I realize that I have been neglectling my Web site, but work has been crazy busy (co-workers reading this will know what I am talking about). Here is an interesting biblio tidbit: Was Nabokov a plagiarist? I guess the term is “cryptomnesia,” meaning he stole his ideas from another author, but he didn’t remember doing it. (Check out the article at the New York Observer: http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage3.asp). According to recent reports, Nabokov stole the idea for his famous story “Lolita” from a 1916 German story titled … wait for it …Lolita. Yet, there is no evidence that it was plagiarism. The “first Lolita” was only 16 pages long and was published in German (Nabokov’s 300-page treatment of the same subject matter was published in 1958).
“Did “Lolita” rise again in Lolita?” asks the Observer’s Ron Rosenbaum. “Professor Maar’s researches show, he says, that Nabokov lived in the same section of Berlin during the 1920’s and 30’s. Did Nabokov read, remember, adopt the earlier eerily similar story? Did he do so consciously or unconsciously, by way of a hidden, unacknowledged memory, “cryptomnesia”? If he read the earlier “Lolita,” could he really have utterly forgotten it? Or if he remembered it, why refuse to acknowledge it? It’s not as if the astonishing work of art that the 300-page novel named Lolita became is diminished by the act of adoption or adaptation. Shakespeare’s plays aren’t diminished by the often-crude source texts he drew on. It’s not something necessarily shameful, a putative debt to the 1916 “Lolita.”” Interesting indeed.
