That Nabokov could really have meant Lichberg is suggested by another, still more remarkable resemblance. If we leaf through The Accursed Gioconda a little further, four stories after Lolita we come upon ‘Atomit’, the penultimate tale in the collection. It contains, to our astonishment, nothing less than the plot of – The Waltz Invention.
Heinz von Lichberg’s ‘Atomit’ narrates, in just ten pages, the following story. An inventor by the name of Bobby strolls into the United States War Department and hands over a letter and his card. He is taken to an antechamber and after a long wait, holding two packages, is ushered in to see President Wilkins. Asked by Wilkins what he can do, he replies: ‘I can end any war in a day!’ Wilkins takes him for mad: ‘My good man, you are either a clown or sick!’ But Bobby will show him that he is not bluffing. When the President tries to open his boxes, he replies: ‘If you go any further, we will both be dead in a second, and the whole Department in perhaps thirty.’ For in them is a gram of atomite: ‘This gram is fully enough to kill some hundred thousand men in about a minute, if they were standing closely enough together!’
And the plainly not-so-mad Bobby gets ready to prove the power of his hellish machine. The demonstration, to which a mouse in a glass jar falls victim, convinces President Wilkins, who summons a Colonel Rosecamp and his servant Pebbs. A test of the new weapon on larger creatures is agreed for the next day. The inventor is already imagining himself a future multimillionaire. The following morning the test is successful: by remote control a quarter of a gram of atomite is released into the atmosphere, and ‘before the faint explosion could even be heard, the animals were lying at the posts to which they were tied, and moved no longer’. But a further trial, in which a still greater quantity is released, ends in disaster. Through the inexperience of the ladies who arrive too late and inadvertently set off the weapon, it is not the animals selected for the experiment but the assembled men who are killed, so that in the future, too, war ‘will last somewhat longer than a single day’.
Compressed, such is the dreadfully silly (and dreadfully misogynist) humorous tale ‘Atomit’, in which – as in Lichberg’s ‘Lolita’ – the first contours of a work by Nabokov appear to be sketched. For how does The Waltz Invention, to whose prophetic ‘atomystique’ Nabokov later proudly pointed, begin?68
A man presents himself at the War Ministry and extols a machine he has invented to unleash an explosion of unimaginable power. Indeed, when this new-fangled weapon is deployed in the third act, an entire city is wiped out – ‘Six hundred thousand! In one instant!’69 Naturally, at the beginning the Minister does not believe a word the inventor says. He takes him for ‘just plain crazy’ or, indeed, a ‘clown!’70 – until, that is, the inventor offers his first proof by blowing up a mountain at a distance. In this first demonstration too, only small creatures are killed – not a trivial mouse, as in ‘Atomit’, but elegant lizards (at the end of Lichberg’s story, a donkey is mentioned; in Nabokov, it is a ‘snow-white gazelle’71). After this initial demonstration, interest in acquiring the wonder-weapon grows by leaps and bounds. The Minister – he too accompanied by a Colonel and a servant (not Pebbs, but ‘Hump’)72 – realizes the advantages possession of such a remote-controlled weapon would afford. Further tests are agreed with the inventor, which prove equally successful. The last doubts removed, the millions the inventor of ‘Atomit’ had prematurely hoped for are promptly offered to Walzer/Waltz.
But the latter refuses them, and the paths of the tale and the play separate. Nabokov’s continuation shows his hero’s rise and fall, his apparent domination of the world, and his final unmasking. For in reality, Waltz/Walzer has sat through all three acts in the Minister’s waiting-room (where Bobby had already waited almost two hours), and only dreamt of the action in the play. In toto Nabokov develops something that is entirely his own out of Lichberg’s scenario – assuming he knew it – and enriches it in an unpredictable way. His world-destroying weapon is no poison gas, but an early atomic bomb.73 His main character is a poor addled fellow who wraps himself in dreams of omnipotence, through whose holes bitter realities eventually whistle. In short, Nabokov’s play is a multilayered work of art, and his deluded inventor Salvator Walzer is no caricature, but a character. Yet that is just it: his name remains Waltz/Walzer, and Nabokov even gives him a double, as if he not only did not want to tear the seal of origin from the cousins, but in fact wanted to hang it around their necks for all to see – fifteen years before he wrote a novel on the child-woman who makes her début here as Annabella.74
If we put all this together, we find in Nabokov, grouped around the Lolita-theme, not only the name of Lichberg’s brothers, elevated to title status, but also particular grotesque scenes and a sketch for a plot from their immediate vicinity. One has to be quite stubborn a champion of coincidence to dismiss these similarities as mere chance.
All the more so as in Ada Nabokov finally lays his cards on the table – or so a proponent of this third hypothesis could argue. For in this novel there really is a work called Lolita that is attributed not to Nabokov, but to an author whose name ends in ‘berg’. This figure wins a court case because he can prove that passages from his book have been lifted in a film. In this film, which heralds the tragic climax of the novel, Ada plays a Spanish girl by the name of Dolores.
In other words: we have a book, Lolita, which someone other than, shall we say, Vivian Darkbloom has written. We have the Spanish (not Mexican or American) child-woman of the same name. We have a court case of plagiarism. And we have as the real Lolita-author a gentleman whose name is – no, not Lichberg, but Osberg.75 Could Nabokov have been more unambiguous?
