The Wizard

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Nabokov monument in Montreux

The Magician , also The Enchanter (Russian: Волшебник Wolschebnik ) is a short story by the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov , which hewrotein Russian in October and November 1939during his exile in Paris. The story has individual elements that have parallels to Nabokov's most important work Lolita . While Lolita was first published in 1955, the story was published posthumously in 1986under the title The Enchanter . It wastranslated into Englishby Vladimir and Véra Nabokov's son Dmitri ; the Russian original was first published in 1991.

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Like Lolita, the story has a middle-aged man, here named Arthur, who has pedophile tendencies as the main character . The protagonist observes a prepubescent girl dressed in violet blue in a park and feels drawn to her. A short time later he married the widowed mother of the child girl, described as a little repulsive, so that he could see her every day. After his mother dies from an operation, a sexual approach fails in a hotel room and Arthur throws himself in front of a truck.

Emergence

In an epilogue to his novel Lolita written in 1956, Nabokov mentions a newspaper report about a monkey in the Jardin des Plantes that is said to have drawn the bars of his cage as the first inspiration for this novella :

“The first faint pulse of Lolita passed through me in late 1939 or early 1940 in Paris, at a time when I was lying down with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I can remember, the initial shiver of inspiration was triggered by a newspaper article about a great ape in the Jardin des Plantes, which, after a scientist had chased him for months, produced the first drawing ever charred by an animal: The sketch showed the bars of the cage of the poor creature. The impulse that I record here had no direct relation to the resulting train of thought, which, however, was related to a prototype of my present novel, a short story about thirty pages long. "

In the same epilogue, he states that he destroyed this narrative soon after he moved to the United States in 1940. Nabokov was wrong about that. The story was found in February 1959 under different papers. A little later he wrote to the publishing director of GP Putnams, the US publisher that published the US edition of his novel Lolita in 1958 after a long controversy .

"I have now reread Wolschebnik with a lot more pleasure compared to what I had while working on Lolita than when it struck me as dead stuff."

The ape depicting the bars of its cage is widely regarded as a metaphor for both the state of mind of Arthur, the main character of the story, and of Humbert Humbert, the main character of the novel Lolita . They are both trapped in their own obsession while they see the normal free world in front of them. Breaking out of the cage turns her into a criminal. However, as Nabokov expert Dieter E. Zimmer shows in detail, Nabokov is mistaken several times in his explanatory afterword. Its time cannot be accurate because Nabokov completed work on the story in November 1939. In addition, this was neither the first known drawing of a great ape nor can these cage bars show. Scribble drawings of great apes were reported several times in the first decades of the 20th century. Today, however, all primate researchers agree that, despite their motor skills, great apes are unable to produce a pictorial image of something because they are unable to break down complex objects into their parts and to break down the relationship between them. However, towards the end of the 1930s there was a chimpanzee in Berlin who took photos and also photographed people standing in front of the bars. The press reported extensively on these photos. There is credible evidence that Nabokov either saw these photos or saw such a photo in the vicinity of a letter he wrote in 1949, which was printed there in connection with another story.

Critical appraisal

Marcel Reich-Ranicki described the story The Magician as a primarily psychological portrait, an astute poetic study of sexual obsession, shown using the example of a pathologically inclined man. He also calls it a thoughtful and multi-layered prose piece of frightening intensity, in which one runs the risk of underestimating the quality of the narrative because it is shadowed by Nabokov's incomparable work Lolita .

literature

  • Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Vladimir Nabokov - essays. Ammann Verlag & Co, Zurich 1995. ISBN 3-250-10277-6 .
  • Dieter E. Zimmer : Cyclone Lolita. Information on an epoch-making novel. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-498-07666-5 .
  • Graham Vickers: Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago Review Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-556-52682-4 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Cyclone Lolita. Information on an epoch-making novel . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, p. 95.
  2. ^ Graham Vickers: Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago Review Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-556-52682-4 . P. 33
  3. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov in his 1956 afterword to the novel Lolita
  4. ↑ Vladimir Nabokov: About a book with the title "Lolita". In: Same: Lolita. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1959, p. 330.
  5. ^ Graham Vickers: Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago Review Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-556-52682-4 , p. 33. The original quote is: “I have reread Volshebnik with considerably more pleasure than I experienced when recalling it as a dead scrap during my work on Lolita . "
  6. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Cyclone Lolita. Information on an epoch-making novel . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2008, p. 95 to p. 103.
  7. ↑ Dieter E. Zimmer: Cyclone Lolita. Information on an epoch-making novel . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 2008, p. 97.
  8. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Vladimir Nabokov - essays. Ammann Verlag & Co, Zurich 1995. ISBN 3-250-10277-6 . P. 66
  9. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Vladimir Nabokov - essays. Ammann Verlag & Co, Zurich 1995. ISBN 3-250-10277-6 . P. 67