Shvabrin, Stanislav. “The ‘Long Way ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ Has Gone: Aleksandr Blok’s The Twelve, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita–and John Keats.” 2024.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in the voice of a Swiss citizen of mixed French, Austrian, and English descent with precious little awareness of anything Russian. Alien as they may be to the novel’s protagonist, Russian concerns are very much on the mind of its author. Using archival research, this study discloses one tangible way in which Lolita integrates Nabokov’s Russian cultural heritage by responding to Aleksandr Blok through the mediation of John Keats.

Blok’s poetry became a formative impression of Nabokov’s youth; his discovery of Keats left a lasting mark on his literary sensibility. It is well known that a Russian translator of Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Nabokov infused Lolita with references to the ballad. The study unlocks a hitherto unknown subtext of these Keatsian references: their close association not only with Blok, but with Nabokov’s conflicted attitude toward Blok’s narrative poem The Twelve.