Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov

  When the first chapters of The Defense came out in 1929 in the leading émigré journal, the Paris-based Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), Nina Berberova knew that “a great Russian writer, like a phoenix [had been] born from the fire and ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved,” she writes in her recent memoir (The Italics are Mine). She was not alone in her estimation of Nabokov, but a number of other émigré critics vilified him for being “un-Russian” in his concerns. So taken for granted were these assumptions about the writer’s social responsibilities that the liberal editors of Sovremennye zapiski, not wishing to offend their readers, refused in 1937 to publish Nabokov’s satirical biography of Chernyshevsky, now intact as Chapter Four of The Gift, which they were then in the process of serializing.

  Living in Switzerland, writing in English, Nabokov is never more Russian than when offering to journalists and interviewers those seemingly fripperous remarks about writers he deems short on style and/or long on argument and advice. Those remarks, hardly random, enable him to sustain his miraculous open-ended debate with Chernyshevsky, thereby fulfilling his own polemical responsibilities as the embodiment of the other great Russian tradition: Pushkin, Chekhov, and the Tolstoy who wrote Anna Karenina, or at least most of it. “Skip the hymn to the wheat,” Nabokov would instruct his students, referring to Tolstoy’s Populist attitudes and Levin’s day in the field.

  Contrary to rumor, Nabokov is not totally ungenerous and has praised in print many writers, from Shakespeare to Sirin. Of the famous moderns, he most admires Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and H. G. Wells, his favorite boyhood author. When Nabokov mentions his continued esteem for Wells, especially his “romances”—The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds—I ask him about Chapter Three of Ada, where he describes Aqua Veen’s private “War of the Worlds,” and, in a haunting passage, her howling disintegration. Did he have in mind, I wondered, the final pages of Wells’s fantasia, when the silence of devastated and darkened London is disturbed by the terrible last lamentations of those mammoth invaders from Mars, toppled by lowly bacteria?

  “Yes,” says Nabokov, “I can still hear those creatures,” and the expression on his face and the tone of his voice remind me of two moments during other visits to Montreux. Late one afternoon in January, 1968, our conversation had turned to the dark days of the mid-nineteen-thirties, when the Nabokovs were planning their permanent departure from Germany. Because Véra Nabokov is Jewish, a future there seemed even more uncertain. Nabokov recalled Ivan Bunin’s visit to Berlin in 1934. The most famous of the émigré writers, Bunin had recently received the Nobel Prize and was making a kind of triumphal tour. Nabokov attended the public ceremony in Bunin’s honor, and a few days later lunched with him at a Berlin restaurant. They were seated, Nabokov remembers, at the rear of a crowded room, beneath a huge Nazi flag. When they met again shortly afterwards, in Paris, Bunin told Nabokov and several others how on his departure from Berlin he had been stopped by the Gestapo, ever on the alert for that most stable of émigré commodities, a smuggled jewel or two. The handsome and erect old gentleman was interrogated, searched, stripped, and searched again. An empty bucket was placed behind the Nobel Laureate, who was then given a strong and immensely successful dose of castor oil. The search of the naked man was completed by the Gestapo agent who wiped him. As Nabokov finished the story, his forehead twisted into a tangle of lines, and he stared, unblinking, at a point considerably distant from this small, nondescript room in a Swiss hotel.

  Late in the last evening of my September, 1966, visit we were talking about Soviet writers. Nabokov spoke contemptuously of “the literary double agents,” “The party hacks,” “The purveyors of works-to-order.” Were there any writers of the Soviet period whom he admired? Yes, there were, and Nabokov spoke of several, concluding with Sinyavsky and Daniel, pacing back and forth across the living room as he talked, clasping and unclasping his hands behind his back as he summarized their strategems for survival. “All these people were enormously gifted,” he said, softly, “but the regime finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps.” His voice trailed off, and for the first time he looked his age. It was eleven o’clock; late indeed for an early riser and insomniac who usually retires by nine. He stood by the open doorway of his small balcony; it was warm and muggy, the darkness over Lake Geneva was softened by a heavy mist, and he was the last free Russian writer.

  “By the way, do you know how a dung beetle lays its eggs?” he asked, moments later, picking up an unresolved thread of conversation from earlier in the evening, when he had entomologically identified Kafka’s metamorphosed Gregor Samsa. Since I had to confess that I did not know how a dung beetle laid its eggs, Nabokov imitated the process as best he could, bending his head toward his waist as he slowly walked away from the darkened doorway, making a dung-rolling motion with his hands until his head was buried in them and the eggs were laid.

