The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

^Six Seeds of Compulsion

As Marshall Thompson continued to track Frank La Salle’s whereabouts without results, Vladimir Nabokov remained on a quest to plumb the fictional mind of a man with a similar appetite for young girls. So far, he had not been successful. He could have, and tried to, abandon it altogether—there were plenty of other literary projects for Nabokov to pursue. But the drive to get this story right went beyond formal exercise. Otherwise, why did Nabokov explore this same topic, over and over, for more than twenty years? At almost every stage of his literary career, Nabokov was preoccupied with the idea of the middle-aged man’s obsession with a young girl.

As Martin Amis wrote in a 2011 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, “Of the nineteen fictions, no fewer than six wholly or partly concern themselves with the sexuality of prepubescent girls…. [T]o be clear as one can be: the unignorable infestation of nymphets… is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of aesthetics. There are just too many of them.”

“Aesthetics” is one way to phrase it. Robert Roper, in his 2015 book Nabokov in America, suggested a more likely culprit: compulsion—“a literary equivalent of the persistent impulse of a pedophile.” Over and over, scholars and biographers have searched for direct connections between Nabokov and young children, and failed to find them. What impulses he possessed were literary, not literal, in the manner of the “well-adjusted” writer who persists in writing about the worst sort of crimes. We generally don’t bear the same suspicions of writers who turn serial killers into folk heroes. No one, for example, thinks Thomas Harris capable of the terrible deeds of Hannibal Lecter, even though he invented them with chilling psychological insight.

Nabokov likely realized how often this theme persisted in his work. That would explain why he was quick to deny connections between Lolita and real-life figures, or to later claim the novel’s inspiration emerged from, of all things, a brief article in a French newspaper about “an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

But there is no getting around the deep-seated compulsion that recurs again and again in Nabokov’s work. I read through his earlier Russian-language novels, as well as more contemporary accounts by literary critics, to figure out why this awful subject held such allure for him.

NABOKOV’S INITIAL EXPLORATION of an older man’s unnatural desire for a preteen girl was published in 1926, within the first year of his career as a prose writer. Before then, he devoted himself exclusively to poetry. Did prose free Nabokov up to wrestle with the darkness and tumult that already surrounded him? His father, the jurist and journalist Vladimir D. Nabokov, had been assassinated four years earlier, and he was a year into his marriage to Véra Slonim, a fellow émigré he met while both lived in Berlin among the community of other Russians who’d fled the Revolution. Neither particularly cared for the city, but they stayed in Berlin for fifteen years, Nabokov supplementing his writing income and growing literary reputation by teaching tennis, boxing, and foreign languages to students.

Nabokov published his first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary), in 1926, under the pseudonym of V. Sirin, which he would use for all of his poetry and prose published before he moved to America. That same year Nabokov, as Sirin, published “A Nursery Tale.” The short story includes a section on a fourteen-year-old girl clad in a grown-up cocktail dress designed to show off her cleavage, though it isn’t clear that the narrator, Erwin, immediately notices that aspect:

“There was something odd about that face, odd was the flitting glance of her much too shiny eyes, and if she were not just a little girl—the old man’s granddaughter, no doubt—one might suspect her lips were touched up with rouge. She walked swinging her hips very, very slightly, her legs moved closer together, she was asking her companion something in a ringing voice—and although Erwin gave no command mentally, he knew that his swift secret wish had been fulfilled.”

Erwin’s “swift secret wish” is his inappropriate desire for the girl.

Two years later, in 1928, Nabokov tackled the subject in poetry. “Lilith” also strongly features the so-called demonic effect of a little girl, of her “russet armpit” and a “green eye over her shoulder” upon an older man: “She had a water lily in her curls and was as graceful as a woman.” The poem continues:

But this illicit coupling is the man’s ruin. Lilith closed herself off to him and forced him out, and as he shouts, “let me in!” his fate is sealed: “The door stayed silent, and for all to see / writhing with agony I spilled my seed / and knew abruptly that I was in Hell.” Two and a half decades before Lolita, Nabokov anticipated Humbert Humbert’s remark that he was “perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”

Another proto-nymphet appears in Laughter in the Dark, though this one, Margot, is a little older: eighteen in the original version published in Russian, Camera Obscura (1932), and sixteen in the heavily revised and retitled edition Nabokov released six years later. (Nabokov rewrote the novel a third time in the 1960s.) Margot attracts the attention of the much-older, wealthy art critic Albert Albinus,[1] whose name foreshadows Humbert Humbert.

We only see Margot’s actions and personality filtered through Albinus’s eyes. He depicts her as capricious, whimsical, and full of manipulation. Just as in Lolita, when Humbert’s plans are upended by the arrival of Clare Quilty, an interloper foils the relationship between Albinus and Margot. Axel Rex’s affair with Margot in Laughter in the Dark serves a more mercenary purpose—gaining access to Albinus’s status and fortune—while Quilty is after Dolores for the same illicit reasons as Humbert Humbert.

Except for Margot, who is a proper character, the early precursors to Dolores Haze are merely images that tempt and torment Nabokov’s male protagonists. The image grows in substance in tandem with Nabokov’s artistic growth. A paragraph in Dar, written between 1935 and 1937 but not published until 1952 (the English translation, published as The Gift, appeared a decade later), all but summarizes the future plot of Lolita. “What a novel I would whip off!” declares a secondary character, contemplating his much, much younger stepdaughter:

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:

“[Carroll] has a pathetic affinity with Humbert Humbert but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.”

Perhaps a similar “odd scruple” may explain why Nabokov was quick to deny any connection between Lolita and a real-life figure he knew early on in his American tenure. Henry Lanz was a Stanford professor of motley European stock, “of Finnish descent, son of a naturalized American father, born in Moscow and educated there and in Germany.” He was fluent in many languages, an avid chess player. By World War I Lanz was in London, married, at the age of thirty, to a fourteen-year-old.

Not long after the Nabokovs immigrated to America in May 1940, arriving in New York on the SS Champlain, Lanz arranged for Nabokov to teach at Stanford. Their friendship grew over regular chess games; Nabokov beat Lanz more than two hundred times. Over these jousts Lanz revealed his predilections—specifically, that he most enjoyed seducing young girls and he loved to watch them urinate. Four years later, Lanz was dead of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.

Nabokov’s first biographer, Andrew Field, suggested that Lanz was a prototype for Humbert Humbert. Nabokov, however, denied it: “No, no, no. I may have had [Lanz] in the back of my mind. He himself was what is called a fountainist, like Bloom in Ulysses. First of all, this is the commonest thing. In Swiss papers they always call them un triste individuel.”

Such a denial makes sense, in light of other future denials of real-life influence. Yet the months Nabokov spent being peppered with stories from a known pederast could not help but inform his fiction—and further bolster his involuntary, unconscious need to unspool this particular, horrible narrative.