Vladimir Nabokov Discusses Lolita
Kerry Ellard / 1959
From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, November 30, 1959. © CBC Licensing. Reprinted by permission.
Narrator: Probably the most talked-of book in the past decade has been Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The most recent development of this book was its publication in England earlier this month. Tonight, “Assignment” begins a three-part profile of Mr. Nabokov. Kerry Ellard talks to this novelist, who has also been Professor of Russian and European Literature at Cornell University and curator of butterflies at Harvard. At one time, Mr. Nabokov believed that his claim to immortality would stem from the fact that he has a butterfly named after him. It’s the Nabokov Wood Nymph, discovered twenty years ago and bearing a name strangely similar to his nymphet of Lolita. The question of his book is the first interest of nearly everyone.
Vladimir Nabokov: I wrote this book because I had to write it. I thought it was an interesting problem to solve in artistic terms, but I never thought of its being controversial or not. As a matter of fact, I never bothered about what would happen to it after I had written it.
Kerry Ellard: When did you write it?
VN: I started writing it as early as ’48 and I went on [writing it] in my spare time well into ’54. As soon as it was finished I sent a copy to my agent in Paris, who arranged for its publication in English. The book was published in ’55 and was published in New York three years later in the American edition.
KE: One of the big discussion points of Lolita to most people is: Is it pornography or is it not?
VN: This is a question which is very easily answered. I gave a complete, detailed answer to that question, if that question be raised at all, in a kind of afterpiece appended to the American edition of Lolita, where I explained that pornography was, first of all, I used the term “copulation of clichés”; something which is fundamentally banal, something which is for a very primitive type of reader. That type of reader, if he acquires Lolita for that special purpose, will not get anywhere because he’ll get bored after the first page. He’ll get more and more bored and will never read the book to the end. So this is not what I would call pornography. This is what I would call a very, very simple term: Art.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, you were originally Russian, weren’t you?
VN: I was born in Russia in 1899 and I had been writing in Russian since 1925. I am a “White Russian.” That is the technical term for a Russian émigré. I left Russia in 1919, and since 1925 I’ve been writing novels and short stories and poems in Russian. These were published by émigré firms in Berlin and Paris and New York. Eight in all. Banned in Soviet Russia, I’m sure they are somewhere there in libraries or smuggled in by my fellow writers. The books which I and other writers, such as Bunin or Aldonov, brought out had a comparatively wide circulation.
KE: In which language do you prefer to write then, English or Russian?
VN: Now I think I would prefer English because I gave up my extremely rich and comfortable Russian language for another tongue in which I am more or less at home because I always knew English. When I was a little boy I had an English nurse and then a whole series of English governesses. I knew French, too. I’ve always had three languages. And, unlike Joseph Conrad, I had written in my mother tongue before, and indeed was an established author in emigration when I switched to English. This was difficult because it was a kind of diminishment from what I would term my palatial Russian to the narrow quarters of my English. It was like moving from a darkened house to another on a starless night during a strike of candle makers and torchbearers. After a period of panic and groping, I managed to settle down rather comfortably. Now I know what a caterpillar must feel on the rack of metamorphosis in the straightjacket of the chrysalis. Now I’m in the last stage, what in science we call the “imago” stage, and I hope to stay in that stage as long as I write because I could not repeat that performance again.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, what are you doing at the moment?
VN: I have just completed a huge work on my favorite Russian writer, the romantic poet, the classical Russian writer Pushkin, of the early nineteenth century. And it is a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which will have a huge commentary. It will be brought out by the Bollingen Press in New York in five handsome volumes of about five hundred pages each. During my years of teaching literature, I demanded of my students the passion of science and the patience of poetry. As an artist and a scholar I always prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas; and obscure facts to plain symbols are always more interesting. So this was my treatment of the Pushkin theme. I had worked for ten years, on and off, on this translation and on those notes. It is an absolutely literal translation of the thing. I do not believe in paraphrases, that would be too easy. It has no rhymes. It is honest and clumsy and ponderous and miraculously faithful. It is what an English schoolboy would call a “crib,” and it is meant to be a crib. I have notes to every stanza and to the commentary I really gave a discussion of such things as irrational associations and a complete Explication de Texte, as the French say.
Narrator: Now we’re continuing Kerry Ellard’s talk with Vladimir Nabokov. Mr. Nabokov, himself a controversial author, has very definite views on other writers. He discounts almost entirely the other recent Russian novel Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. He doesn’t like the English poets Shelley or Swinburne, but he does admire Shakespeare and Keats. Referring to his own work, Mr. Nabokov feels that his two best works are Lolita and a paper he wrote dealing with South American blue butterflies. Kerry Ellard has now some more questions for Mr. Nabokov.
KE: What about Pnin? Pnin is a book of yours which was written quite a while ago, I believe, and has suddenly become popular through the fame which came to you from Lolita. Is it doing very well right now?
