Lolita

Before Nabokov wrote his scandalous book , one Heinz von Lichberg had published an 18-page story about a middle-age man who falls in love with the daughter of the woman who runs the boarding house where he lives. He has sex, and in the end the girl dies, while the narrator remains alone forever. Here’s the kicker: the name of Lichberg’s nymphet was Lolita!

Michael Maar tells the extraordinary story of this earlier Lolita in the April 2 issue of the TLS , and concludes that the most likely scenario is that Nabokov had read Lichberg’s story, and forgot he had read it. When he came to write of his Lolita, the Lichberg story was in the back of his mind, as Borges’s Pierre Menard said of the Quixote , not as the recollection of a book read but as the unformed conception of a book not yet written.