And there remains the insistent question: would it have rightly rung a bell? What exactly are we dealing with here? Plainly, there are only three possibilities, at any rate until someone shows us a fourth.58 Let us consider each in turn.
The first is that Nabokov was completely unaware of Lichberg’s tale, and we are in the presence of one of those fortuitous coincidences which recur in the history of art and science. As we have known since Aristotle, it is inherent to the laws of probability that the improbable occurs. Paradoxically, it even occurs more frequently than we would intuitively suppose. Littlewood’s Law, called after the Cambridge mathematician, states that on average everyone can expect one wonder a month, which only goes to show that in the world of statistics, guesses based on common sense are likely to be too conservative. Why, then, should the chain of concordances between the two Lolitas, instead of being anchored in a fundamentum in re, not simply dangle from the ether of pure contingency? Why should it not simply be a splendid, mysterious, even faintly comical example of the way life displays patterns that look deliberate yet are only the caprices of coincidence? In a certain sense this would be a classic Nabokovian theme.
And, of course, nothing can be excluded. Still, by the beards of the prophets, or of the Walzer brothers: even granted the counterintuitive aspects of probability, how likely is it that two authors would independently baptize a male couple with the same unusual surname? How likely is it that they would further create, again independently of each other, a child-woman called Lolita, and have her seduce a guest in a boarding-house? How likely that they would send, again in perfect independence of each other, the inventor of a futuristic weapon into the antechamber of the War Department? (But we anticipate.) That Nabokov should at some point in his time in Berlin have read a book in German seems, to put it moderately, somewhat less improbable.
The second possibility takes us deep into the hypothetical.59 It runs like this. Nabokov could have come upon Lichberg’s Accursed Gioconda, and found in it a theme that had already begun to take shape in his mind. Thereafter he forgot the tale. Later, drawn to the surface by new bait, whole fragments of the Ur-Lolita rose from the depths. Nabokov remained quite unconscious of this resurgence of memory in what seemed to him to be entirely his own creation. The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia.60 Nabokov himself must have been familiar with it: according to his own account, he often read two or three books a day, which he immediately forgot.61 And with him, of course, as with any author, a part of what was written went back to what was read.
The advantage of this variant is that it does not overwork coincidence, and spares us other difficult questions. For how could an author who was so uncommonly proud of conjuring the fictional world out of nothing have at the last moment changed the name Juanita to Lolita, if he was aware that he would be citing an unworthy predecessor? The question and the problem do not apply if he was unaware of it. The disadvantage of this hypothesis is that it is hard to square with the details of the third possibility.
The third hypothesis is this: Nabokov indeed knew Lichberg’s tale – from 1933 onwards at the latest – and, half-inserting, half-blurring its traces, set himself to that art of quotation which Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called ‘higher cribbing’.62 The stress lies on ‘higher’. Of course, this possibility would have as little to do with plagiarism as it did in the case of Mann, who was quite self-conscious about what was he was doing, saying, with Molière, ‘Je prends mon bien où je le trouve’. Who would deny him or any other great author this right? Literature has always been a huge crucible, in which familiar themes are continually recast; Nabokov would have been the only author to escape this process – the first whose work was sheer material, not what a great writer made of it. Nothing of what we admire in the novel Lolita is already to be found in the tale; the former is in no way deducible from the latter.63 All of this needs no further explanation; it is self-evident to anyone who can read. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?
Much suggests that he did, once we take a small step backwards and look not just at the two girls, but at the works in which they are framed. For nowhere is it written that Nabokov could have reacted to Lichberg’s Lolita only in his novel of the same name. And no one can prescribe that he should have read only one of the fifteen tales in The Accursed Gioconda.
One of the most remarkable scenes in Lichberg’s Lolita is the magical competition to which the brothers Walzer are challenged by an imperiously mocking Lola:
‘ “I will love the one who is strongest!” ’,
‘So they took off their jackets and their muscles swelled. But they realized they were equally strong.
‘ “I will love the one who is tallest!” ’ Her eyes flashed.
‘And lo and behold, the men grew taller and taller, their necks lengthened and grew thinner, and their sleeves burst right through to their elbows. Their faces became ugly and distorted, and I thought I could hear their bones cracking. But not by so much as a hair did one become larger than the other.’
And lo and behold, just this grotesque scene was elaborated by Nabokov in a story he wrote in 1933. Here too there is a pair of brothers, metaphorically even ‘identical twins’,64 who suddenly begin to grow larger, and here too one of them is called Anton. The brothers threaten their new neighbour, after whom the story is called: an émigré who is harassed and finally murdered by these brutalized German philistines.65 As the story begins, the brothers visit the new tenant in his apartment. He obscurely senses the danger they represent, his thoughts wander, and like his predecessor, Lichberg’s narrator in Alicante, he slips into a day dream or vision:
Meanwhile the brothers began to swell, to grow, they filled up the whole room, the whole house, and then grew out of it … Gigantic, imperiously reeking of sweat and beer, with beefy voices and senseless speeches, with fecal matter replacing the human brain, they provoke a tremor of ignoble fear. I don’t know why they push against me; I implore you, do leave me alone.66
As in Lichberg’s Lolita, the surreal swelling prefigures an outbreak of murderous rage. On both occasions it is jealousy which unleashes the murder, though in the new neighbour’s case jealousy that is only simulated; the real motive is hatred of the average lump for the fine-spun outsider. That the brothers have ‘fecal matter’ instead of grey cells under their skull – rather a crude image by Nabokov’s standards – indicates the intensity of his feelings in this story. It is plain that old antipathies mingled here with new impressions from the year 1933. Nabokov himself wrote later that the story originated under the grotesque and ferocious shadow of Hitler.67 If he had the brothers Walzer in his mind’s eye in depicting his swollen German thugs, would their inventor have been a beam in it?