Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age
looks back on the story of an amour[ou, one beginning
when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The
moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost.
She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave
him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator-marked by her
forever-remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the
title of the story: Lolita.The author of the story I've described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale
of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov's novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937.