But – opponents of this hypothesis can immediately point out – Nabokov was quite unambiguous, in the notes he attached to the novel. There he helpfully explains to us that the name Osberg is a ‘good-natured anagram’. For Osberg read Borges; and to this Borges, with whom he had been compared one time too often, Nabokov pays a somewhat tart tribute. That he really did mean Borges when he wrote Osberg is shown by his characterization of him in the narrative itself as a ‘Spanish writer of pretentious fairy-tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shrift thesialists’: which captures the Argentinian as Nabokov saw him accurately, if also maliciously, enough.76 So Osberg is Borges – as has been the undisputed reading since the novel appeared. It has the certificate and seal of the author, and the question remains only whether the matter is thereby settled. The supporters of the third hypothesis would answer no, and raise counter-questions. Just what did Borges have to do with Spanish nymphets? Only in Lichberg is there a Spanish Lolita, and only in him is there a male pair called Walzer, who as ‘Walter’ recur again in Ada.77 The one allusion, en plus, does not exclude the other. Lolita was already cryptic enough; Ada is a labyrinth. Any philologist who ventured to propose conjectures as remote as those of Vivian Darkbloom in his notes to Lolita would be accused of referential mania. Yet Darkbloom is still operating under cover. As Brian Boyd has shown, among the wild luxuriance of allusions in Ada, some have as much as a fourfold meaning. One cannot therefore exclude the possibility that the wizard Nabokov had more than one writer in mind when he invented the name ‘Osberg’ – which would even fit quite well, if we only think of Osram.78
One can exclude it even less in that there is no end to name-play after Ada. In Nabokov’s last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, the travesty of an autobiography, Humbert and Lolita appear under other names. The narrator, Vadim, is called Dumbert Dumbert; the eleven-year-old girl on his lap, with whom he meets and falls in love in 1933, is called, like Lolita, ‘Dolly’.79 Dolly’s surname is ‘von Borg’ – the aristocratic prefix von retained in the English original. Had it been Nabokov’s aim to divide his interpreters once again into camps, he could not have found a more appropriate name. For as naturally as the question arises – is someone juggling with the hot potato of a certain aristocratic name here? – comes the equally prompt retort from the other side: but no, ‘von Borg’ is once again Borges, this time not shaken into an anagram, but castrated.
The ambiguity is not to be resolved. Matters would remain there, had not Nabokov brought still other names into play. Dolly von Borg has a pseudo-double called ‘Dalberg’ – last syllable and stress as in the original.80 That seems, in total, a bit much: the names of the generals in The Waltz Invention that all end in -berg (at a time when Nabokov had never heard of Borges), then Osberg, von Borg, Dalberg, and all linked to Lolita.
Supporters of the third hypothesis have strong evidence on their side. Yet the answer it delivers poses a cluster of new questions, the central one of which is: why? For a theme that pounded and gnawed within him for so long, Nabokov certainly had no need of Heinz von Lichberg. As for artistic respect for him, he had – or would have had – equally little. It is one thing to allude to Proust, Poe or Pushkin, to Shakespeare, Flaubert or Joyce, to quote half-sentences or whole plots from them as rich linings to your own work. But what would be the point of embroidering into it an unknown author, and so paying reverence to him? This is the trickiest question in this whole affair, and the right answer may still be beyond us. If we do not believe in the huge, hundred-legged spider of coincidence, there is scarcely a way of avoiding the supposition of a somewhat more definite acquaintance between Nabokov and the author of The Accursed Gioconda. There are many possibilities here – too many even to be delimited.81 Something may have linked Sirin to Herr von Lichberg, though it would certainly not have been sympathy. Just as in his novels he almost compulsively – and careless even of costs to his narrative – had to introduce gibes at Freud or Dostoevsky and a dozen more of his pet aversions – most of whom, in one way or another, were not so entirely distant from him – so again and again he seems to have reverted to this German who wrote about a nymphet. Yet, we may ask, would he really have condescended so far as to take over Lichberg’s names? Or was he so completely confident that he was a snow-white gazelle and the other a donkey that he enjoyed playing with his wretched predecessor and allowing himself risky, triumphant, semi-private jokes at his expense?
This suspicion becomes almost irresistible, if we read the film script of Lolita that Nabokov wrote in Hollywood in 1960, into which he smuggled little details that are not to be found in the novel. In one scene Lolita displays her dancing costume to the new tenant and spins charmingly around in front of him, until Humbert admonishes her: ‘Hold it, Lolita. No waltzes.’ A stage direction lets fall another name: ‘In the early light, a smile plays over her flickering lips, like that of a little Gioconda.’ Damned little Gioconda! Or this scene: Lolita, sitting with two girls by a swimming-pool, is asked: ‘Aren’t you kind of Spanish, Lolita? LOLITA (laughs, shrugging her shoulders)’. Once again we may ask: who is really laughing at whom here? But, as we can see, with such surmises we gradually leave the terrain of philology for that of psychology, where no certainties can be expected – least of all in the case of a writer who was not just an incalculable genius, but a genius of deception to boot.
We should not deceive ourselves, then, that clarity is to be had where more than enough cloud-banks remain. This is no tall tale, but a story with many unresolved questions – for the time being, and possibly for ever. If the first issue of textual genesis were to be settled by some unequivocal proof, once and for all, the second and third, more sublime and more interesting questions would finally come into their own: what the Ur-Lolita means for the status of Nabokov’s novel (not so much), whether it diminishes Nabokov’s rank as a writer (but no), whether we need to correct our image of him (slightly), whether we learn something from the two Lolitas about the interplay between high and light literature (absolutely), anything about his relationship to Germans (that too), anything about his art of controlling and sometimes misleading his admirers (certainly). Only one thing is sure: this is the story of an ugly duckling and a proud swan – but if this image smacks too much of a fairy-tale, it can be expressed more technically. Heinz von Lichberg busied himself in his Lolita, rather awkwardly, with linen, wood, paper and string. Vladimir Nabokov used similar materials. But out of them he fashioned a kite that would vanish into the clear blue air of literature.