Message

The article about Charlie Chaplin in the Hindustan Times by one V.B.N.Ram affirms that my father, Vladimir Nabokov, was influenced when writing Lolita by Chaplin's relationship with Lita Grey. That is utter nonsense. I don't know if Hitler remained a fan of Chaplin's after The Great Dictator. I do know that my father found certain scenes of Chaplin's hilarious -- for instance, the Hitler figure bouncing an inflatable globe in that film, or the shoe-eating episode in The Gold Rush. I also know that my father, no matter how much he enjoyed Chaplin's comic skills, had valid political cause to avoid frequenting the man ( who lived not far from the Montreux Palace ), in spite of the well-meaning efforts of various undescriminating intermediaries. The general credibility of Mr. Ram's highly tendentious, but equally naive, piece can well be judged by the Lolita sample. I shall not bother to dismantle his obsolete pink apologia.