Could it have aroused a slumbering interest in Nabokov so early on? No doubt this curiosity was already wide awake: there are forerunners of Lolita in his work virtually from the start. In his short story ‘A Nursery Tale’ (1926), Nabokov had created a child-woman capable of turning the head of the hero. In the company of an old poet – in whom Nabokov retrospectively discovered, to his own astonishment, a prefiguration of Humbert23 – there sways past Erwin, who spins around to look at her, a child of around fourteen, in a low-cut black cocktail dress:
There was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl – the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt – one might suspect that her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice – and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.24
For his secret wishes are fulfilled by no less than the devil. Shining eyes, swinging hips – here, no doubt, is the first of a chain of pre-Lolitas that will henceforward be unbroken. She is still nameless, but already quite the fatal nymphet, as Nabokov would later term her.25 Next a child-woman leads the wretched Albinus of Laughter in the Dark to ruin. Not long afterwards appears the first sketch of the plot. He puts it into the mouth of an antipathetic secondary character in The Gift, the hero Fyodor’s landlord. ‘Ah, if only I had a tick or two,’ sighs the stepfather of the girl he will love – and the sigh is anything but innocent – ‘what a novel I would whip off!’:
Imagine this kind of thing: an old dog – but still in his prime, fiery, thirsting for happiness – gets to know a widow, and she has a daughter, still quite a little girl – you know what I mean – when nothing is formed yet but she has a way of walking that drives you out of your mind – A slip of a girl, very fair, pale with blue under the eyes – and of course she doesn’t even look at the old goat. What to do? Well, not long thinking, he ups and marries the widow. Okay. They settle down, the three of them. Here you can go on indefinitely – the temptation, the eternal torment, the itch, the mad hopes. …26
And here Nabokov did go on, writing five years later in Paris a short novel, The Enchanter, in which the germ cell of Lolita has already developed into a full embryo – certainly the most osé version of all. Ten years after that, he began the composition of the novel which, despite every temptation of the incinerator, he triumphantly completed in Ithaca in December 1953.
It is noticeable, however, that Lolita, although she emerges so early as a figure and a theme, as a name appears very late. Nabokov told Lolita’s first commentarist, Alfred Appel Jr, that he had originally intended to call his heroine Virginia and the novel Ginny.27 In the manuscript she bore the name Juanita Dark for a long time. It was only later that Nabokov discovered a thousand reasons why the name Lolita, with which the novel begins and ends, had become essential.28 This fact alone might suggest that he was not conscious of any predecessor to his nymphet, since if he had wanted to cover his tracks he would surely have done just the opposite – unless, of course, he precisely did not want to cover them.
In both cases Lolita is a diminutive form of Lola – in the one of Spanish and in the other of Mexican origin.29 Interestingly, there is also, as Appel noted, a German strain in Nabokov’s Lola. The femme fatale of that name in Sternberg’s movie The Blue Angel was played by Marlene Dietrich, to whom Humbert once compares Lolita’s mother.30 On parting, he evens calls her Marlene, another time Lotte; while her surname, Haze, is close to the German Hase (Bunny), as Nabokov confided – perhaps merely to flatter the magazine – to an interviewer from Playboy.31 That Humbert once calls his Lolita die Kleine, and can pity her for a ‘rustic German’ look, belongs to the same astoundingly consistent background.32
The figure herself bears as much resemblance to her Hispano-German forerunner as one young girl may bear to another. They are in no way twins, and the likeness between them is fleeting – as fleeting as the scent of Spanish toilet powder that wafts from Humbert’s first love.33 The name Humbert gives this girl, taken early by death, offers another scent. He calls her Annabel, after Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name on the dead child-bride Annabel Lee. Humbert’s unfulfilled passion for Annabel leads him into the arms of Lolita, who seems to him a reincarnation of this first nymphet. The very names of his two loves – ‘Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta’34 – blend and merge into one another.
Such fusion is a process found early in Nabokov’s work. Lolita has another and largely unknown predecessor called Annabella, a character in his play The Waltz Invention. The plot of this drama, which dates from 1938, is very close to the earlier ‘Nursery Tale’. Through a set of fantastic circumstances Waltz, its inhibited, demented hero, finds himself in a position to fulfil his erotic dreams. Lord of the world, he lets a harem be assembled for him, but rejects every woman he is offered in favour of Annabella. Although she is five years older than Lolita – Nabokov took care to specify the difference in a postwar afterword – ‘little Annabella’ is ‘a very young girl’, ‘less than a child’, but thoroughly eroticized by a series of ambiguities and risqué allusions.35 The lovesick Waltz is so smitten with her that he threatens to blow up the whole country if her father does not deliver her to him.
Nabokov’s play, though certainly no masterpiece, is carefully constructed. It seems all the more striking that he inserts into it a character who is a pure name, never appears on stage, has no function and is mentioned only once: an old, grey-bearded relative of the hero, supposedly the genius in the background, to whose imaginary invention the play owes its title. He is a cousin of the same name.
In Nabokov’s Annabella-drama there is thus an ominous male pair by the name of Waltz.36 In German, where it originates, the word for waltz is Walzer. The reader may well ask what the brothers in Lichberg’s Lolita are called. Here is perhaps the most striking of all the concordances between the two texts. Their name, too, is Walzer. Even the grey beard – in Lichberg streaked with red – recurs in Nabokov.