Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

by Robert Golla (ed)

  Playboy: You have also written that poetry represents “the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.” But many feel that the “irrational” has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?

  VN: This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion. In point of fact, the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don’t believe that any science today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call “science” the cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrist’s mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is that yesterday’s neutron or today’s truth dies tomorrow. But even in a better sense of “science”—as the study of visible and palpable nature, or the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy—the situation remains as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.

  Playboy: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?

  VN: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

  Notes

  1. Lake Geneva is Lake Léman.

  On the Banks of Lake Léman: Mr. Nabokov Reflects on Lolita and Onegin

  Douglas M. Davis / 1964

  From The National Observer, June 29, 1964. Copyright © 1964 Dow Jones and Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprinted with permission of The National Observer.

  For lovers of Russian literature—and lovers of Vladimir Nabokov—last week was a milestone. It was the week Pantheon Press published Mr. Nabokov’s four-volume translation of Alexander Pushkin’s great narrative poem, Eugene Onegin, complete with footnotes and commentary.

  To people who think of Mr. Nabokov as the gay, mad author of novels like Lolita and Pale Fire, this latest work may seem incongruous. No doubt it will leave them wondering what kind of man this Nabokov is.

  I wondered the same thing as I traveled by train from Geneva to Montreux, a small resort town on the far side of Lake Léman, where Mr. Nabokov now lives with his wife and son. I wanted to know, too, why Mr. Nabokov had apparently deserted his “new home,” the United States, as soon as Lolita began to bring him long-denied financial rewards in 1959 and 1960.

  Before I had gone very far, though, I began to think that the countryside alone was reason enough for Mr. Nabokov’s move to Switzerland. No lake in the world can rival the beauty of Léman. No town owns a better view of Léman than Montreux, perched on the edge of a steep hill towering above the lake. And in Montreux no hotel suite fronts the lake more directly than Mr. Nabokov’s.

  Why He’s at Lake Léman

  Shortly after my arrival at this suite, as if reading my mind, Mr. Nabokov threw open the French doors and gestured at the lake. Then he explained why he was there. “I am working on a novel which ‘happens’ on Lake Léman,” he said, adding that he planned to return to the United States as soon as it was finished.

  Which came first—the novel or the move to Montreux? He wouldn’t say. He uncorked a bottle of red wine instead, and talked of Switzerland. “It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoyevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dostoyevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.”

  Mr. Nabokov—in his sixties, graying, slender, ruddy in complexion—speaks with an accent that is difficult to “place.” He was born in Russia; his father, a lawyer, was a member of the first Duma (Czarist parliament) and editor of a liberal newspaper. But when the Communists came in 1919, the Nabokov’s were forced to emigrate. Since then Vladimir has almost lived out of his bags, moving from Germany to France to the United States, with a short stay in England as a young student.

  Wanted Son to be in the US

  “In 1935, my wife and I decided to go to America and live, since the language there was the language I wished to be near,” he explains. “We had a little boy, too, and I wanted him there. And people began to translate my books in America. So the practical was associated with the metaphysical.”

  But the Nabokovs didn’t get to America until 1940. Five years later, Mr. Nabokov became a naturalized American citizen. What does he think of the United States after twenty years?

  “America is my home now. It is my country. The intellectual life suits me better there than any other country in the world. I have more friends there, more kindred souls than anywhere. I don’t care for American food, mind you. Ice cream and milk are all right in their place. The American steak is a mistake. There’s a pun for you.

  “But these are material things, not important, really. No, there is something about American life and people and universities which keeps me perfectly and completely happy.”

  Mr. Nabokov’s love for America has not always been returned in spades. Some of the critical reaction to his pet novel, Lolita—the story of a wild, comic, and touching affair between a middle-aged man and a young “nymphet”—was vehement.

  “What bothered me most,” recalls Mr. Nabokov, “was the belief that Lolita was a criticism of America. I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t see how anybody could find it in Lolita. I don’t like people who see the book as an erotic phenomenon, either. Even more, I suppose, I don’t like people who have not read Lolita and think it obscene.”

  The author believes too many critics overlooked the change that takes place in Humbert Humbert, the book’s “hero,” during the course of his affair with Lolita. “I don’t think Lolita is a religious book,” he says, “but I do think it is a moral one. And I do think that Humbert Humbert in his last stage is a moral man because he realizes that he loves Lolita like any woman should be loved. But it is too late; he has destroyed her childhood. There is certainly this kind of morality in it.”

  All the same, the critics can’t be blamed entirely for their misreadings. Mr. Nabokov is a complex, eccentric writer. His novels abound with puns, stylistic tricks, sudden alterations of mood, and downright deception. In Pale Fire, for example, the narrator is plainly mad; in order to deduce the truth, the reader must discount almost everything Mr. Nabokov—through the narrator—tells him.

