| Vladimir Nabokov had been contributing to The New Yorker for more than a decade by the time his most famous work was finally published in the U.S. “Lolita,” which arrived in American bookstores sixty-six years ago today, took a notoriously winding path; it was roundly rejected by U.S. publishers before finding a willing editor in France. (The novel débuted there in 1955, but was subsequently banned, twice.) Narrated, to darkly comic effect, by a middle-aged pedophile, “Lolita” recounts the kidnapping and molestation of a twelve-year-old girl, a premise that continues to spark revulsion and debate. The book’s opening—one of the most unforgettable in twentieth-century literature—revisits the antihero’s first sexual infatuation as a teen-ager, with a “girl-child” roughly his age. In 1949, as Nabokov was working on “Lolita,” he published a short story in The New Yorker called “Tamara.” As in the novel that followed, the narrator is a middle-aged European, and the title character a young girl—fifteen, in this case—who is recalled as a formative object of desire during his adolescence. (Both stories also begin with a pointed focus on the female character’s name.) Like in “Lolita,” time and circumstance block the protagonist’s pursuit of the young girl, and the story evolves into an exploration, in part, of memory, mood, and perspective. Later in life, Nabokov faced frequent efforts by readers to draw parallels between himself and the narrator of “Lolita”; in “Tamara,” the biographical distance between the two appears smaller. The narrator is described as a man with a background much like Nabokov’s: an aristocratic Russian family; displacement by the Bolsheviks; a frantic escape from Crimea, aboard a Greek ship bound for Turkey. Was “Tamara” a sort of rough draft? The story stands on its own. “We lost ourselves in mossy woods and bathed in a fairy-tale cove and swore eternal love,” Nabokov writes, before his narrator returns to the present. “No matter how I worry the screws of memory, I cannot recall the way Tamara and I parted.” | 
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