The Two Lolitas

[John Doe]

Very cool...I'm surprised scholars didn't discover the
connection, if any, to Heinz von Eschwege soooner;when
I read that novel in high school I was most impresed
by Nabokov's writerly talents and found the premise
rather banal and ancient - there's nothing
particularly gripping about an older dude losing his
mind over a "nymphet"; that theme is as old as the
hills, and, being a guy who finds young women icky and
daft and has always been "hot for teacher" and
generally for women over 35, I found it
psychologically ludicrous...BUT, in Nabokov's
rendering, it seems ultimately to be about what
Humbert Humbert loses in himself more than what he
loses ex amore;and am very curious to see how Eschwege
angled it; since clearly such an obsession is not
about "love" but Lust...the question is, lust for
What, exactly?...I wouldn't be surprised if Nabokov
lifted the plot - he was more of an Architect of
stories than an Secreater like Kafka , say, who sort
of oozed out his stories more than deliberatley
"searched" for them...


--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> 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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