There’s a fascinating story of literary intrigue making the rounds on the Internet about Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and the possibility that Dorothy Parker may have ripped off the story before its publication.

Vulture has all the details. Basically, the story is that Nabokov’s now-famous novel was making the rounds in New York, trying to find a publisher daring enough to put it out in the world. (The novel’s tale of pedophilia is tame by today’s standards, but back then it was scandalous and predicted to fail miserably.) Sometime between Nabokov’s writing of Lolita and its eventual publication, Dorothy Parker published a New Yorker story with a remarkably similar plot. Nothing is certain, but it seems that Parker may have had access to Nabokov’s manuscript before it was published.

So, did Parker rip off Nabokov to make a quick buck? Seems like she might have—though the whole story raises interesting questions about the shades of difference between outright theft and mere influence (be it conscious or subconscious).

Nabokov himself can’t exactly claim to have created the story of Lolita out of thin air. In a 2007 essay for Harpers, Jonathan Lethem notes an identical story by Heinz von Lichberg that appeared long before Nabokov’s novel:

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called “higher cribbing.” Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?

Interestingly, this passage itself is a plagiarism—Lethem’s essay, called “The Ecstasy of Influence,” is largely cobbled together from quotations of the work of others, which Lethem cites at the essay’s end. And Lethem, of course, is well regarded as an artist of pastiche, someone whose own creative work borrows heavily from the texts he loves.

And so the chain of creative theft continues.

Pablo Picasso is alleged to have said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” (This is perhaps apocryphal; Steve Jobs, himself a brilliant thief, was the one who most famously made the attribution.) Whoever said it, it’s an idea that exists in the cultural consciousness—alongside the perhaps-incompatible notion, among some audiences, that what they read, or watch, or listen to, must be wholly original to be any good.

Who knows what happened between Dorothy Parker and Vladimir Nabokov—or, for that matter, Nabokov and Heinz von Lichberg? Whatever the true story, Nabokov for his part denied any knowledge of von Lichberg’s work, and Parker—when asked to review the book she is alleged to have ripped off—raved about Lolita, saying:

It is in its writing that Mr. Nabokov has made it the work of art that it is … His command of the language is absolute, and his Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book.

No hard feelings, then—just words of admiration, passed from one thief (for what else can an artist be in the postmodern world?) to another.