  There is No Teasing

  Yet Mr. Nabokov denies that he sets out deliberately to mislead the reader. “I play with him, yes, but not as a cat with a mouse. I suppose there is a lot of shifting in my work, but that is natural to me. As one face or phrase passes, another takes over. But there is no teasing. I am very honest, actually.”

  For all his love of the oblique and the evasive, however, Mr. Nabokov is a man of blunt opinions—particularly about his fellow writers.

  On Robert Frost: “Not everything he wrote was good. There is lots of trash. But I believe that rather obvious little poem on the woods (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) is one of the greatest ever written.”

  On Ernest Hemingway: “Hemingway did some wonderful things. But those long novels—For Whom the Bell Tolls and the rest—I think they are abominable. He was, after all, a short story writer.”

  On William Faulkner: “I am completely deaf to Faulkner. I do not understand what people see in him. He has been invented. Surely, he was not a real person.”

  Mr. Nabokov writes in three languages—Russian, French, and English—and he speaks directly on this subject too. “At this point I write English better than the other two, and prefer it. I am appalled by the provincial inclinations and philistine thought of modern Russian.”

  What does he think of Russia today? “Lost country means to me lost childhood and abandoned language, little more. The idea of traveling to Moscow, wh
ere I’ve never been, seems as boring to me as that of visiting Belfast or Belgrade, where I’ve never been either.”

  It was not until the end of our conversation, when the last of the red wine had been downed, that Mr. Nabokov mentioned his latest work. “You have not asked about my labor of love. It is the great work of my life.”

  A Russian “Don Juan”

  This, of course, was Onegin. Pushkin first published it in Russian in 1824. It’s an extravagant, bold poem, filled with jaded young aristocrats and bored damsels on their country estates—in brief, sort of a Russian Don Juan. Only a poet-translator could have brought this triumph of Russian romanticism alive for the English ear. And only a determined scholar could have annotated, interpreted, and restored it so completely.

  All this says something about Mr. Nabokov. He is much more than the eccentric novelist of legend. He is a careful, precise thinker as well—even something of a pedant. Remember his own words: “It is the great work of my life.” Add to them the concluding paragraph of the autobiography he wrote for the dust jacket of Onegin:

  He lectured on Russian literature at Wellesley (1941–48) and Cornell (1948–58) and has worked on Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942–48). He is also the author of several novels in English.

  He is also the author of several novels in English. Undoubtedly, the playful Nabokov spirit is behind that sentence. But there is also a vein of honesty. Would Mr. Nabokov rather be remembered as the translator of Pushkin than the creator of Lolita? I am not sure, but I would not be surprised if he would.

  USA: The Novel—Vladimir Nabokov

  Robert Hughes / 1965

  From National Educational Television, September 2, 1965. © Thirteen Productions LLC. Reprinted by permission of WNET.

  Vladimir Nabokov: I’m not a good speaker, you see. When I start to speak I have immediately four—five lines of thought. Sort of roads, you know, trails, going various ways. I have to decide which trail I’m going to follow. And while I decide, this hawing and hemming begins and it may be very upsetting, but I do it myself. I can never understand those limpid, fluid speakers, as my father was, who just deliver perfect phrase, beautifully built, with an aphorism here and a metaphor there. I can’t do it. I have to think it out. I have to take a pencil, I have to write it down laboriously, have it before me; do things like that. It’s probably psychological. I can imagine what old Freud would have said, whom I heartily detest, as my readers know by now.

  Robert Hughes: Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is you detest Dr. Freud?

  VN: I think he’s crude. I think he’s medieval and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams, or balloons.

  VN: The first part of my life is marked by a rather pleasing chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia.

  RH: He began life in Saint Petersburg, eldest son of an aristocratic but liberal family. The author of Lolita, Pale Fire, The Gift, and Speak, Memory learned English from his governess before he learned Russian. At eighteen, the October Revolution destroyed his world, including his fortune.

  VN: The next twenty, in Western Europe.

  RH: A poet, a composer of chess problems, a deviser of crossword puzzles, after Cambridge University he lived as an exile in Berlin and Paris with his wife of forty years, Véra. Their son Dmitri is now an opera singer. Vladimir Nabokov eked out a living by tutoring, translating, coaching tennis, as well as by writing his eight novels in Russian.

  VN: And the twenty years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America.

  RH: Here he taught literature at Cornell, Harvard, Wellesley, and Stanford. Before emigrating, he had translated two of his novels from Russian into English and written the first of his five English novels. His complete switch from Russian to English prose was exceedingly painful, but his lifelong love affair with the English language continues.

  VN: I’ve been living in Europe again for five years now.

  RH: Currently, in an elegant Swiss hotel overlooking Lake Geneva.

  VN: But I cannot promise to stare down another fifteen, so I still retain the rhythm. Nor can I predict what new books I may write.

