Nabokov fans, brace yourselves! Nabokov scholar Michael Maar accuses the author of stealing the premise of Lolita from another writer. Pair with this Millions essay about designing the cover of the book.
Who Wrote It First
Not for Kids
What makes an idea too odd to sustain a children’s book? The answer: characteristics that make it, as Steven Heller explains, “so high concept or clever [it’s] deemed difficult for a child to enjoy.”
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“A history of fire flooding and water flooding”
Not every Craigslist ad is noteworthy, but this property listing, titled “Gorgeous Rural Mountain Acreage” and hailing from Kentucky, is a notable (and sobering) exception. Full-Stop republished the whole thing, which includes warnings that “bears are known to be about” and “beautiful water seeps.”
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Fini
Recommended Reading: Colm Tóibín reads a new French novel, The End of Eddy.
The Son
He befriended Mark Twain. His father wrote The Scarlet Letter. He drank wine with Oscar Wilde, George Eliot and Henry James, and William Randolph Hearst once hired him as a reporter. He even published a few books to critical acclaim. So why do so few of us know anything about Julian Hawthorne? In the WaPo, Michael Dirda reviews a new biography. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
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I had the impression from the exchange that Maar thought of Nabokov’s Lolita as more influenced by or derived from Lichberg’s than a plagiarism of it.
Unless someone can show us the sentences, in VN’s Lolita, that are (or nearly) word-for-word copies of sentences to be found in a text known to have preceded VN’s book, using the word “plagiarism”, here, is libellous and… idiotic. Anyway, Maar makes it clear that his interest in all this centers on the distinct (but literarily inconsequential) possibility of a secret connection between VN’s Lolita and a German writer’s book…. he’s trying to hunt down another one of VN’s pranks. Did whoever linked this actually read the article…?
From the article:
Question: “So let’s get this out of the way first—is this about plagiarism?”
Answer: “Of course not. The word came up in the press when I published my first article about the discovery, but that’s not what this is about at all.”
And so it persists in the press. Maybe I should just be skipping straight to the Parid Review?
The stealth edit from “plagiarism” to “stealing the premise” is hilarious. This slender distinction, adopted presumably out of self-delusion, is also incorrect.