Proust’s Albertine and Nabokov’s Lolita

In Lectures on Literature (1980), Nabokov expressed great admiration for the subtlety and style of Proust’s Swann’s Way: “The transmission of sensation into sentiment, the ebb and tide of memory, waves of emotions such as desire, jealousy and artistic euphoria—this is the material of the enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.”  Nabokov leaves an important clue about Proust’s influence by writing, “This book is about Lolita… and might be called ‘dolorès disparue.’ ”  The italicized words refer to Albertine disparue, the French title of Proust’s novel, translated as The Fugitive or, more poetically, as The Sweet Cheat Gone.  As in Proust, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert describes the object of his love, justifies his cruel behaviour and pursues his obsession.  He follows Proust’s pattern and portrays his characters as tragic, comic, ordinary and absurd.  Both Albertine and Lolita are described by first-person narrators, Marcel and Humbert, who justify their behaviour and also express the major theme of the novels: the jealousy and anguish of love.  It seems, when reading Nabokov, that we’re simultaneously reading the template of Proust.

Marcel’s passion for Albertine, in her early 20s, appears mainly in The Captive (posthumously published in 1923) and The Fugitive (1913), the 5th and 6th volumes of Remembrance of Things Past. These titles concisely define key elements in the plot of Lolita (1955): confinement and escape.  Nabokov writes, in a brilliant description of the beach-clad Lolita, “the white negative image of a rudimentary swimsuit [was] patterned against her tan”.  The photographic negative of her bathing costume emerges from the positive image of her tanned skin.  In the same way, Proust’s Captive is the photographic negative from which Nabokov develops his positive image in Lolita.

Nabokov reveals the Proustian connection by teasing us with the characters’ names.  The ever-changeable Lolita is variously called Dolores, Dolly, Lola, Lo and Lolitchen.  Albertine is intimately shortened to Titine.  The name of the Baron de Charlus leads to Lolita’s mother Charlotte; the name of his corrupt young lover Charlie Morel slyly reappears as the teenaged Charlie Holmes, the seducer of the virginal Lolita at Lake Climax.

Both Proust and Nabokov had to be circumspect with their sensitive subjects.  Homosexuality was not illegal in France, but homosexuals were subject to discrimination and surveillance, and had to be careful and discreet.  The model for Albertine was Proust’s lover Alberto Agostinelli, who died in a plane crash in 1914.  Nabokov is more daring in his characters.  His sexually active heroine is a child, and Humbert commits a criminal offence: statutory rape.

In The Captive, Marcel has sequestered his mistress Albertine from her lesbian girlfriends.  While his family is away from their flat in Paris, leaving only the servant François and the chauffeur who drives them around (as Humbert drives Lolita), Albertine moves into an adjoining bedroom separated from Marcel by a thin partition.  She is now financially dependent on him, effectively cloistered and caged.  Marcel has cunningly concealed from his friends the fact that he is hiding this delightful and irritating young woman.

Albertine is now very different from the girl who had appeared only a few years earlier with the group of adolescent maidens on the Normandy coast.  He recalls “the girl whom he had seen the first time at Balbec, in her flat polo-cap, with her insistent laughing eyes”, and “was quite distinctly proud of having plucked, and carried off from them all, their fairest rose”.

She has a disturbing charm, a faculty for suddenly changing her mood, thoughts and plans, and cultivates a blend of mystery and sensuality.  Albertine has no conception of punctuality and order, and has poor taste in music, but she develops intellectually and becomes extremely intelligent.  Watching her sleep like a child, Marcel notices that her throat is startlingly beautiful.  He tells her, “I never saw anybody as pretty as you.  You know I am madly in love with you.”  Nobody in the world cares for her more than he does.  He likes to reward her sexual kindness, and is always eager to procure attractive clothes for his mistress.  When she says, “I should so like some mussels,” he immediately satisfies her craving for special kinds of food.  But as she plays two quasi-incestuous roles as both mistress and daughter, Marcel “trembled at the thought of not being able to keep Albertine by his bedside”.  He continually suffers when he’s in love with her.  Always uncertain about what she might be doing, he engages in a kind of Spanish Inquisition and criminal investigation.  Yet the cunning and duplicitous young woman always manages to elude him.

