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From The Times
April 2, 2004

Nabokov’s son rejects plagiarism allegation

Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

THE son of Vladimir Nabokov has dismissed research suggesting that his father’s 1956 classic story about a young temptress’s seduction of an older man was first thought up by a Nazi radio journalist.

Dmitri Nabokov, a leading translator, has protested to a literary scholar who found that Heinz von Eschwege told a similar story in an 18-page novella, published in 1916, 40 years before Lolita.

A girl called Lolita bewitches the first-person narrator, who is staying in her house while on holiday and who is devastated when she dies.

Michael Maar, a literary scholar, wrote in this week’s Times Literary Supplement that the similarities — the name, the title and the fact that it was written in the first person — could not be ignored.

Nabokov’s son has written a letter of protest to Herr Maar: “Of course it’s true that it is set in Spain, where the name is hardly a rarity. It also appears to be junk. Besides, my father had practically no German. I would guess it is . . . a journalistic tempest in a teacup.”

Dieter Zimmer, the editor of the German edition of Nabokov’s work, has leapt to his defence. “If your father had ever seen it or heard about it, I am sure he would have given his girl some other name,” he wrote to the son.

Herr Maar came across the Von Eschwege book while at a party, when a teacher suggested that the Lolita name and story was not new. He believes that Von Eschwege could have crossed Nabokov’s path. The pair lived in the same area of south-west Berlin for 15 years.

Herr Maar wrote that he had a feeling of deja-vu when he read it: “Can Vladimir Nabokov . . . have known of the ugly duckling that was (his novel’s) precursor?”

Von Eschwege, who was 25 at the time, later joined the Nazi party and commentated on Hitler’s torch-lit procession to the Reichstag in 1933.

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