Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0011750, Tue, 30 Aug 2005 15:13:37 -0700

Subject
Fwd: Re: Michael Maar's evidence on the Lolita/Lichberg
issue.
Date
Body
Dear Don and List

There is something that I cannot understand qua Michael Maar´s books on
Lolita and the influence over its plot by Lichberg´s own Lolita. Nabokov
constantly makes references to various authors pointing to their works,
poems, misapprehensions and serendipities. There is Turgenev, although in a
satyrical vein and, more reverently, Pushkin. There is Prosper Merrimée and
Chateaubriand, Byron and Plato. What makes VN´s putative use to certain
aspects of minor Lichberg´s opus so disturbing?
Jansy

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 12:13 PM
Subject: Michael Maar's evidence on the Lolita/Lichberg issue.


Michael Maar's new book on "Lolita and the German lieutenant" has appeared
in
Germany. The
edition features a reprint of Lichberg's "Lolita".
http://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/hp_2005_2/41716.htm

Maar presents new evidence for the intertextual relationship between
Lichberg's
Lolita from 1916
and Nabokov's masterpiece.
Maar slightly modifies his former thesis on cryptomnesia and suggests that
Nabokov may have
alluded to the Lichberg story by pointing mysteriously to a "spanish child
of an
aristocrate" in his
novel. In the screenplay for "Lolita" Nabokov even calls Lolita "Gioconda" -
von
Lichberg's collection
of stories bears the title "The Cursed Gioconda". Moreover, Maar discovered
in
the same collection
another short story by Lichberg ("Atomit") which anticipates the plot of
Nabokov's play "The Waltz
Invention".

Ulrich Schmid
Slavic Dept.
Ruhr-University Bochum

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