Books

BY BRIAN JOSEPH DAVIS

Vlad the imitator

Questions of Dan Brown or James Frey's talent aside, all writing is lying or stealing to varying degrees, and always has been. After all, you'll never see the "author" of the most ludicrously embellished memoir being questioned by Oprah -- "Tell us, Jesus, were you crucified, or did the Romans just take your beer away and give you a fine?" -- and he's sold almost as much as Brown.

There's grandeur to good literary scandal but, unfortunately, it usually has one direction: straight down. The South Beach Diet, for example, has never been outed as a cleverly marketed literary experiment written by Italo Calvino. But in The Two Lolitas (Verso, 107 pages, $32), critic Michael Maar suggests that at least one giant of literature pulled off a blurred line between high and low, thievery and brilliance. Even at face value, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is a smoke-damaged mirror of mind-fuckery. As any reader who picks up the book looking for a scintillating read finds out, Lolita is a devastating moral tale where characters have unstable doubles and America itself is atomized into the best alliterative prose ever written. Clan of the Cave Bear it ain't.

Yet, in his meticulously researched book, Marr presents his discovery of a short story about a landlord's young daughter and a lecherous academic tenant that was published -- 40 years before Nabokov's -- by the forgotten German author Heinz Von Lichberg. That story was also called, remarkably, "Lolita."

What wasn't remarkable was the talent of Von Lichberg, a hack journalist who bottomed out writing Nazi propaganda by the 1930s. During Von Lichberg's time, Nabokov was a Russian émigré in Berlin but what cause would he have to swipe the plot and characters from an obscure, terrible writer? Maar fairly entertains all theories from coincidence to the intriguing idea of cryptomnesia, a taking of long-ago-read ideas to be your own. What seems most likely to Maar is that Von Lichberg's story was raw, rough kindling to Nabokov. The Lolita we know does read like a clichéd plot that is being subverted at every turn by a cruel and masterful comedian to the point that even the narrator becomes concerned with the author's intentions. Nabokov carrying this germ with him for decades seems odd, but then, he never forgave Germany for either the assassination of his father or for the Nazism that drove him from Berlin, and then later, Paris. That Von Lichberg is (very) obliquely referenced in Nabokov's pun-laden Ada seals the deal with a wonderfully vengeful wink. Using an actual writer, he created his own authorial double: Bizarro-Nabokov.

Maar takes great pains to be the Joe Friday of literary forensics, and presents the facts with no bold conclusions. But between the famous Lolita and the forgotten "Lolita," there is no contest. Included as an appendix, Von Lichberg's story is crap and reads like the author is indeed a hack journalist who went on to become a Nazi. If this affair is a scandal, then it's a scandal that only enriches Nabokov's book and proves that stealing well doesn't always mean stealing high. EMAIL LETTERS eye.net.