Subject
Re: Dorothy and Lolita (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITORIAL NOTE, Professor Robert's comment follow a copy of Galya
Diment's recent annotation.
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 14:13:14 +0000
From: Seth Roberts <roberts@garnet.berkeley.edu>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@UCSBVM.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Re: Dorothy and Lolita (fwd)
>The August 27, 1955 issue of The New Yorker, while not featuring anything
>of Nabokov's, must have been of certain interest to him, assuming he
>read it. It had a story by Dorothy Parker about a widowed mother
>and a daughter who compete for the love of the same man. The daughter wins out
>The daughter's name is Lolita and so is the title of the story.
>
>What would not one give to know precisely what Nabokov thought as he was
>reading that story at the time! Did he think it was an uncanny
>coincidence or was he suspicious that Dorothy Parker, a good friend of
>Edmund Wilson, had somehow learned about his project and was playing a
>joke on him?
>
The correspondence between Nabokov and The New Yorker, in the
Berg collection at the New York Public Library,
provides the answer to these questions.
Nabokov, as I read his letters to Katherine White, was very upset
--suspected that somehow the manuscript he had sent her in strictest confidence
had become more widely known. White said, in essence, that
this was ridiculous. Nabokov calmed down.
Seth Roberts
University of California at Berkeley
Diment's recent annotation.
-------------------------------------------------------
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 14:13:14 +0000
From: Seth Roberts <roberts@garnet.berkeley.edu>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@UCSBVM.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Re: Dorothy and Lolita (fwd)
>The August 27, 1955 issue of The New Yorker, while not featuring anything
>of Nabokov's, must have been of certain interest to him, assuming he
>read it. It had a story by Dorothy Parker about a widowed mother
>and a daughter who compete for the love of the same man. The daughter wins out
>The daughter's name is Lolita and so is the title of the story.
>
>What would not one give to know precisely what Nabokov thought as he was
>reading that story at the time! Did he think it was an uncanny
>coincidence or was he suspicious that Dorothy Parker, a good friend of
>Edmund Wilson, had somehow learned about his project and was playing a
>joke on him?
>
The correspondence between Nabokov and The New Yorker, in the
Berg collection at the New York Public Library,
provides the answer to these questions.
Nabokov, as I read his letters to Katherine White, was very upset
--suspected that somehow the manuscript he had sent her in strictest confidence
had become more widely known. White said, in essence, that
this was ridiculous. Nabokov calmed down.
Seth Roberts
University of California at Berkeley