I confess that Michael Maar’s discovery about Lolita has become an obsession of mine. I’ve no solution to offer, and to be quite frank, I don’t even have a convincing theory; but at the same time I can’t accept that the riddle is unsolvable. Of course, for people uninterested in the labyrinthine art and adventurous life of Vladimir Nabokov, this doesn’t matter – but for a Nabokov-lover, Maar’s discovery is so astonishing that you would need to have firmly opted for ignorance to maintain it was unimportant.
I won’t describe Maar’s impressive detective work here; you can read it for yourself in his own elegant prose. I’d just like to mention two things that are always brought up in connection with it. First of all, the whole business could of course be pure accident. In theory this wouldn’t be impossible. It could be accidental that two central characters in works by two writers unknown to one another are called Lolita; it could be pure chance that each is a landlady’s daughter, and it could likewise be by chance that both authors wrote stories in which an inventor presents a minister of war with a weapon of mass destruction, and introduced two closely related men called Waltz, a name which is not exactly common. In pure logic, there is nothing against this. But it is certainly improbable – so improbable that almost any other hypothesis is more likely. Besides, Maar discovered after the first publication of this book (there is a footnote on this in the new edition) that Lichberg was related to Nabokov’s Berlin landlady – a woman whose family is still mentioned in Nabokov’s letters to his wife Véra years after he moved from the house. And so, to put it very cautiously, it is at least not absurd to assume there is a causal connection.
Secondly, wherever this causal connection may lie, it has nothing to do with plagiarism. This should go without saying, but still needs to be stated loud and clear. When Maar published his discovery for the first time, newspapers across the world reported ‘accusations of cribbing’ against Vladimir Nabokov. As was only to be expected, a few Nabokov experts felt themselves moved by a kind of reflex to defend the great man against an accusation that no one had actually made – most of them simply saying that Lolita was after all a common name, and failing to mention the many other coincidences: ‘Nabokov family rejects plagiarism claim’ was a headline in the Guardian in April 2004. When in April 2016, in an interview for the online edition of the Paris Review, I asked Michael Maar, ‘Is this about plagiarism?’ he answered, ‘Of course not.’ And yet more than one literary magazine referred to this discussion, reprinted here as Appendix II, with the outcry that a German literary critic was raising accusations of plagiarism against Nabokov. It seems as if the concept ‘plagiarism’ is so strong that it overrides any logical operator, any qualification, even a clear denial.
Superfluous as this is, it must therefore be restated: What Maar discovered not only has nothing to do with plagiarism, but is its very opposite. If I name a character in a novel ‘Leopold Bloom’, I am not plagiarizing James Joyce’s Ulysses: I am deliberately referencing it. Had Nabokov simply been inspired by the (bad) novelist Lichberg, it would have been easy for him to cover his tracks. But given an essential aspect of the concordance lies precisely in the characters’ names, we have by definition not theft but rather deliberate indication.
But for whom is this indication designed? And why? Neither in personal nor artistic terms do we find anything about Lichberg that might have influenced or even interested the uncompromising master Nabokov. What is it we are overlooking, then? What is there that we don’t know? A reference is an act of communication, but with whom was Nabokov communicating here, given that Lichberg had long been dead when Lolita was published, and his book had been out of print for years? Communication with spirits may well be an important theme in Nabokov, but here we would be in the realm of pure speculation.
And if we simply shrug our shoulders and say: ‘I don’t care!’? The urge to do so would certainly be understandable. If a similar question had arisen with Hemingway or Hamsun, it would indeed have been a matter of indifference; but Nabokov is precisely the key author of the cipher, the grand master of reference, the very one out of all novelists of classic modernity who signals most tirelessly to the reader that in his work every detail is important and needs deciphering.
And so we are supposed to solve the mystery; Nabokov himself schooled us to do so with his understanding of literary works as highly complex puzzles. What then are we to do? We can at least, while awaiting new discoveries and new detectives, read Michael Maar’s book and bear the confusion it arouses in us with stoical curiosity.