Marcel is both master and slave.  His love is an incurable malady and “could not be lasting unless it were unhappy”.  He has a burning curiosity about Albertine’s secret life and confesses, “she has deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance”.  But he masochistically concedes, “to be harsh and deceitful to the person whom we love is so natural!”  She is always hatching secret plans, and he never knows if he really possesses her or if she will escape.  But his love object is worthy of his jealousy, which both authorises deception and intensifies his love.  After their bitter quarrels, Marcel’s anger subsides and his mistress soon regains his affection.

He torments himself by imagining “all the things that we did together she also did with all the other men”.  Her “impatience made me ask myself whether Albertine was not planning to cast off her chain”.  But he can neither act on his forebodings nor prevent the inevitable, and fears “the future was not destined to be the same for Albertine as for myself”. One characteristic Proustian passage about Marcel’s lover closely foreshadows Humbert’s feelings and mood, his suspicion and jealousy of Lolita: “Allow Albertine to go by herself into a big shop crowded with people perpetually rubbing against one, furnished with so many doors that a woman can always say that when she came out she could not find the carriage which was waiting farther along the street; I was quite determined never to consent to such a thing.”

In a moment of classic ambivalence, Marcel hopes to be released from his own emotional captivity and simultaneously pleads for both caution and recklessness: “I beg you, my dearest girl, no more of that haute voltige [high-wire act] you were practising the other day.  Just think, Albertine, if you were to meet with an accident!  Of course I did not wish her any harm.  But what a pleasure it would be if, with her horses, she should take it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never to return again to my house.  How it would simplify everything.”

Devastated by the news of Albertine’s sudden departure, Marcel calls “the present calamity the worst that I had experienced in my life”.  Desperate to bring her back, he realises that he loves her and wants to marry her.  But he must now accept the news of her death in a riding accident and suffer the shock of her permanent loss.  As Theodore Roethke writes in “Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse)”: “If only I could nudge you from this sleep, / My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. / Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love.”  The critic Paul Alexander concludes, “Inconsolable with grief, Marcel struggles to accept the reality of her death.  But the demons of jealousy resurface and he remembers some suggestion of lesbian activities in the bathhouses of Balbec.”

The similarities between The Captive and Lolita are extensive and unmistakable.  Nabokov adopts Proust’s essential tone, characters, structure and ideas, and magically transforms them in his own novel.  Both girls are alluring and tormenting, desired and finally unattainable.  Marcel tries to recapture his original impression of the young Albertine in Normandy.  Humbert tries to recapture his childhood memory of Annabel Leigh, an earlier love, on the French Riviera.  Albertine is first seen in Balbec; Lolita first seen, like the innocent Eve, in her garden.  Humbert immediately summons up remembrance of the lovely Annabel: “on mirrory beaches and rosy rocks, we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other.”  Humbert continues, in a lyrical and poetic strain that makes his lurid encounter with Lolita seem almost innocent: “It was the same child—the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair.  A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.”

Albertine was also an adolescent nymphet when Marcel first met her.  He was enraptured by “the dreamy sweet radiance of her features”, and adds, “I was weak, I was not wise, my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall.”  Proust describes Albertine’s childlike body: “I opened her chemise.  Her two little uplifted breasts were so round that they seemed not so much to be an integral part of her body as to have ripened there like fruit.”  He calls her vulva “two valves of a curve, hushed, reposeful and cloistered” like a nun. Nabokov similarly and lyrically describes the erotic landscape of Lolita’s naked adolescent body, which “presented to me its pale breastbuds; in the rosy lamplight, a little pubic floss glistened on its plump hillock.”

Albertine moves into the house of Marcel’s parents.  Humbert moves into Lolita’s house.

Albertine is promoted from lover to lodger; Humbert rises from lodger to lover.  Both girls are isolated.  Albertine’s aunt, Madame Bontemps, gives her free rein and allows her to have a good time.  Lolita’s brother died at two when she was four.  After her mother dies and she’s captured by Humbert, she has no parents, school or friends.

