Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

“Cuff” ( this page) as in “cufflinks.” It is clearly implied that the poor woman is still playing hard to get. The wordplay, with an oblique echo of the work’s Russian title, whose most direct meaning is “magician,” refers to a card up the conjuror’s sleeve—the superficial trappings of marriage—plus the actual, live, presumably loving husband, “the live ace of hearts.” There is also a parallel, introspective nuance here: the cynical trick that this travesty of a marriage represents to the protagonist. He shares this underlying joke with the perceptive reader, though not, of course, with his bride-to-be. We have the same kind of multiple compression here as in the graffito image.

“Compass rose” ( this page): The early Italian nautical compass card, more stylized than today’s, and indicating, as compass roses still do, the principal and subsidiary compass points (which also identified the directions from which winds blew) was called rosa dei venti , “rose of the winds,” because of its flowerlike appearance and because wind directions were of paramount concern to navigators; the Italian term survives to this day. A nice fillip is gained in translation (for a minority of readers perhaps—those who navigate and those who know Italian), since the image refers to drafts coming from various directions through windows opened by the charwoman.

“The 32nd” ( this page): another beautifully concentrated image that it is almost a pity to deaden by bookish explication. His violent emotions—anticipation of finally encountering the girl alone, the infuriating surprise and disappointment of finding the bustling char—have simply imparted a moist blur to his vision and made him see an absurd date. The month is immaterial. A Nabokovian irony is there, but a bit of compassion for the monster seeps through as well.

A “doubling cat” ( this page) is a cat seen by a child so tired that she has difficulty keeping her eyes focused. It is, optically, akin to “32nd” and the “green rabbit.”

It would of course have been possible to give a minute explanation of every challenging passage, but that would have produced a scholarly apparatus longer than the text itself. These little puzzles, which, without exception, have an artistic purpose, should also be fun. The approximate reader, drowsy from the airliner’s unhealthy air and the complimentary drinks he has downed, always has the lamentable option of skipping, as he often did with the best-selling Lolita .

The things I love about the story are, among others, the suspense (how will reality betray the dream?) and the corollary of a surprise on every page; the eerie humor (the grotesque wedding night; the suspicious chauffeur who vaguely foreshadows Clare Quilty; the Shakespearean clown of a night porter; the protagonist’s desperate search for the misplaced room—will he emerge, as in “A Visit to the Museum,” [21]into a totally different town or will the old porter, whom he comes upon at last, react as if seeing him for the first time in his life?); the descriptions (the forest hopping from hill to hill only to trip over the highway, and much else); the preliminary glimpses of people and things with a parallel life of their own that will, incidentally or crucially, recur; the trucks ominously thundering in the night; the splendidly innovative use of Russian in the original; the cinematic imagery of the surreal conclusion and the frenzied pace, a kind of stretta finale , that accelerates toward the crashing climax.

The English title chosen by Father has, of course, a not-so-secret echo in The Enchanted Hunters of Lolita . I shall leave to others the search for additional Easter eggs of this kind. One should be wary, however, of exaggerating the significance of superficial similarities. Nabokov considered The Enchanter a totally distinct work, only distantly connected to Lolita . It may have contained, as he put it, “the first little throb” of the later novel—and even that thesis might be questioned if one attentively examines certain earlier works of his—but we must also not forget that the arts in general pulsate with first throbs that foreshadow future, larger works; various literary compositions come to mind, such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist . Or, conversely, there may be a subsequent mini-version, a final distillation such as Massenet’s Portrait of Manon . In any case, Volshebnik is certainly not a Portrait of Lolita: the differences between the two are clearly greater than the similarities. Whether or not the later novel is a love affair between the author and the English language, a love affair between Europe and America, a jaundiced view of the motel scene and the surrounding landscape, a modern-day “free translation of Onegin” (these and a multitude of other hypotheses have been advanced, eagerly but with varying degrees of seriousness and credibility), Lolita is unquestionably the product of very new and different artistic stimuli.

On the premise that it is preferable to be angelic than foolish in approaching the genesis of a complex artistic work, I shall not venture to assess the importance to Lolita of Nabokov’s study of Lewis Carroll; of his observations in Palo Alto in 1941; or of Havelock Ellis’s transcription, circa 1912, of a Ukrainian pedophile’s confessions, which have been translated from the original French by Donald Rayfield (who, despite a 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 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.