found only in Lolita and in no preceding work is offered, together with a possible source in Bunin, by Tom Bolt in a letter to the Nabokv-L forum of 26 May 2004. Whatever the similarities of plot, in Bunin there is ‘no Quilty and no Catullus, no Aztec red convertible, no McFate, no Blue Licks obelisk, no Kasbeam barber, no sign of the Tigermoth, no small matter-of-fact voice, no big pink bubble with juvenile connotations, no lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country’.
64 ‘The red sweater and grey went up to the window and actually leant out, becoming identical twins’: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, p. 357.
65 ‘The New Neighbour’ is a forerunner of the 1937 tale ‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’, in which a shy Russian exile is tormented by a group of German travellers and – one possible reading – driven to suicide. The twist in the earlier tale is the false lead that Nabokov lays, letting the reader believe that the dreamy night owl Romantkowski is a writer, perhaps a novelist, in any case not the leonardo – that is, counterfeiter – that the English title of the story already betrays him to be. The now suggestive association Leonardo – Gioconda was not yet possible in 1933; Nabokov first encountered the slang term ‘leonardo’ for a forger in the 1970s, when he rendered the tale into English with his son: Stories, p. 649.
66 Stories, p. 357.
67 Ibid., p. 649. The assertion is untypical for Nabokov, who always resisted the imputation of direct political references in his work, even when they were plain for all to see, as in Bend Sinister.
68 See his foreword to the English-language edition of 1966.
69 The Waltz Invention, p. 81.
70 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
71 As apt a symbol of the difference between the two authors as anyone could find.
72 ‘Hump: an undersized mute – a servant; a general and herald; a sports-instructor’ reads his description in the Dramatis Personae of the play. The use of droll names, overworked by Nabokov, is already there in Lichberg. In revising the play, Nabokov dropped the idea of deriving the name of the eleven generals from the ‘mountain’ [Berg].
73 Lichberg’s ‘Atomit’ was less prophetic; the idea of gas warfare was familiar to every soldier in the First World War. It also plays a brief but dramatic role in a Russian novel that could be another source for The Waltz Invention, since it too deals with the invention of a new-fangled weapon capable of annihilating from afar. Its author was Alexei Tolstoy, whose bestseller The Garin Death Ray was published in 1927, with an enlarged and revised edition appearing in 1938, thus just prior to the publication of Izobretenie Val’sa. Nabokov was personally acquainted with the author, who had frequented his father’s house in Berlin and whose openly pro-Soviet attitude he detested. Virtually everything in Tolstoy’s novel, in which noble-minded Bolsheviks heroically save the world from the Dostoevskyan genius Garin and a wicked Amer
ican chemical tycoon, would have disgusted him – which does not mean he never read the book: it is very probable that he did. In Tolstoy, who was technically much more informed than Salvator Waltz, the atom bomb is at least conversationally anticipated. Garin’s actual invention is yet more prophetic than Waltz’s, a kind of long-distance laser that prefigures Star Wars. The element of plot similarity is the idea that world domination is to be achieved with the help of an ingenious long-distance weapon. But Tolstoy’s novel lacks any of the scenic details that The Waltz Invention has in common with ‘Atomit’. The ending of the novel, on the other hand, which depicts the flight of the dictator Garin from his palace, vaguely resembles Kinbote’s flight from Zembla in Pale Fire. That one of Garin’s doppelgänger is a ‘Baron Korf’ would have amused Nabokov, who devotes some pages of his autobiography to the family of his German great-grandfather, Baron Ferdinand von Korff. (I would like to thank Tatiana Ponomareva, director of the Nabokov museum in St Petersburg, for drawing Alexei Tolstoy’s novel to my attention.)
74 This Annabella, in no way a secondary character, procures the key to the whole play. She is, in effect, subtly equated with Waltz/Walzer’s invention. She too is only ‘more or less real’, as the Dramatis Personae tells us. When the deluded inventor presses her father for her whereabouts, he is told: ‘Don’t bother to search; she is just as well hidden as your machine.’ Girl and invention have the same, twice-mentioned top price. Waltz/Walzer is offered two million for his weapon: ‘one million before delivery and one million after’. In the next act, he in turn offers two million for Annabella; ‘one right now, the other on delivery’. The girl, in other words, is the real delusion, and the hellish machine, as he confesses in his final outburst, ‘is with me, in my pocket, in my breast’: The Waltz Invention, pp. 63, 108, 111.