Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0009568, Mon, 5 Apr 2004 09:39:22 -0700

Subject
Fw: Maar's TLS article available
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mary Bellino" <iambe@rcn.com>
> A longish excerpt from Michael Maar's TLS article (the issue
> is due out tomorrow) is now available at the TLS website:
> http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2106863
>
> The excerpt comprises the first 2200 words of the article.
> Maar describes and quotes from the German "Lolita" and gives
> a short bio of Lichberg/ von Eschwege together with some
> musings on the state of VN's German and his period of
> residence in Berlin. There is a brief comparison of the two
> works, which presumably is extended in the remainder of the article.
>
> Maar nowhere suggests that VN plagiarized Lichberg; his
> statement on the matter is "[C]an Vladimir Nabokov, the
> author of the imperishable Lolita, the proud black swan of
> modern fiction, have known of the ugly duckling that was its
> precursor? Could he - if only unconsciously, since a
> conscious quotation would presumably have been unthinkable,
> - have been under its stimulus?" Maar seems fairly well up
> on Nabokov scholarship, citing VN's 1947 Guggenheim
> application and summarizing other instances of his possible
> use of German sources ("Material for his novel Despair came
> from German newspapers and in one of his stories he took a
> side-swipe at Leonhard Frank's novel Bruder und Schwester,
> occasionally regarded as a source of Ada").
>
> Mary
>