The Two Lolitas

[Dave Monroe]

A leading German scholar reveals the secret history of
Nabokov’s infamous novel.

Does it ring a bell? the first-person narrator, a
cultivated man of middle age, looks back on the story
of an amour fou. It all starts when, traveling abroad,
he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the
daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a pre-teen,
whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her
age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she
dies, and the narrator 
 marked by her forever 

remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title
of the story: Lolita.

Maar, Michael.  The Two Lolitas.
   Trans. Perry Anderson.  London and New York: Verso,
2005.

We know the girl and her story, and we know the title.
But the author was Heinz von Eschwege, whose tale of
Lolita appeared in 1916 under the pseudonym Heinz von
Lichberg, forty years before Nabokov’s celebrated
novel took the world by storm. Von Lichberg later
became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his
youthful work faded from view. The Two Lolitas
uncovers a remarkable series of parallels between the
two works and their authors. Did Vladimir Nabokov,
author of an imperishable Lolita who remained in
Berlin until 1937, know of von Lichberg’s tale? And if
so, did he adopt it consciously, or was this a classic
case of “cryptoamnesia,” with the earlier tale
existing for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged
memory?

In this extraordinary literary detective story,
Michael Maar casts new light on the making of one of
the most influential works of the twentieth century.

http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/m-titles/maar_m_two_lolitas.shtml

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