The Enchanter (11 page)

As for
The Enchanter
’s contribution, occasional ideas and images from it are indeed echoed in
Lolita
. But, as I—and many others—have noted in the past, themes and details of various kinds often recur in Nabokov’s novels, stories, poems, and plays. In this case, the echoes are distant and the dissimilarities substantial: setting (geographically but, above all, artistically remote); characters (reflected on occasion, but dimly at best); development and dénouement (totally different).

Perhaps a girl in a European park, fleetingly recalled by Humbert on an early page of
Lolita
, is Nabokov’s way of acknowledging the little heroine of
The Enchanter
, but also of relegating her forever to the category of very distant relative.

Dolores Haze may, as Nabokov says, be “very much the same lass” as the Enchanter’s victim, but only in an inspirational, conceptual sense. In other ways the earlier child is very different—perverse only in the madman’s eyes; innocently incapable of anything like the Quilty intrigue; sexually unawakened and physically immature, which is perhaps why Weidle recalled her as a ten-year-old.

It would be a serious mistake to roll away, on that protonymphet’s skates, into a garden of parallel primrose paths.

1.
In
VN: The Art and Life of Vladimir Nabokov
, New York, Crown, 1986. An odd concoction of rancor, adulation, innuendo, and outright factual error, which I had occasion to read in page proof.

2.
In his story “The Rotten People” originally published (after the novel) under the offensive title
“Zhid
” (“The Yid”), which, incidentally, Nabokov would not have used in a million years.

3.
In
The Defense
, tr. Michael Scammell, New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.

4.
In the short story “Bachmann,” in
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
, tr. Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1975.

5.
In
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, tr. Dmitri Nabokov and Simon Karlinsky, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973.

6.
In “Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster,” in
Nabokov’s Dozen
, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1958.

7.
In
The New Yorker
, tr. Dmitri Nabokov, 18 February 1985.

8.
In
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
, tr. Dmitri and Vladimir Nabokov, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1976.

9.
See
Author’s Note One
.

10.
For a name Nabokov subsequently attributed to the protagonist, see
Author’s Note One
and
this page
.

11.
In
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
, tr. Dmitri Nabokov and Simon Karlinsky, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1973.

12.
I am indebted, for certain details and citations, to Edwin McDowell’s report in
The New York Times
of 15 March 1985, regarding the publication by Grove Press of
The Confessions of Victor X
.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on April 23, 1889. His family fled to Germany in 1919, during the Bolshevik Revolution. Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1923, then lived in Berlin (1923–1937) and Paris (1937–1940), where he began writing, mainly in Russian, under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he pursued a brilliant literary career (as a poet, novelist, critic, and translator) while teaching literature at Stanford, Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard. The monumental success of his novel
Lolita
(1955) enabled him to give up teaching and devote himself fully to his writing. In 1961 he moved to Montreux, Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Recognized as one of this century’s master prose stylists in both Russian and English, he translated a number of his original English works—including
Lolita
—into Russian, and collaborated on English translations of his original Russian works.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Dmitri Nabokov was born in 1934 in Berlin and came to the United States as a small child with his parents. He graduated from Harvard, served in the U.S. Army, and then began the vocal studies that led him to become an opera and concert performer—a basso—around the world. He has translated most of his father’s Russian short stories and plays and many of his novels into English.

BOOKS BY
VLADIMIR NABOKOV

ADA, OR ARDOR

Ada, or Ardor
tells a love story troubled by incest, but is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72522-0

BEND SINISTER

While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay,
Bend Sinister
is first and foremost a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72727-9

DESPAIR

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965, thirty years after its original publication,
Despair
is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72343-1

THE ENCHANTER

The Enchanter
is the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel,
Lolita
. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72886-3

THE EYE

The Eye
is as much farcical detective story as it is a profoundly refractive tale about the vicissitudes of identities and appearances. Smurov is a lovelorn, self-conscious Russian émigré living in prewar Berlin who commits suicide after being humiliated by a jealous husband, only to suffer greater indignities in the afterlife.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72723-1

THE GIFT

The Gift
is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period of his literary career. It is the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré who dreams of the book he will someday write.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72725-5

GLORY

Glory
is the wryly ironic story of Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian émigré of no account, who is in love with a girl who refuses to marry him. Hoping to impress his love, he embarks on a “perilous, daredevil” project to illegally reenter the Soviet Union.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72724-8

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

Invitation to a Beheading
embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world; in an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude.”

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72531-2

KING, QUEEN, KNAVE

Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing store, is ruddy, self-satisfied, and masculine, but repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72340-0

LOLITA

Lolita
, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous and controversial novel, tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72316-5

LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS!

Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899). Focusing on the central figures of his life, the book leads us to suspect that the fictions Vadim has created as an author have crossed the line between his life’s work and his life itself.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72728-6

THE LUZHIN DEFENSE

As a young boy, Luzhin is unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen—an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge, and rises to the rank of grandmaster, but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72722-4

PALE FIRE

Pale Fire
offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures: a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade; an adoring foreward and commentary by Shade’s self-styled Boswell, Dr. Charles Kinbote; a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72342-4

PNIN

Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72341-7

THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT

Many knew of Sebastian Knight, distinguished novelist, but few knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career. After Knight’s death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with clues found in the novelist’s private papers.