Nabokov: Plagiarist or Cryptomnesiac?

The allegation that Vladimir Nabokov may have lifted the plot of Lolita from another author’s work has Ron Rosenbaum fascinated. “It’s not so much a scandal as a literary mystery — a mystery about the mind of one of the great artists of our era. And second, the alleged scandal turns on the question of a literary-psychological term that was new to me, but that has now become one of my favorites: ‘cryptomnesia.'” The term mean just what it sounds like: it describes an author who has read another author’s work, but completely forgotten about it, to the extent that he appropriates the plot without ever realizing that he has done so.