EDNOTE. Dr. Zimmer is the leading authority on Nabokov in Germany.
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Subject: Zimmer in the TLS

TImes Literary Supplement April 23 2004, Letters to the Editor (p. 15):


Nabokov and the lending library

Sir, - Michael Maar is not to be blamed for the widespread allegations of plagiarism levelled against Vladimir Nabokov that have followed German and English publication of Maar's researches into "the first Lolita" (Commentary, April 2). But he should have foreseen what would happen, and should not have emphasized the vague parallels between Heinz von Lichberg's and Nabokov's Lolita without emphasizing the much greater differences.
Lichberg's Lolita Ancosta is a young woman of, I would guess, between fifteen and eighteen, working as a housemaid in her father's Alicante inn, not a child of eleven. There is no hint that the age difference between her and the narrator is a problem for anybody. There is no mother to marry in order to gain access to the daughter. Her father does not seem to mind her having an affair with his lodger. The narrator enjoys her lovemaking for a few weeks but is not exactly infatuated with her and quite glad to get away, obviously because her crush on him has become a nuisance. In the end she dies, but not because the narrator interfered with her life either directly or indirectly..  He does not rob her of her childhood, or of anything.  It is rather the other way around.  Even if she bites, she is no demon, no witch, no belle dame sans merci, not in her own eyes, nor in the eyes of her lover, but rather the poor victim of some sort of Gothic demonism.
Mr Maar has offered three possible explanations for the "resemblances" between Lichberg's and Nabokov's Lolita stories: coincidence, deliberate plagiarism, or some sort of unconscious fermentation.  Excluding plagiarism and coincidence, he himself opted for the third hypothesis, arguing that Nabokov must have known Lichberg's story and that somehow it worked its way into his 1955 novel. It eludes me how the fact that for some time they both lived in the same city of 4.5 million people should have facilitated their meeting or the reading of each other's books. Brian Boyd tells us (Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian years) that Nabokov remembered meeting Kafka on the Berlin tram he used when he went to see his fiancée Miss Siewert in Lichterfelde: "One could not forget that face, its pallor, the tightness of the skin, those most extraordinary eyes, hypnotic eyes glowing in a cave. Years later when I first saw a photo of Kafka I recognized him immediately." However, Kafka arrived in Berlin only after Nabokov's engagement was broken, and lived on Grunewaldstrasse, which was not on the way from Nabokov's pension in Lichterfelde. That reminiscence was a fabrication, perhaps a deliberate one. I am wary of all allegations that Nabokov purposefully misled his readers in maintaining that his German was poor while it actually was fluent; he may well have been influenced by all kinds of German writers (this claim was made by Nabokov's first biographer, Andrew Field). But, certainly, it would have been sufficient to get the gist of Lichberg's story (which is mercifully short). But I don't see Nabokov avidly reading a story so shoddy that he wouldn't have read it even if his German had been better. Nabokov simply was not interested in German literature or in Germany as a whole and would not have wasted his time on a third-rate piece of German writing.
So it seems unlikely to me that he knew the story. Maar claims that he perhaps did and then forgot about it, but that it somehow survived in his subconscious and some thirty years later the memory rose towards the surface and made him work a few elements from Lichberg's plot into his novel in progress, renaming his "Juanita" Lolita. The unconscious, of course, is a very pliable medium. You may fill it with anything you wish, and as nobody can ever prove the contrary, you're always on the safe side. It's hard enough to prove that somebody knew a book he never talked about, but it is utterly impossible to prove that he did not know it.
I am surprised nobody so far seems to have thought up a fourth possibility, one that would be much more in line with Nabokov, especially with his ideas on mimicry. It would go like this: one day Nabokov was laid up with the flu and somebody brought him a pile of ill-assorted German books from the Russian-German lending library he frequented on Passauerstrasse. As at that moment he had nothing better to do, he sleepily and disgustedly browsed through them. When he got to a story entitled "Lolita" by one Heinz von Lichberg, however, he was alerted. It struck him so deeply that he decided to write a Lolita of his own. To this purpose he preserved all its detail in his (perfectly conscious) memory for future use. When he finally carried out the plan thirty years later, after hinting at it several times in various other works, he thought it only fair gratefully to remember the originator of the idea. There would be an acknowledgement, not an open one but a Nabokovian one. So he purposefully called his girl Lolita, hoping that some day somebody as clever as Michael Maar would discover the resemblance, along with a number of other much subtler and slighter resemblances he had wilfully planted. For Nabokov considered the discovery of overlapping patterns arranged by some higher creative force a sublime joy, and was intent on delivering his readers this kind of aesthetic bliss wherever he saw the chance.

DIETER E: ZIMMER

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