haunting echo of the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., in Lolita, is a very real British scholar). Rayfield theorizes, amid certain less convincing assertions, that the pseudonymous Victor, via Ellis, deserves credit “for his contribution to the theme and plot of Lolita and the strange sensuous and intellectual character of Humbert Humbert, the hero of Nabokov’s finest English-language novel.” And, while acknowledging the previous composition of The Enchanter (whose title he translates literally as “The Magician”), he further conjectures that the unfortunate Ukrainian’s account provided the final impetus for the emergence of “Lolita’s central theme.” [22] This hypothesis might merit consideration, were it not for certain chronological facts that I must nevertheless point out: It was not until 1948 that Edmund Wilson sent the Ellis transcription to Nabokov, who had had no previous acquaintance with it—while Volshebnik, which does contain what might be called the “central theme” (if little else) of Lolita, was completed in 1939.
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 denouement (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.
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.
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 emigre 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 emigre 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 emigre 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 
