Lolita – a Tale by Heinz von Lichberg (trans, by Carolyn Kunin)
Requirements: ePUB Reader, 37 KB
Overview: Born to a family of Hessian nobility, he chose the pen name of Heinz von Lichberg after Leuchtberg near Eschwege, where many battles had been fought. He served in the cavalry during the First World War, and after the war worked as a journalist and author in Berlin. He reported from Graf Zeppelin during its record-breaking flight around the world in 1929, earning a name as a foreign correspondent. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933 and worked as a radio journalist and a culture journalist with the Völkischer Beobachter. He left the Nazi Party in 1938 and rejoined the military during the Second World War, serving in the Abwehr military intelligence department. After the war, he settled in Lübeck, where he worked for a Lübeck newspaper and died in 1951.
Lichberg was mostly forgotten, until literary scholar Michael Maar came across his “Lolita” short story and argued that Nabokov had derived his story from Lichberg’s work in several articles and a 2005 book.
The story is short, silly and uninvolving. But the similarities with Nabokov’s Lolita seem too many to discount. The main ones are these: both have a first person narrator who turns up at a boarding house; Lolita in both cases is the daughter of the house; she “seduces” him; sex and death (and death after birth) are presented as different aspects of the same violence, or as cause and effect; and finally, the title.
Genre: General Fiction/Classics/Short Story
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