THE son of Vladimir Nabokov has dismissed research suggesting that his father’s 1956 classic story about a young temptress’s seduction of an older man was first thought up by a Nazi radio journalist.

Dmitri Nabokov, a leading translator, has protested to a literary scholar who found that Heinz von Eschwege told a similar story in an 18-page novella, published in 1916, 40 years before Lolita.

A girl called Lolita bewitches the first-person narrator, who is staying in her house while on holiday and who is devastated when she dies.

Michael Maar, a literary scholar, wrote in this week’s Times Literary Supplement that the similarities — the name, the title and the fact that it was written in the first person — could not be ignored.

Nabokov’s son has written a letter of protest to Herr Maar: “Of course it’s true that it is set in Spain, where the name is hardly a rarity. It also appears to be junk. Besides, my father had practically no German. I would guess it is . . . a journalistic tempest in a teacup.”

Dieter Zimmer, the editor of the German edition of Nabokov’s work, has leapt to his defence. “If your father had ever seen it or heard about it, I am sure he would have given his girl some other name,” he wrote to the son.

Herr Maar came across the Von Eschwege book while at a party, when a teacher suggested that the Lolita name and story was not new. He believes that Von Eschwege could have crossed Nabokov’s path. The pair lived in the same area of south-west Berlin for 15 years.

Herr Maar wrote that he had a feeling of deja-vu when he read it: “Can Vladimir Nabokov . . . have known of the ugly duckling that was (his novel’s) precursor?”

Von Eschwege, who was 25 at the time, later joined the Nazi party and commentated on Hitler’s torch-lit procession to the Reichstag in 1933.

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