RR: The world knows that you are also a lepidopterist but may not know what that involves. In the collection of butterflies, could you describe the process from pursuit to display?
VN: Only common butterflies, showy moths from the tropics, are put on display in a dusty case between a primitive mask and a vulgar abstract picture. The rare, precious stuff is kept in the glazed drawers of museum cabinets. As for pursuit, it is, of course, ecstasy to follow an undescribed beauty skimming over the rocks of its habitat, but it is also great fun to locate a new species among the broken insects in an old biscuit tin sent over by a sailor from some remote island.
RR: One can always induce a mild vertigo by recalling that Joyce might not have existed as the writer but as the tenor. Have you any sense of having narrowly missed some other role? What substitute could you endure?
VN: Oh, yes, I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings—Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada—which my heirs discover and publish.
RR: Alberto Moravia told me of his conviction that each writer writes only of one thing—has but a single obsession he continually develops. Can you agree?
VN: I have not read Alberto Moravia but the pronouncement you quote is certainly wrong in my case. The circus tiger is not obsessed by his torturer, my characters cringe as I come near with my whip. I have seen a whole avenue of imagined trees losing their leaves at the threat of my passage. If I do have any obsessions I’m careful not to reveal them in fictional form.
RR: Mr. Nabokov, thank you.
VN: You’re welcome, as we say in my adopted country.
VN—RIP
William F. Buckley Jr. / 1977
From National Review, July 22, 1977. © 1977 National Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
The cover of this magazine had gone to press when word came in that Vladimir Nabokov was dead. I am sorry—not for the impiety; sorry that VN will not see the cover, or read the verse, which he’d have enjoyed. He’d have seen this issue days ahead of most Americans because he received National Review by airmail, and had done so for several years. And when we would meet, which was every year for lunch or dinner, he never failed to express pleasure with the magazine. In February, when I last saw him, he came down in the elevator, big, hunched, with his cane, carefully observed by Véra, white-haired, with the ivory skin and delicate features and beautiful face. VN was carrying a book, which he tendered me with some embarrassment—because it was inscribed. In one of his books, a collection of interviews and random fare, given over not insubstantially to the celebration of his favorite crotchets, he had said that one of the things he never did was inscribe books.
Last year, called back unexpectedly to New York, I missed our annual reunion. Since then I had sent him my two most recent books, and about these he now expressed hospitable enthusiasm as we sat down at his table in the corner of the elegant dining room of the most adamantly unchanged hotel in Europe: I cannot imagine, for all its recent architectural modernization, that the Montreux Palace was any different before the Russian revolution.
He had been very ill, he said, and was saved by the dogged intervention of his son, Dmitri, who at the hospital ordered ministrations the poor doctors had not thought of—isn’t that right, Véra? Almost right—Véra is a stickler for precision. But he was writing again, back to the old schedule. What was that schedule? (I knew, but knew he liked to tell it.) Up in the morning about six, read the papers and a few journals, then cook breakfast for Véra in the warren of little rooms where they had lived for seventeen years. After that he would begin writing and would write all morning long, usually standing, on the cards he had specially cut to a size that suited him (he wrote on both sides, and collated them finally into books). Then a light lunch, then a walk, then a nap and, in nimbler days, a little butterfly-chasing or tennis, then back to his writing until dinner time. Seven hours of writing, and he would produce 175 words. (What words!) Then dinner, and book-reading, perhaps a game of Scrabble in Russian. A very dull life, he said chortling with pleasure, and then asking questions about America, deploring the infelicitous Russian prose of Solzhenitsyn, assuring me that I was wrong in saying he had attended the inaugural meeting of the Congress for Cultural Freedom—he had never attended any organizational meeting of anything—isn’t that right, Véra? This time she nods her head and tells him to get on with the business of ordering from the menu. He describes with a fluent synoptic virtuosity the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupiditious publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son’s operatic career, and what am I working on now?
A novel, and you’re in it.
What was that?
You and Véra are in it. You have a daughter, and she becomes a Communist agent.
He is more amused by this than Véra, but not all that amused. Of course I’ll send it to you, I beam. He laughs—much of the time he is laughing. How long will it take you to drive to the airport in Geneva?
My taxi told me it takes “un petit heure.”
