Sons of Goethe: Vladimir Nabokov

How Goethe and the literature of the ancient world both worked to influence the writings of Vladimir Nabokov.

Vladimir Nabokov was literature’s greatest aesthete. Whereas authors before him have sought to tell stories, most of the fiction in Nabokov’s oeuvre are intended to be works of art that stretch the boundaries of what a novel can be. The story acts as merely a canvas for the pigments of the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of all who have come before him. To suggest that there is evidence of inspiration from both classical antiquity and Goethe alike in his books is akin to pointing out the use of phthalo blue on a Bob Ross painting. What we’re really looking for is a hint of lapis lazuli blue, to extend the metaphor, that signifies an express, intentional appreciation for both of those categories. Past scholars have already done the work to broadly quantify the appearances of authors’ individual presences,¹ but mere nominal references count just the same as deep rooted allusions throughout the whole story. Seeing the tobacco brand named Omen Faustum is about as useful to the reader as pointing out that Quilty lives at “Pavor Manor.” Instead of aiming to provide an exhaustive list of all possible uses of the topic of our conversation across the span of his work, the main focus will be on Lolita, with brief jaunts to his other books when the topic is unavoidable. If any readers are not familiar with the themes of the story, I would ask them to take special care to seek them out beforehand; these essays are written as analyses of overall themes across a body of work anyway, so one ought to know a thing or two going in, but special care should be taken with this one.

The opening chapters of Humbert’s manuscript, between John Ray Jr.’s introduction and the actual narrative of the story, serve as a way to trick the reader and mollify them into believing the crime of pedophilia is less serious than they have been led to believe. In the past we have discussed the ways in which an imperfect representation of the forms and functions of the ancient world have been used to launder a false ethos, but here is something much different. Humbert is a scholar, and he has the knowledge necessary to speak on the topics he has referenced. What he’s laundering is a deeper connection from his behavior to that of the ancient world. The rigid label for the logical fallacy is “appeal to antiquity/tradition” because someone behaving a certain way in the past does not necessarily make it permissible to do so in the modern world. The Roman poet Catullus is named twice throughout the narrative of Lolita; both times, Humbert intends to draw the comparison between Dolores² and Lesbia as a way to “legitimize” his perversion. The more significant of the two occurrences comes alongside a parody of Catullus 58, which begins “Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa…” as Humbert copies the repeated invocation of Dolores’ name here and in the opening lines of the book. This motif appears throughout Roman poetry, but it’s especially notable in Catullus because of both writers’ penchant for using pseudonyms to protect the identities of the targets of their courting.³ The more interesting aspect of this reference, though, comes from the lines that Humbert does not reproduce. That poem is, in toto, a rebuke against Lesbia’s actions. She has, in Catullus’ mind, chosen to screw around⁴ with a subset of people he deems to be lesser than what he could have provided when they were together. After Dolores escapes Humbert’s grasp she winds up marrying Richard Schiller, who is a good-hearted but poverty-stricken man. Conditions have gotten so bad that Dolores even has to reach out to the person who defiled her in order to finance their move to his new job in Alaska. The denunciation of the type of man she has settled down with is not as strong as in Catullus’ original poem,⁵ but it’s still floating around in the back of both their minds.