By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
In a fictional foreword to Vladimir Nabokov's 1955 mock memoir, ''Lolita,'' a psychologist explains that the book's ''author,'' the pedophile Humbert Humbert, has disguised the names of many personages. But not that of Lolita herself, the 12-year-old object of Humbert's obsessions -- since ''her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it.''
Earlier this spring, Michael Maar, a literary scholar, speculated that the name Lolita may have been similarly interwound with Nabokov himself. In Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and in The Times Literary Supplement, Maar alerted readers to a 1916 short story called ''Lolita,'' by an obscure Berlin writer, Heinz von Lichberg. That von Lichberg later served on the editorial board of a notorious Nazi publication heightened the frisson of scandal.
In the earlier work, as in the later, a first-person male narrator describes an obsession with a young girl named Lolita that entails long travels and ends in death. Maar finds the coincidence of plot, narrative and name ''striking.'' He does not accuse Nabokov of plagiarism, since ''he was a genius on his own.'' (As some are too rich to steal, apparently, others are too smart to crib.) Maar prefers the word ''cryptomnesia,'' a process by which things are learned, forgotten and then mistaken for original inspirations when recalled. Since Nabokov lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1937, Maar asks, could he have been under the ''stimulus'' of von Lichberg's story? If so, what does that tell us about one of the last half-century's most famous -- and notorious -- works of fiction?
Von Lichberg's work is an 18-page gothic tale set in Spain. Nabokov's is an American ''Diary of a Madman'' and a word game sustained across some 300 pages. Of course, the coincidence of names is startling. But even if Nabokov did somehow have the name of von Lichberg's heroine in mind, he wasn't necessarily up to anything questionable. Once the narrators' obsessions with youth are accounted for, the other resemblances plainly come with the territory. Maar notes that von Lichberg's narrator falls in love at ''a first, fatal glance, that cannot but remind us of the later Lolita.'' Yeah, along with most love stories ever written. That both novels describe young girls as ''boyish'' is no more surprising than that two novels should describe basketball players as ''tall.''
Nor should you be too impressed with Maar's claim that in the earlier ''Lolita,'' ''she's the one who seduces the narrator, like with Humbert Humbert.'' As any small-town district attorney knows, it is the pattern for sex offenders to depict their crimes in this light: she was asking for it! Whether Nabokov and von Lichberg were guilelessly revealing their own prurience or thinking their way into the minds of their narrators, a depiction of the child as seducer is the first thing you would expect to find in such a fictional memoir.
Nabokov is an unlikely plagiarist. Honing a distinctive literary voice obsessed him. ''Style is not a tool,'' he once said in a lecture, ''it is not a method, it is not a choice of words alone. Being much more than all this, style constitutes an intrinsic component or characteristic of the author's personality.''
Why the fuss, then? Since few books today evoke emotions worth feuding over, postmodern literati settle for having the old literary feuds again and again. Linking von Lichberg with Nabokov lets readers address, as if it were still a burning issue, the question of how dirty a book ''Lolita'' is. Whether you believe the charge of borrowing or not has much to do with whether you think ''Lolita'' is art or smut. If you consider Humbert Humbert an outright pervert with whom only the rare weirdo can empathize, then it's very unlikely that Nabokov arrived at his similarities with von Lichberg by accident. In this case, a compromised protagonist suggests a compromised author.
But you can also consider Humbert's vice, as Lionel Trilling did, a part of the human inheritance that civilization has tried to overcome, or at least tame. While Trilling found ''Lolita'' pornographic and at times shallow, he grants that ''it is not about sex. It is about love.'' Trilling means courtly love -- ''passion,'' with its etymological overtones of suffering and doom. Art does not deal with love in this way nowadays, Trilling says, because ''we have all become so nicely cleareyed, so sensibly Coming-of-Age-in-Samoa,'' that no passion can shock, no amatory choice is despised, no one is doomed. Lovers as jealous as Othello or as thwarted by snobbery as Romeo and Juliet would be implausible. To create a protagonist doomed by his passion, you must seek the only taboo left standing: pedophilia. ''Lolita'' is a bid to rescue love from the forces of health -- marriage on the one hand and psychiatry on the other -- in order to reclaim it for suffering, and for art. If Trilling is right, then ''Lolita'' has an aesthetic rationale so compelling that it is no surprise that two authors should gravitate to it independently.
If this rationale does not exist, though, the similarities are suspicious. That is why the present controversy offers more to ''Lolita'' skeptics than to ''Lolita''-philes. The consensus for the past half-century has been that ''Lolita'' is not smut because it is a work of original genius. The new controversy raises skeptics' hopes that they can now win the argument on a technicality, simply by running it backward: if ''Lolita'' is not a work of original genius, then it is smut. The smart money would seem to be on the proposition that it is both.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times.