  Laughter in the Dark is clearly a resonant title. That it embodies the ample spirit of the man as well as his work is best illustrated for me by an incident at Cornell in 1953, when I was one of thirty or so students enrolled in Nabokov’s Russian literature course. The class was held at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall. I was rushing to class one wintry morning, three or four minutes late, but slackened my stride when I noticed that Professor Nabokov was also late, and walking ahead of me halfway down the hall. He hurried into a classroom, and my heart sank as I realized it was one door too soon. I entered the class to find Nabokov several sentences into his lecture; not wanting to waste another minute, he was stooped over his notes, intently reading them to thirty stunned students, a shell-shocked platoon belonging to an even tardier don. Trying to be as transparent as possible, I approached the lectern and touched Nabokov on the sleeve. He turned and peered down at me over his eyeglasses, amazed. “Mr. Nabokov,” I said very quietly, “you are in the wrong classroom.” He readjusted his glasses on his nose, focused his gaze on the motionless figures seated before him, and calmly announced, “You have just seen the ‘Coming Attraction’ for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may register next fall.” Pnin no more, he closed his folder of notes and moved one door down the hall. “A most extraordinary thing just happened, most extraordinary,” he told the students of Literature 325, chuckling to himself as he opened his folder once more and, not bothering to explain what had happened, began to lecture.

  Understanding Vladimir Nabokov—A Red Autumn Leaf is a Red Autumn Leaf, Not a Deflowered Nymphet

  Alan Levy / 1971

  From The New York Times, October 31, 1971. © The Estate of Alan Levy. Reprinted by permission.

  In the glassed-in greenhouse that lobbies for the Edwardian rococo Palace Hotel, a dozen Trumanesque tourists and their plum-pudding ladies are worrying one another about the weather—asking anxiously whether it will hold for their air-conditioned sightseeing excursion. Right in their midst, but clearly not part of them, a professional old gent is exulting: “It’s been a wonderful summer for butterflies! Generally, their emergences are staggered. But this year, May and June were such bad months that the butterflies just waited—and then they all came out together!”

  His enthusiasm cuts through the querulousness around him, and strangers eavesdrop. The most distinguished permanent resident of the Montreux Palace, Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita and Ada, stands out in that crowd of transients not only because he is, at seventy-two, slightly older yet much sprier than the tour, but also because he dresses more like a tourist than the tourists: windbreaker over gold button-down sport shirt tucked into gray pin-striped shorts meshing with sun-textured freckled knees. Add to all this the gold-handled butterfly net (from an “entomological-instruments store on 33d Street”) in his right hand, and the effect is septuagenarian Hulot—stooped a little by age, but the better to lean into the butterfly hunt that is looming. N
ow Hulot dons a white cap, and—voila!—instant Magoo!

  The old magician tells stories, too, in a hale and hearty hiker’s voice. My admiration for his “entomological instrument” elicits the tale of a lavishly equipped, heavily laden photographer who descended upon Nabokov recently: “I was curious about all the technology he carried, so he opened up his fancy camera case for me and there was his trouser belt! ‘I’ve been looking for it all morning,’ the man said, putting it on right then and there.”

  “Freud would have a field day with that,” I remark. Nabokov (Na-BOA-koff) can be expected to snap at the bait, for he has penned and punned so vehemently and so often against “the Viennese witchdoctor,” “quack” and “charlatan,” against “Freudian voodooism” and “the lewd, ludicrous and vulgar … Signy-Mondieu analysts.” Having vented his contempt (which, one recognizes from reading him, is based on a thorough familiarity with Freud), Nabokov can now afford to reply benignly: “A Freudian can have a field day with any object at hand.” To demonstrate, in the public rooms of the Montreux Palace, Nabokov deftly manipulates his butterfly net like an outstretched umbrella, and it suddenly balloons to its full thirty-six inches. One of the Bess Truman ladies giggles, gasps, clucks and asks: “Who is that man? He’s not one of us, is he?”

  The Soviet Union’s Short Literary Encyclopedia (Vol. V, 1968) answers the lady’s question rather objectively—so much so, in fact, that the whole volume has been officially attacked for “objectivism.” It says:

  “Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899- )—Russian-American writer. Son of V. D. Nabokov, a leader of the Kadet Party. Finished the Tenishev School. Published his first collection of poetry in 1916. From 1919 he has been in emigration, where in 1922 he finished Trinity College (Cambridge). He achieved literary recognition after the publication of the novel Mary in 1926. N.’s works bear an extremely contradictory character. Among his most interesting works are the … long story The Defense (1929–30), which depicts the life tragedy of a phenomenal chess player, the novels Laughter in the Dark (1932–33), Despair (1934 …), the stories … which reflect the process of spiritual bestialization of the bourgeoisie in Germany as it was becoming Fascist. In the novel, The Gift (1937 …) N. presents a tendentiously distorted picture of N. G. Chernyshevsky. N.’s books are characterized by literary snobbism, replete with literary reminiscences. His style is marked by excessively refined ‘estrangement’ of devices and the frequent use of mystification. These same features are also characteristic of his lyrics. In N.’s prose the influence of F. Kafka and M. Proust can be felt; such as the novel Invitation to a Beheading (1935–36 …) in which N. describes the nightmarish existence of a little man surrounded by the monstrous phantasms of the contemporary world. Such are the features which made possible the ‘denationalization’ of the work of N.—who in 1940 began to write in English. Since that time he has lived in the U.S.A., where for some time he taught literature in universities. Among his books of this period are … the erotic bestseller Lolita (1955), the novel Pnin (1957). He translates Russian classical poetry into English. In 1964 he published a translation of A.S. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in four volumes with extensive commentaries.”