Une petite heure (he is the professor): that means fifty minutes. We shall have to eat quickly. He reminisces about his declination of my bid to go on Firing Line. It would have taken me two weeks of preparation, he says almost proudly, reminding me of his well-known rule against improvising. Every word he ever spoke before an audience had been written out and memorized, he assured me—isn’t that right, Véra? Well no, he would answer questions in class extemporaneously. Well obviously! He laughed. He could hardly program his students to ask questions to which he had the answers prepared! I demur: his extemporaneous style is fine, just fine; ah, he says, but before an audience, or before one of those … television cameras … he would freeze. He ordered a brandy, and in a few minutes we rose and he and Véra and I walked ever so slowly to the door. “As long as Western civilization survives,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the Times last Tuesday, “his reputation is safe. Indeed, he will probably emerge as one of the greatest artists our century has produced.” I said goodbye warmly, embracing Véra, taking his hand, knowing that probably I would never see again—never mind the artist—this wonderful human being.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
Ada (The Texture of Time)
Adams, J. Donald
Adams, Robert M.
Albinus (character)
Aldonov, Mark
Alice in Wonderland
American Mercury
American Museum of Natural History
Amis, Kingsley
Anchor Review
Andersen, Hans Christian
Angelico, Fra
Angry Young Men
Anna Karenina
Annotated Lolita, The
Ann Veronica
Appel, Alfred, Jr.
Aristophanes
Atlantic Monthly
Auden, W. H.
August, 1914
“Aurelian, The”
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Balzac, Honoré de
Bardot, Brigitte
Barry, John
Barth, John
Beat Generation
Beckett, Samuel
“Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter”
Bely, Andrei
Bend Sinister
Bennett, Arnold
Berberova, Nina
Berlin, Isaiah
Bishop, Morris
Blok, Alexander
“Blood Bath of Kishinev, The”
Bloom, Leopold (character)
Bobbs-Merrill Company
/> Bollingen Foundation
Borges, Jorge Luis
Brecht, Bertolt
Brooke, Rupert
Brothers Karamazov, The
Brown, Clarence
Browning, Robert
Bryusov, Valery
Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology
Bunin, Ivan
Burnt-Out Case, A
Butterflies of Japan, The
Byron, George Gordon
Camus, Albert
Capote, Truman
Carroll, Lewis
Carter, Jimmy
Cash, Johnny
Castle, The
Castro, Fidel
Cather, Willa
Chanson de Roland
Chaplin, Charles
Chekhov, Anton
Chekhov Press
Chernyshevsky, Nikolay
Chevalier, Maurice
Cincinnatus C. (character)
Circular Ruins, The
“Cloud, Castle, Lake”
Colorado Butterflies
Conclusive Evidence
Conrad, Joseph
Constitutional Democratic Party
Cornell Daily Sun
Country of the Blind, The
Coward, Noel
Crime and Punishment
Crossword puzzles
Daily Telegraph & Morning Post
Daniel, Yuli
Darwin, Charles
de Gaulle, Charles
Dead Souls
Death in Venice
Death of Ivan Ilyich, The
Dedalus, Stephen (character)
Deer Park, The
Defense, The
Delalande, Pierre
Deledda, Grazia
Derzhavin, Gavrila
Despair
Dickens, Charles
Doctor Zhivago
Don Juan
Don Quixote
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Double, The
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dr. Zhivago (character)
Dreiser, Theodore
Dupee, F. W.
Editions Victor
Eichmann, Adolf
Eliot, T. S.
Elliott, George D.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Emmie (character)
Encounter
Epstein, Jason
Esquire
Eugene Onegin
Evergreen
Exegi Monumentum
Existentialism
Exploit, The
Eye, The
Fadiman, Clifton
Faulkner, William
Fawcett Publications
Field Guide to the Butterflies, A
Fielding, Henry
Finnegans Wake
Firing Line
First Love
Fischer, Bobby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Flaubert, Gustave
Fogg, Phileas
Fonteyn, Margot
Ford Foundation
Forgetting Elena
Forster, E. M.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Freud, Sigmund
Frost, Robert
Galsworthy, John
Genet, Jean
Gerhardi, William
Gift, The
Gigi
Gingold, Hermione
Ginsburg, Ralph
Girodias, Maurice
Glory
Godbotherers, The
Godunov-Cherdyntsev, Fyodor (character)
Gogol, Nikolai
Gone with the Wind
Gorky, Maxim
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
Gravity’s Rainbow
Greene, Graham
Grove Press
Guardian
Guggenheim Foundation
Hamilton College
Hamlet
Harper & Brothers
Harris, James B.
Harvard Crimson
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Haze, Dolores (character)
Hellman, Lillian
Hemingway, Ernest
Hoffmann, E. T. A.
Holmes, Sherlock
Homer
“Hotel Room”
Housman, A. E.
Hudson Review
Hugo, Victor
Humbert, Humbert (character)
Ilf, Ilya
In Cold Blood
In Search of Lost Time
“Inspiration”
International Herald-Tribune
Invisible Man, The
Invitation to a Beheading
Ionesco, Eugéne
Italics are Mine, The
Ivanov, Georgy
James, Henry
Jarrell, Randall
Joyce, James
Kafka, Franz
Karlovich, Hermann (character)
Karpovich, Mikhail
Kaye, Nora
Kazin, Alfred
Keaton, Buster
Keats, John
Kenyon Review
Kerensky, Alexander
Kerouac, Jack
Killers, The
Killing, The
Kimbote, Charles (character)
Kirkus, Virginia
Klots, Alexander
Knopf, Alfred A.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard Von
Kreutzer Sonata, The
Kubrick, Stanley
Kuprin, Aleksandr
Lane, Franklin
L’Arc
La Rue du Chat qui Peche
Laughlin, James
Laughter in the Dark
Laurel and Hardy
Lawrence, D. H.
Leavis, F. R.
Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher
Le Monde
Lenin, Vladimir
Le Noeud de Viperes
Leon, Lucie
Leon, Paul
Lepidopterists’ News
Lermontov, Mikhail
Lerner, Alan Jay
Les Misérables
Levin, Harry
Library of Congress
Listener, The
Literary Gazette
Lolita; banning of; film adaptation of; inspiration for; publication of; symbolism within; translations of; writing of
Lolita, My Love (musical)
Look at the Harlequins!
Lost World, The
Lorca, Federico
Lovat Dickson’s Magazine
Lowell, Robert
Lyceum
Lyon, Sue
Madame Bovary
Mailer, Norman
Malraux, André
Mandelstam, Osip
Mann, Thomas
Mansfield, Jayne
Mansfield Park
Manson, Charles
Mao Tse-Tung
Marcel, Gabriel
Mary
Marx, Karl
Mason, James
Maugham, W. Sommerset
Maupassant, Guy de
Mauriac, François
Maxwell, William
McCarthy, Joseph
McCarthy, Mary
McCartney, Paul
McGraw-Hill Publishing
Melville, Herman
Memoirs of Hecate County
Mencken, H. L.
Metalious, Grace
Metamorphosis, The (The Transformation)
Millstein, Gilbert
Milton, John
Minton, Walter
Mizener, Arthur
Monroe, Marilyn
Montserrat, Nicholas
Moravia, Alberto
Morgan, Rex, M. D.
Mozart and Salieri
Mrozovski, Peter
Muromtsev, Sergey
Museum of Comparative Zoology
Myron
Nabokov, Dmitri (Nabokov’s son)
Nabokov, Elena (Nabokov’s mother)
Nabokov, Olga (Nabokov’s sister)
Nabokov, Sergey (Nabokov’s brother)
Nabokov, Véra (Nabokov’s wife)
Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich (Nabokov’s father)
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: background and early life; in Berlin; at Cambridge University; on censorship; on chess; on coining the word “nymphet”; at Cornell University; on education; on God; at Harvard University; on humor; on index cards; on language; as lepidopterist; on literary criticism; at Montreux Palace Hotel; in Paris; on poetry; on politics; on pornography; on pronunciation of his name; on reading; on Russia; on Russian literature; on science; on the Soviet Union; on speaking; at Stanford University; on Switzerland; on translating; at University of Salt Lake City; on the United States; at Wellesley College; on writing
Nabokov’s Dozen
Nabokov’s Pug (moth)
Nabokov’s Wood Nymph (butterfly)
National Review
New Directions Publishing
New Republic
New Statesman
Newsweek
New York Daily News
New Yorker
New York Review of Books
New York Times
New York Times Book Review
Nicolson, Nigel
Nine Stories
Niven, David
Nose, The
Nouvelle Revue Francaise
Novyy Journal
Oakes, Philip
Oates, Joyce Carol
Odoevtsev, Irina
Odoyevsky, Vladimir
Old Man and the Sea, The
Olesha, Yury
Olivier, Laurence
Olympia Press
O’Neill, Eugene
Orczy, Emmuska
Original of Laura, The
Ostrovsky, Alexander
Pale Fire
Paris-Soir
Parry, Albert
Partisan Review
Passionate Friends, The
Pasternak, Boris
Paths of Glory
Perkins, Agnes
Petersburg
Petrov, Yevgeny
Peyton Place
Picasso, Pablo
Pirandello, Luigi
Plato
Playboy
Pléiade editions
Pnin
Poe, Edgar Allan
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A
“Potato Elf, The”
Pound, Ezra
Prisoner of Chillon
Prokofiev, Sergei
Proust, Marcel
Pryce-Jones, Alan
Psyche
Punch
Pushkin, Alexander
Pynchon, Thomas
Quarter
Quilty, Clare (character)
Racine, Jean
Rachmaninoff, Sergei
Random House
Ransom, John Crowe
Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The
Republic of the Southern Cross, The
Resurrection
Return to Peyton Place
Richardson, Samuel
Ridgewell, Rosemary
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov Page 30