Some fascinating literary detective work about Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” in the (London) Times Literary Supplement (available on line only to TLS subscribers, unfortunately). It seems that in the 1920s, while Nabokov was living in Berlin, an aristocratic Berlin aesthete named Heinz von Lichberg published a short story about a nymphet and the middle-aged man who loses his heart to her: the story (and the nymphet) were named… “Lolita”. The Lichberg “Lolita” was soon forgotten, even in Germany, and although there is a huge secondary literature about Nabokov’s “Lolita”, apparently no one noticed the possible precursor until now.
The TLS sleuth, Michael Maar, suggests three possibilities about all this: (1) Pure coincidence — but the parallels and connections are so striking that it would be, if so, a truly amazing coincidence. Or (2) Nabokov saw Lichberg’s “Lolita” at the time, forgot about it at a conscious level, but developed it into his own — brilliant — “Lolita” decades later. Or (3) Nabokov consciously and knowingly borrowed (or even “borrowed”) from the obscure Lichberg. In a follow-up TLS piece, Maar points out what certainly looks like a sly, conscious allusion in Nabokov’s “Lolita” to Lichberg’s version: an allusion to details that appear in Lichberg’s tale but don’t otherwise have anything to do with Nabokov’s version. The implication is that Nabokov knew quite consciously what he was doing: adapting — without acknowledgement — the obscure Lichberg story and, to be fair, greatly improving upon it as a work of literature.
Heinz von Lichberg enters history one more time. On the day that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, there was a famous and deeply sinister nighttime torchlight parade of the triumphant Nazis through Berlin. The mass tochlight parade was important in conveying that there had been a true Nazi “Machtuebernehmung” — seizure of power — and that Hitler would be the dictator, not merely the Chancellor, of Germany. The parade was filmed at the time, and is a staple of film documentaries about the Third Reich. The German radio network broadcast nationwide live coverage of the parade at the time, and of Hitler reviewing his ecstatic supporters from the balcony of the Chancellery. Two radio announcers “anchored” the coverage, in tones of worshipful adulation of Hitler. (The two broadcasters went on, literally for hours, about how serene, dedicated, superhuman Hitler was…) One of the two broadcasters that night was… Heinz von Lichberg.
There is some evidence, although not much is really known, that Lichberg may have cooled on Nazism later in the 1930s. In any event, he was a Wehrmacht officer on the Russian front during the war. He died quietly in West Germany in the 1960s, without ever speaking up in any way about “Lolita”, although Nabokov’s book — published in 1955 — was by then a worldwide sensation.
A truly weird story.
Comments are closed.