  Aside from overlooking Nabokov’s return to Europe in 1960, this Soviet listing is as complete as any. But his Russian chronologers take no note of his acclaim by serious critics as the “greatest living American novelist” and “most original writer and stylist since Joyce”; nor do they credit their fellow Slav with adding the improper nouns “nymphet” and “lolita” to the English language. And, for all their adventurousness, they could never begin to depict the Hotelmensch whose adult life has been spent camping in motels, cabins, furnished flats, sublet homes of professors on sabbatical; who calls the Montreux Palace “a rosy and opulent place for an exile,” and who has never owned a home. “Nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” he says. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly, so why trouble with hopeless approximations?”

  Nabokov is, says Alfred Kazin, a man with “no country but himself. He is the only refugee who could have turned statelessness into absolute strength.” And in a 1969 cover story, Time magazine proclaimed him “an exile, a man who has triumphantly survived this century of the refugee, a man who has lost everything, yet transformed his losses through art and levity into a habitation of the mind.”

  Literary detection reveals that, living in Berlin in 1927, Nabokov was still “absolutely sure, with a number of other intelligent people, that sometime in the next decade, we would all be back in a hospitable, remorseful, racemoseblossoming Russia.” But, with “the passing of years, I grew less and less interested in Russia and more and more indifferent to the once-harrowing thought that my books would remain banned there as long as my contempt for the police state and political oppression prevented me from entertaining the vaguest thought of return.”

  Through the late fifties and the sixties, while the Soviets were revising and rewriting their history, Nabokov was busily translating (often with his only child, Dmitri, an opera singer now thirty-seven) his earlier works from their original Russian and revising them. (The latest of these, his first novel, Mary, was issued in English last year.)

  In his preface to the 1965 English rendition of Despair, he wrote:

  “The ecstatic love of a young writer for the old writer he will be some day is ambition in its most laudable form. This love is not reciprocated by the older man in his larger library, for even if he does recall with regret a naked palate and a rheumless eye, he has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.”

  No loss of ardor and no witty deceits have mellowed Nabokov’s lifelong love for butterflies—a passion that has granted him immortality as the discoverer of finds that “will dwell in generations more numerous than editions.” Some of his discoveries have been named after him, and he speaks with rapture of “that blessed black night in the Wasatch Range” when he boxed one of them, now classified as Nabokov’s Pug (Eupithecia nabokovi McDunnough) “on a picture window of James Laughlin’s Alta Lodge in Utah” in 1943.

  From 1942 to 1948, while lecturing on literature at Wellesley, Nabokov was also a Harvard Research Fellow in Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. “To know Nabokov at his best,” a mutual friend told me, “is to know him when he’s with butterflies.” And thus was decreed the climax (though I hope not the end) of my friendship with the inventor of Humbert Humbert and Van Veen, Dolores Haze and Clare Quilty, Timofrey Pnin and Cincinnatus C, and Vivian Darkbloom, who once wrote under a pseudonym:

  “And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A scene of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

  Prague, not the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis, is where this friendship of ours began, before we met, though its principal parts were staged in a dream-bright Switzerland. And Prague, stony and brooding, is where Nabokov’s aristocratic mother lived in the nineteen-thirties on a small pension from the Czechoslovak government and where she died on the eve of World War II.

  A year or so ago, toward the end of my own four-year stay as a correspondent in the Soviet-occupied city, I started hearing from a middle-aged Czech lady who worked for the trade union publishing house. She had met me just twice at parties, but now phoned sporadically to ask such bizarre questions as these: “What means in English when you say ‘putty-buff-and-snuff’ or engorged heart’ or ‘the gift of the menarche?’” She had been entrusted with the task of translating Lolita into Czech. While Nabokov is banned in his native Russia, his classic is known and even tolerated in some of the satellites. And while the lady’s project was sometimes on and s
ometimes off the schedule (“It would be better,” one of her newer bosses told me, “if this Lolita were about a worker”), she was plowing forward steadily but quietly on the Nabokovian assumption that, if nothing else, art would outlive politics.

  When she called me with another list of queries last fall, I told her: “I’ll be in Montreux on other business, but staying at the Palace Hotel where the Nabokovs live. I don’t want to impose upon him, but if you’ll write him a letter telling him when I’ll be there, he can get in touch with me if he wants to.”

  The tweedy host who invited me down to the hotel’s Green Room in November, 1970, for an eleven A.M. drink of “coffee, tea or grappa” (he chose grappa) was charming and marvelously preserved—even the red veins in his face seemed to glow. He took care of business right away by running down the Prague lady’s list:

  “Tell her that ‘ululate’ is not a dirty word. ‘Lull’ is a boy’s name; at least, the only person I knew named Lull was a boy. ‘Matted eyelash’ means just that—not a pubic hair—and a ‘red autumn leaf’ is a red autumn leaf is a red autumn leaf, not a deflowered nymphet …”