The Lolita Before The “Lolita”?

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is 50 years old this year. But a researcher has dug up “a 1916 short story by the aristocratic German writer Heinz von Eschwege (1890-1951), a German newspaper journalist (and descendant of the Grimm Brothers) who wrote under the pen name Heinz von Lichberg and later became a Nazi Party propagandist. The story involved a cultivated middle-aged man bewitched by a preteen beauty named Lolita. It appeared as one of a collection of 15 tales published by Falken Verlag in Darmstadt under the title, ‘The Accursed Giocanda’.”