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Fw: creepy Lichbergism: a protracted nightmaar
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----- Original Message -----
From: alex
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:35 AM
Subject: creepy Lichbergism: a protracted nightmaar
So it appears now that the entire VN's oevre is teaming with allusions to/borrowings from the writings of Heinz von Lichberg, particularly his all-important short story "Lolita." I suggest therefore that a team of expert Nabokovians be organized to trace those borrowings in all the rest of VN novels, including The Gift, Pale Fire and Ada. And in the meantime, while we eagerly expect a couple of German dissertations on the subject to appear pretty soon, I would like to point out to their future authors that when Nabokov wrote his wonderful short story Korolyok (in 1933, I believe), he hadn't the faintest idea that the corresponding English slang term for "counterfeiter" would be Leonardo. I'm sorry to say it, but, at least initially, this story contained no allusions whatsoever to the author of La Gioconda. So, there hardly will be a connection between it and the accursed title of Lichberg's collection of stories.
Personally, I do not understand why the word "accursed" and the names "Anton Petrovich" and "Berg" in the first sentence of An Affair of Honor must all allude to the v. Lichberg story, but may be the said authors of future dissertations will explain it to me? Perhaps they will argue that as early as 1924 or 1925, when VN wrote Podlets (as the story is entitled in Russian), he already knew that he will write a major novel one day and call it Lolita, so he felt obliged to make a series of cryptic allusions to the short story of that same title, the short story that has already lapsed into obscurity by 1924 and might sink into total oblivion by the time his novel will be written at last? One couldn't really object to such an explanation.
To the list of VN's writings that, according to Ludger Tolksdorf, seem to contain references to Lichberg's "Lolita" (it also includes Cloud, Castle, Lake and The Waltz Invention) I myself would add Nabokov's English poem Lines Written in Oregon. Its last line, "Esmeralda immer, immer!" (I quote it from memory, but, I hope, correctly) is an unmistakable echo of the narrator's exclamation in the Lichberg story ("und immer - immer!"), isn't it? Moreover, Esmeralda can allude not only to a butterfly, but also (covertly) to a little gipsy girl in Hugo's novel. And many Gipsies are native to Spain...
Sehen Sie wie kompliziert kann das alles sein.
viele Gruesse aus St.-Petersburg,
Alexey Sklyarenko
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 6:00 AM
Subject: Leonardo. plus: An Affair of Honour".
EDNOTE. "Creeping Lichbergism"
----- Original Message -----
From: Ludger Tolksdorf
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Monday, May 10, 2004 11:04 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: Leonardo. plus: An Affair of Honour"
Dear list,
although I am not quite sure I know the difference in every case between correspondence, resemblance, adaptation, parallel, coincidence, recurrence, allusion, plagiarism, etc., I would like to report a find that could be of interest in the Lichberg debate. I don't particularly like the idea of Lichberg exerting so overarching an influence on Nabokov, but if the truth must be known, here it is: "An Affair of Honour" seems to display traces of Lichberg's "Lolita". Before I provide evidence, I would like to apologize for the length of my posting and for my objectionable use of language in case anybody finds it so. I apologize, too, if I missed any insinuations of irony in Michael Maar's and Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello's recent postings on resemblances between "The Leonardo" and Lichberg's "Lolita".
Whereas in "The Leonardo" it is the title itself that instantly rings the bell of Lichberg's collection (The Accursed Gioconda), in "An Affair of Honour" it is the first sentence that sets off the ringing: "The accursed [my italics, LT] day when Anton Petrovich made the acquaintance of Berg [...]." In addition to containing the word "accursed", this sentence not only features somebody called "Anton" (the reader may well ask what one of the greybeard brothers in Lichberg's "Lolita" is called), it even features someone called "Berg". I do not know whether the name "Berg" was sufficiently rare in Berlin in the 1920s (as rare, for instance, as "Walzer") to warrant the assumption of Nabokov cryptomnesially referencing Lichberg. Neither do I know what criteria Dr. Maar's TLS letter applies to Nabokov's Lolita's Spanish friend and her aristocrat father, but I tend to follow Dr. Maar's example and regard the use of the name "Berg" here as a tribute to Lichberg [my italics, LT]. Why else would Nabokov have included a character named "Henry" (the English equivalent of Lichberg's first name Heinz) in this story?
All this would still be too vague to support the assumption that Nabokov knew Lichberg's "Lolita", were it not for two additional facts. (1) In the frame narrative of Lichberg's "Lolita", countess Beate is originally about to consume food (an orange), and "An Affair of Honour" closes with Anton in the act of "woolfing gluttonously at a ham sandwich on which he immediately soiled his fingers and chin with the hanging margin of fat." (2) Like in Lolita and "Lolita", water features prominently in Nabokov's earlier story: not only when Berg is surprised in the bedroom by Anton, whose wife is having a bath, but also when Anton throws the gauntlet: "He pulled off the glove with a final yank and threw it awkwardly at Berg. The glove slapped against the wall and dropped into the washstand pitcher. 'Good shot,' said Berg."
So, among other things, "An Affair of Honour" deals with a duel, and in a slightly more literal sense even than "The Leonardo" with its "growing-scene". Although the prospective duelists are not a pair of metaphorical twins or even brothers, they are certainly quite a pair, and, like in Lichberg's "Lolita", the proposed duel is to be fought out over a woman. Unfortunately, Nabokov never lets the duel happen, but had he done so, it would probably have been as swell a scene as the swelling scene in "The Leonardo" or as gross a scene as the growing scene in Lichberg's "Lolita".
I am not quite sure as to what implications my find has for Nabokov scholarship, but I trust that a study tracing all the traces and explaining all the explanations will soon be written. (By the way, there were a couple of translation mistakes in the "Lolita" passage which Dr. Maar quoted yesterday: in the German version (1) the brothers' necks grow long and thin, instead of long and thick, and (2) as the brothers' arms grow in length, their jacket sleeves shoot up to their elbows, instead of bursting.) A cursory glance at, for instance, "Cloud, Castle, Lake" suggests that there must be hundreds of Lichberg influences strewn throughout Nabokov's writings: Vasiliy Ivanovitch, although only on a few days' pleasure trip which he originally thinks will be no more than a quiet holiday, calls on the landlord of an inn with a lake nearby and the Baltic only a few hundred kilometres away and is accompanied upstairs to look at a room. Like Humbert and Lichberg's narrator, Vasiliy is immediately bewitched and abandons any thought of departure: "Upstairs was a room for travelers. 'You know, I shall take it for the rest of my life [my italics, LT],' Vasiliy Ivanovitch is reported to have said as soon as he entered it. The room itself had nothing remarkable about it." Granted, there is not a single girl in the room, but there certainly is a castle at hand to remind the reader of Lichberg's Santa Barbara castle. Note also the ghostly echo in Vasiliy's utterance of Lichberg's narrator asking the castle's towers to give Lolita his love: "Grüßt sie von mir, grüßt sie im letzten Augenblick - und immer - immer!"
Best regards,
Ludger Tolksdorf