  RH: But he soon told us of one of his many works in progress.

  VN: I’m in the process of translating Lolita into Russian, which is like completing the circle of my creative life, or rather starting a new spiral. Shall I read three lines of this Russian version? Because, incredible as it may seem, perhaps not everybody remembers the way Lolita starts in English. So perhaps I should do the first five in English. First: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip on three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. Now comes the Russian. Note by the way that the first syllable of her name sounds more like an ‘R’ sound than the ‘O’ sound. [Nabokov reads the opening in Russian.] I live in Montreux for certain family reasons. I have a sister in Geneva and a son not very far away [in] Milan, and also because I find the view so wonderfully soothing and exhilarating, according to my mood and the mood of the lake. Everything is bedaze when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses. I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called “Great Books.” That, for instance, Mann’s asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak’s melodramatic, vilely written Doctor Zhivago or Faulkner’s corn-cobby chronicles can be considered masterpieces, or at least what journalists term “Great Books,” is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order, Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s Transformation, Bely’s Petersburg, and the first part of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

  RH: I notice there are no American masterpieces on your list. What do you think of recent American writing? Who are the best of our writers since, say, forty-five?

  VN: Seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are, by far, the finest artists in recent years. Lots of Russian writers have strolled here [in Montreux]: Gogol, brewing here his Dead Souls and killing lizards with his cane, and Tolstoy, courting housemaids and meditating on social welfare and other exciting matters.

  RH: Mr. Nabokov and his wife spent each of their twenty summers in America touring the country, collecting butterflies.

  VN: It is really summers that are collected in my mind. They are a kind of rainbow, and they are really quite, quite wonderful.

  RH: He came to know and love the United States and its minutest distinctions of style and landscape, and he talks of returning to America soon, for good. Since 1945, he has been a citizen.

  VN: After all, that’s the country where I have been happier than anywhere else.

  RH: The American Museum of Natural History contains several butterflies first described by this lifelong lepidopterist. One is known as “Nabokov’s Nymph,” a unique specimen he named many years before giving our language the word “nymphet.”

  VN: Personally, I do not think in words. It is not a verbal process, it’s just a sequence of, a blending of images. It can be something quite brief, quite short, a juxtaposition of two things in a brief composition or pattern. After that it will fall into words because I know that the words are there, no doubt as to where, behind the scene they are waiting to come out and the only difficulty is to find them. For me, what is called “inspiration” is a matter of recognition … These are index cards, which they call in France fiche bristol. I buy them at a shop here, one hundred, two hundred, every time. I use them not only to jot out notes and things which I want to remember, but actually to write the novel or story I am composing. Then I rearrange them in a given order because it doesn’t matter, really, where I start. The thing is mor
e or less in my mind. I just have to fill in the gaps. But it’s a very convenient arrangement, a fashion, or method, that I acquired rather gradually. In the old days in Europe I remember writing in copy books.

  RH: After you finish writing on the cards, do you type them out?

  VN: I don’t type, so when I finish with a card, and that means writing in pencil, arranging the card, rewriting it once or twice, then copying it out on another card or turning the card around and copying on the other side, and losing the card—I threw three cards away the other day like that. After that, my very kind and patient wife sits down at her typewriter and I dictate the matter of the cards to her, making some changes, and very often discussing this or that, “you can’t say that; you can’t say that; let’s see, perhaps I can change it …” I start in the morning at eight, half past eight, and I start writing here [in his office] and correcting proofs. Today I’ve been cutting through proofs because I’ve got two sets at the same time. It’s rather along the lines of the riddle of the sphinx, the ages of man … After lunch, I generally sit down after having rearranged my desk a little … it’s often disorder here. After that, when I feel the heaviness of the evening weighing upon me, I go on the bed. That’s where I end up. It’s very funny though, sometimes after dinner I suddenly feel very, very fresh and full of inspiration, and I go back to the select chair and it starts all over again in a kind of cosmic arrangement. I like to correct proofs with this Florentine pencil my sister gave me. I have here a little note. I say here in the introduction [to the novel Despair] that, “The book has less White Russian appeal than have my other émigré novels.” And there’s an asterisk and a little note: “This did not prevent a communist reviewer (J.P. Sartre), who devoted in 1939 a remarkably silly article to the French translation of Despair, from saying that both the author and the main character are the victims of the war and the emigration.” That’s wonderful, seeing the author and the protagonist on the same level. I have here some, not all, some of the editions of Lolita. [Nabokov shows various foreign editions of Lolita.] I have notes here in this copybook about the things I detest. For instance, italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought, background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, next-room music, inflicted music, concise dictionaries, bridge manuals, journalistic clichés: “the moment of truth.” The moment of truth! “Senility”—splendid word … that kind of thing. These are the index cards of a new novel of mine.