VN: This is not quite exact because Pnin was published serially. It came out in chapters in The New Yorker. At the time it enjoyed a certain success among people who like literature as much as I do. But finally it came out as a book. It came out, as a matter of fact, after Lolita had been published by Olympia in Paris. Its success was a gradual development of the general success attending my other works because it is not true that I was a completely obscure, unknown writer before Lolita came out. I was very well known in those circles who were interested in literature. It is only what the French call le gros public that discovered my work [later on]. Others knew it before.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, I’ve read Lolita and enjoyed it immensely. You seem to write with a gusto. An awful lot of fun seems to have been had by somebody in writing this book. At least in Lolita I had the feeling you got a real boot out of writing this thing.
VN: Yes, “a real boot” is good. I did. I got a kick out of it as we say in New York State and I thought it was fun. It was also very difficult. It was a very arduous task and there were many times when I told myself, “Well, perhaps I’d better stop and do something else easier than that.” But for me, art is difficult. Art is never easy. A good book is never a simple book. Good literature is always elaborate, always complex; and this idea, this feeling, led me on and helped me to stick to the task I had set to myself. I was having fun, but it was the kind of fun that one has in paddling down one of those rapids that you have in Canada and elsewhere in the Rockies, where everything is very difficult and very dangerous and you are very cold and wet, but still it is fun.
KE: Yesterday I was riding on the Metro with a friend and we were talking about Lolita, and we were thoroughly astonished. Someone turned around as they were getting off the Metro train and said, “Tell Mr. Nabokov for me, I think his book is lousy.” Do you get this kind of reaction from people because Lolita is such a controversial novel?
VN: That’s a rather rare reaction. Perhaps it does occur more usually than I know. But it is also true that among the thousands of letters that my wife and I got in reference to Lolita, there were only three or four that were critical of the book and that were downright insu
lting; so that when my wife told a journalist in America that there had been only two insulting letters, [the] next week we got one which said: “This is the third. I have not read Lolita but it is a wicked book and it should be banned.”
KE: What do you think about book banning?
VN: Generally speaking, the banning of books is a medieval custom, a medieval tradition. I’m not speaking of censorship. I think there should be some kind of censorship against downright pornography and that kind of thing, there’s no doubt about that. But the banning of books just because they displease some cranky old party, some philistine, some postmaster, or some head librarian—I think that’s silly.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, you have coined a word in English now. “Lolita” has come to apply to a nymphet, as you call her in your book, and this was a classification which hitherto had never existed. You invented the classification of a nymphet.
VN: That’s right, I invented the classification. I invented the appliance of that term but I did not invent the word. The word is a diminutive of “nymph,” which had been used before by early French poets, by Ronsard for instance, and by English writers of the time, of Shakespeare’s time as a matter of fact, who have used the word nymphet before in poems. But in those days it just meant a small, a nice, a gentle, a charming nymph. It had not that special tang that I gave it. And it is not I who gave it. It is my hero, Mr. Humbert Humbert, who concocted the term in order to apply it to very young girls.
KE: Do nymphets exist? Was this a figment of your imagination or has it got some basis in fact?
VN: It was a figment of my imagination but I suppose they will exist now, as often happens. Say a painter draws a fog on a river. Then the next man who sees a fog on the river says, “Oh, that’s just like Turner’s. That’s his kind of fog.” And so everybody starts to see that fog in terms of the picture which first expressed it. I suppose that’s the same thing with those graceful girls, of which that particular nymphet is a representative.
KE: You have immortalized yourself by putting a name to something which hitherto did not have a name.
VN: Immortalize is, of course, a ponderous word. I hope I will continue to be happier than my poor little girl is.
Narrator: Tonight, we’re completing the story of Vladimir Nabokov, author of the bestseller Lolita. Many of Mr. Nabokov’s earlier works are written in Russian and, as yet, unavailable in North America. However, this situation may be changed shortly, as the author’s son, Dmitri, is currently translating one of his father’s Russian novels. Tonight, Kerry Ellard talks with Mr. Nabokov about his views concerning Lolita and nymphets in general.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, how did you pick America as a set for this particular book? Some people I think would—certainly myself, living in France –find that this would apply even more so to Paris.
VN: Curiously enough, when I first started to toy with this theme I thought of staging the whole thing in France and I even wrote a first draft of Lolita, a kind of sketch or short story of some thirty pages or so. Then I realized that I didn’t know France well enough. Though I don’t know any American little girl, I can imagine an American little girl … but I just could not imagine a French little girl clearly enough, lucidly enough and poetically, artistically enough to use that as a term of reference. In America I found, to my intense relief and gratitude, a country that I could use and an America that I could reimagine. The America in Lolita is my own America. It’s a Nabokovian America, a kind of world that I have recreated. I’ve been very happy there, very content, and I’ve found it the place for writing books.
KE: Are you going now to write another book?
VN: I’m planning another novel, which will not be a continuation of Lolita as one newspaper in London had me say. This book will probably be set in America as [was] Lolita. I’m going back to America in a few months and I’ll put myself into the task of writing it.
KE: When people interview you, and I’m sure you’ve been interviewed thousands of times now, what do they usually ask you?
VN: They generally ask me about my book; why I wrote it. This is one of those questions I find unanswerable. Any kind of theme which I would choose would also require the same answer.
KE: Mr. Nabokov, I know quite a few Russians in Paris and I’ve met them before in other places. The Slavic temperament has got something that [makes] people always want to go back to Russia. I know Americans who live out of America and Canadians who live out of Canada and they don’t particularly harp on going home again. But Russians—maybe it’s because some of them had to get out—have a certain love of Russia that nobody else has. Every time they have three or four vodkas they stand around together and say “Those were the days on the Volga.”
VN: I think you are right in half-suggesting that the reason for that passion to go back is the sudden cutting away of a country. Otherwise, if you know that you can go back, and if the parting has been more or less gradual and you have some contact with the old country, that’s another kind of thing. I know many Irishmen who would like to go back to Ireland. They have their friends and their old aunts there, and sometimes their father and their mother and so on, and they go back with pleasure. But it is not this kind of keen spiritual pang which an émigré feels. If I went back to Russia I would look up the places of my childhood, the landscape of my youth. It would be a very small country that I would be going back to because it would come to me, not in terms of a huge national, geographic and political kind of country, but in terms of the garden, of the park, of the grove, where I played as a child.
KE: Thank you very much, Mr. Nabokov, for talking to us this afternoon. I hope that a lot of us will be looking forward to your next book and I think a lot of people will get hold of Pnin and take a look at Nabokov in a broader view.
VN: And remember that there is nothing between the ‘P’ and the ‘N.’ It is Pnin and not “Penin,” which is, of course, difficult for the Anglo-Saxon tongue to achieve.
KE: Thank you very much, Mr. Nabokov. This is Kerry Ellard reporting to “Assignment” from Paris.
After Lolita: A Conversation with Vladimir Nabokov—with Digressions
John G. Hayman / 1959
From The Twentieth Century, December, 1959. © John G. Hayman. Reprinted by permission.
The series of events leading to the American publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita read like a highly contrived fantasy. Rejected by four American publishers on the grounds that parts of it were pornographic, the novel was finally published by the Olympia Press in Paris. According to one account, however, so many copies of this edition found their way into England that the English Home Office called for its suppression. The truth of this account, however, has been denied. The subject matter, which was at first found objectionable, is, as most people now know, the love of a mature man, Humbert, for a girl of twelve—a “nymphet” in Humbert’s terminology. One of the American publishers felt that he might be able to print the work if a boy of the same age were substituted for the girl.
All this is somewhat unfortunate since the significance of the work as literature tends to be overlooked in the side issues. In America, for example, the fantasy continues. The film rights have been sold for $150,000 (plus fifteen percent of the film’s revenue) and it is Time’s guess that the chief roles will go to Maurice Chevalier and Brigitte Bardot. The work is also being translated into various languages, and Mr. Nabokov recently discovered a Swedish version that was about to be published, the slightness of which suggested to him that certain portions had been deleted. On scrutiny he found that only the “purple patches” had been selected. Naturally, Mr. Nabokov suppressed the edition.
When I suggested to Nabokov that he might reasonably feel outraged at the charges of pornography, he replied that he thought they were “just plain silly.” Talking with Nabokov in his office at Cornell University, I frequently met this mildness. He was unwilling, for example, either to speak harshly of any living writer or to select any for particular praise. Those earlier writers he
criticized, too, were nearly always commended on some personal grounds. (“Galsworthy was a good man, I believe … Gorky was a great character.”) And yet his mildness is mingled with excitement—an excitement which will often reveal itself in a sudden aside and which makes conversation with Nabokov a little like riding on a switchback.
Nabokov’s casual attitude towards the publication of Lolita is connected, it seems to me, with his general unconcern with his audience. I recalled that a number of English critics and writers have suggested that the writer in America is “isolated,” that he is never quite sure who, if anyone, is going to read his work. Nabokov said that he had never been troubled by this: “I write for myself,” he said, “and hope for hundreds of little Nabokovs.” So far there have been over one hundred thousand little Nabokovs who have read Lolita, so perhaps such a rejoinder was to be expected. And yet the question of the writer’s public in America (which remains for me, at least, an interesting one) was posed recently concerning Lolita in a cartoon in The New York Times Book Review. A carefully dressed office worker was reading a copy of Lolita over the shoulder of a man partially engaged in working down a manhole. The caption was an order from the workman: “Go and buy your own copy.” Possibly the little Nabokovs are thus diversified—and possibly the trouble with much American writing is that it is aimed too calculatedly at certain small and different sections of the public. Nabokov, however, is not particularly interested in any of this.
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 6