Marcel knows that Albertine is a lesbian; Humbert suspects that Lolita has been one: “Her kiss to my delirious embarrassment, had some rather comical refinements of flutter and probe made me conclude she had been coached at an early age by a little Lesbian.”  He wanted to know where she “had learned those sapphic diversions.”  Like Albertine, Lolita has a “tender dreamy childishness, a kind of eerie vulgarity” and is “singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant”.  Humbert partially redeems himself with his genuine affection for Lolita and declares, “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.  I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth.”  Marcel promises to buy luxurious gifts for Albertine.  More modestly, Humbert buys Lolita clothes, books, comics, movie magazines, records, snacks, fast food, malts and meals.

Marcel’s and Humbert’s relations with their lovers are ruled by hostility, suspicion and conflict.  When Humbert picks her up from summer camp, he sincerely exclaims, “You know, I missed you terribly, Lo.”  She crushingly responds, “I did not.  Fact I’ve been revoltingly unfaithful to you.”  His suffering is a perverse part of his pleasure and he says, “I had, fond fool, suffered her to cultivate deceit.”  Humbert tortures himself by imagining transgressions far worse than anything Lolita actually does and is jealous of every male they meet.  Marcel either desires or is jealous of the mendacious Albertine.  Lolita lies about missing her piano lessons and secretly meeting boys, about giving a truck driver directions when she is actually trying to escape with him.  Humbert, madly jealous and constantly suspicious of Lolita’s whereabouts, repeatedly condemns himself to a new cycle of persecution.

Andrée, a lesbian from Balbec, is Marcel’s sexual rival; the demonic Clare Quilty is Humbert’s sexual rival.  Lolita is filled with distrust and surveillance.  Charlotte spies on Humbert’s diary, Humbert spies on Lolita, Quilty pursues, tortures and spies on Humbert.  Marcel spends a lot of time in a desperate attempt to check Albertine’s movements and prevent her from contacting her lesbian friends.  Humbert first suspects Lolita’s sexual involvement with boys at school and at camp, then is tormented by imagining what Quilty does to her after he captured her.

Like Marcel with Albertine, Humbert suffers with Lolita and suspects her of betraying him.  He dares not leave her unobserved for a moment and gives up all his social engagements to concentrate on her.  Marcel reveals his agonies to the reader, but it is not clear if he is driven by love, lust or jealousy.  Humbert’s feelings are also a painful mixture of the same emotions.  Albertine remains a puzzle.  She’s sexy with Marcel, but mysterious and evasive about her female contacts, and his jealousy drives him mad.  Lolita is naturally secretive about sleeping with Charlie at Lake Climax.

The more the men try to control the girls, the greater is their desire to escape.  Readers sympathize with Albertine and understand why she wants to flee from her stifling confinement.

Humbert’s greatest fear is that Lolita might accumulate sufficient cash to run away.  She feels smothered and finally manages to flee, but moves from one imprisonment to another.  Albertine also runs away from Marcel.  After tracking her down, he promises to buy her a yacht and a Rolls-Royce if she will only come back to him. Humbert finally tracks down Lolita, gives her $4,000 and begs her to run away with him, though she is married and pregnant.  It’s quite impossible to imagine the fastidious Humbert driving across the country with a screaming infant in the back seat.

At the end of Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel, inspired by Albertine, finally decides to write his novel.  Humbert never progresses with his history of French literature.  He first writes only in his diary, then composes a memoir of his life with Lolita while in prison and awaiting trial for murdering Quilty.  Albertine is killed in a riding accident.  Lolita dies in childbirth.

All Proust’s major themes are adopted by Nabokov, and the French master’s most important sentences could have been written by his Russian disciple: “I was employing a thousand circumstances, a thousand pleasures, to procure for her in my society that illusion of happiness”; “If she left my side for a moment, I became anxious, began to imagine that she had spoken to, or simply cast a glance at somebody”; “I had never supposed that one day I should be following a trail, even a false trail”; “my suffering could end only with Albertine’s life or with my own.”  Both authors finally conclude, “We love only what we do not wholly possess.”

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has had thirty-three books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents.  Forty-Three Ways of Looking at Hemingway came out in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest appeared with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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