Sarah Weinman - The Real Lolita - The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

Nabokov did not exactly “whip off” the novel that became Lolita . There was one more abortive attempt written in his mother tongue, Volshebnik, which was the last piece of fiction he wrote in Russian. He worked on it at a critical point in his life, while waiting to see if he and his family would be able to flee Europe and immigrate to America. But Volshebnik would not see publication until almost a decade after his death.

WHEN GERMANY DECLARED WAR on Poland in September 1939, plunging the rest of the world into global battle, Vladimir Nabokov was under considerable stress. He had reunited with his wife, Véra, and their son, Dmitri, in Paris, after an extended separation stranded them in Germany. He had broken off his affair with fellow émigré Irina Guadanini to join his family, but Paris was no safe haven anymore, as the Vichy regime became increasingly close with the Nazis. Véra was Jewish, and so was Dmitri, and if they could not get out of France, they might be bound for concentration camps.

The personal stakes were never higher, and Nabokov’s health suffered. That fall, or perhaps in the early winter of 1940, he was “laid up with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia,” a mysterious ailment of damage to nerves running between the ribs that would plague him off and on for the rest of his life. He could not do much more than read and write, and he retreated into the refuge of his imagination. What emerged was Volshebnik, the fifty-five-page novella that most closely mirrored the future novel.

Unlike Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Volshebnik is nameless (though Nabokov once referred to him as “Arthur”). He does not have Humbert’s artful insolence. Instead he is in torment from the first sentence, “How can I come to terms with myself?” A jeweler by trade, he moves back and forth between being open about his attraction to underage girls and his resolve to do nothing about it, coupling his inner torment to overweening self-justification. “I’m no ravisher,” he declares. “I am a pickpocket, not a burglar.” Humbert would sneer at the hypocrisy of this declaration.

Nabokov was not the artist he would later become, and it shows in the prose: “I’m not attracted to every schoolgirl that comes along, far from it—how many one sees, on a gray morning street that are husky, or skinny, or have a necklace of pimples or wear spectacles— those kinds interest me as little, in the amorous sense, as a lumpy female acquaintance might interest someone else.” He doesn’t have the wherewithal to describe his chosen prey, whom he first sees roller-skating in a park, as a nymphet. Such a word isn’t in his vocabulary because it wasn’t yet in Nabokov’s.

Still there are glimpses of Lolita ’s formidable style, as when Volshebnik ’s narrator comments on “the radiance of [one girl’s] large, slightly vacuous eyes, somehow suggesting translucent gooseberries” or “the summery tint of her bare arms with the sleek little foxlike hairs running along the forearms.” Not quite up to the level and the hypnotic rhythm of Humbert’s rhapsodizing about Dolores Haze (“The soot-black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes… I might say her hair is auburn, and her lips as red as licked candy”), but the disquiet is present, waiting to spring like a trapdoor.

As in the later novel, Nabokov’s narrator preys upon his underage quarry through her mother. She is more broadly cast than Charlotte Haze, whose rages against and aspirations for her daughter make her an interesting figure. The mother here is little more than a cipher, a plot device to engineer the man and girl toward their fates.

Volshebnik ’s narrator may be tormented by his unnatural tastes, but he knows he is about to entice his chosen girl to cross a chasm that cannot be uncrossed. Namely, she is innocent now, but she won’t be after he has his way with her. Humbert Humbert would never be so obvious. He has the “fancy prose style” at his disposal to couch or deflect his intentions. So when he does state the obvious—as he will, again and again— the reader is essentially magicked into believing Dolores is as much the pursuer as the pursuee.

Both men’s plans are the same: “He knew he would make no attempt on her virginity in the tightest and pinkest sense of the term until the evolution of their caresses had ascended a certain invisible step,” says Volshebnik ’s narrator. He also sets the same stage for his seduction, in a faraway hotel, away from knowing, prying eyes, or so he thinks. The hotel, in Europe, is less shabby than Humbert’s choice of The Enchanted Hunters, but serves the same purpose: allowing the narrator to watch over the sleeping girl and make his move against her will.

The outcome differs from Lolita . The narrator is consumed by the girl lying supine on the bed, robe half-open, and begins “little by little to cast his spell… passing his magic wand above her body,” measuring her “with an enchanted yardstick.” Here, again, Humbert Humbert would sneer. But then he did not have the girl look “wild-eyed at his rearing nudity,” caught out like the pedophile he is. Nor does Humbert become “deafened by his own horror” when the girl begins to scream at his rejected advances. Humbert is all about self-justification; Volshebnik ’s narrator suffers no such delusion about his quarry.

He tries to soothe the girl—“be quiet, it’s nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet”—but she will not be placated. And when two old women burst into the room, he flees, only to be hit by a truck, the ensuing gory mess described as “an instantaneous cinema of dismemberment.” The narrator’s fate is awful and inevitable. He is the predator hunted, captured, taken down. The girl’s big bad wolf is punished by a passing truck.

Nabokov did not publish Volshebnik during his lifetime because he knew, as was clear to me upon reading it, that the story was not a stand-alone work but source material. It is more straightforward and less sophisticated than Lolita . As the scholar Simon Karlinsky wrote when Volshebnik was finally published in English as The Enchanter in 1986, the novella’s pleasure is “comparable to the one afforded by studying Beethoven’s published sketchbooks: seeing the murky and unpromising material out of which the writer and the composer were later able to fashion an incandescent masterpiece.”

In other words, the story carries equal value to the creation of Lolita as did the story of Sally Horner. One was fiction; the other was truth. But art is fickle and merciless, as Nabokov explained repeatedly throughout his life. Volshebnik possesses a powerful engine of its own. It does not possess Lolita ’s literary trickery and mastery of obfuscation, which continue to make moral mincemeat out of the novel’s wider readership. Here, instead, is a more prosaic depiction of deviant compulsion and tragic consequences.

TWO OTHER WORKS are notable influences upon Lolita . Annabel Leigh, Humbert Humbert’s first love, is named in homage to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” The novel’s working title, The Kingdom by the Sea, is a quote from that poem, and Humbert’s memories of his Annabel, dead of typhus four months after their seaside near-consummation, echo many more of Poe’s lines. (Nabokov: “I was a child and she was a child.” Poe: “I was a child and she was a child.”)

Lolita also owes a great deal to an influence never explicitly referenced in the text, but one Nabokov knew well from translating into Russian in his early twenties: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. As he later explained to the literary critic Alfred Appel: