In much the same solemn spirit, certain crusty lepidopterists have criticized my works on the classification of butterflies, accusing me of being more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus and the family. This kind of attitude is a matter of mental temperament, I suppose. The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas. Oh, I know the type, the dreary type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social comment; he likes to recognize his own thoughts and throes in those of the author; he wants at least one of the characters to be the author's stooge. If American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is acutely and ridiculously classconscious; he finds it so much easier to write about ideas than about words; he does not realize that perhaps the reason he does not find general ideas in a particular writer is that the particular ideas of that writer have not yet become general.
Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world's great authors. Yet you have described him as «a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar». Why?
NonRussian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment — by this reader anyway.
Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad «writers of books for boys»?
That's exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that delightful, highly artistic short story, «The Killers». And the description of the iridescent fish and rhythmic urination in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad's souvenirshop style, bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches. In neither of those two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved authors, the pets of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such as — but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the dead ones are not yet buried.
What did you read when you were a boy?
Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry — English, Russian and French — than in any other fiveyear period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several — Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke — have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate tliot and ot definitely secondrate Pound. 1 read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.
What are your reading habits today?
Usually I read several books at a time — old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything — and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch — mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called «powerful» novel — full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialogue — in fact, when I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher — «hoping that 1 like the book as much as he does» — I check first of all how much dialogue there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from my bed.
Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy reading?
I do have a few favorites — for example, Robbe-Grillet and Borges. How freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths! I love their lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.
Many critics feel that this description applies no less aptly to your own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose and poetry intermingle as art forms?
Except that I started earlier — that's the answer to the first part of your question. As to the second: Well, poetry, of course, includes all creative writing; 1 have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our concept of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor.
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?
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, 1 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.
Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
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 целительный 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.
4
On August 18, 1964, Jane Howard of Life magazine sent me eleven questions. I have kept the typescript of my replies. In mid-September she arrived in Montreux with the photographer Henry Grossman. Text and pictures appeared in the November 20 issue of Life.
What writers and persons and places have influenced you most?
In my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader. By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French — besides hundreds of other books. Today I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago; but I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence upon me. As to the influence of places and persons, I owe many metaphors and sensuous associations to the North Russian landscape of my boyhood, and I am also
aware that my father was responsible for my appreciating very early in life the thrill of a great poem.
Have you ever seriously contemplated a career other than in letters?
Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime — but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.
Which of your writings has phased you most?
I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow — perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings. Well-wishers have tried to translate Lolita into Russian, but with such execrable results that I'm now doing a translation myself. The word «jeans», for example, is translated in Russian dictionaries as «wide, short trousers» — a totally unsatisfactory definition.
In the foreword to The Defense you allude to psychiatry. Do you think the dependence of analyzed on analysts is a great danger?
I cannot conceive постигать how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst, but of course if one's mind is deranged one might try anything; after all, quacks and cranks, shamans and holy men, kings and hypnotists have cured people — especially hysterical people. Our grandsons no doubt will regard today's psychoanalysts with the same amused contempt as we do astrology and phrenology. One of the greatest pieces of charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense imposed on a gullible public is the Freudian interpretation of dreams. I take gleeful pleasure every morning in refuting the Viennese quack by recalling and explaining the details of my dreams without using one single reference to sexual symbols or mythical complexes. 1 urge my potential patients to do likewise.
How do your views on politics and religion affect what you write?
I have never belonged to any political party but have always loathed and despised dictatorships and police states, as well as any sort of oppression. This goes for regimentation of thought, governmental censorship, racial or religious persecution, and all the rest of it. Whether or not my simple credo affects my writing docs not interest me. I suppose that my indifference to religion is of the same nature as my dislike of group activities in the domain of political or civic commitments. I have allowed some of my creatures in some of my novels to be restless freethinkers but here again I do not care one bit what kind of faith or brand of non-faith my reader may assign to their maker.
Would you have liked to have lived at a time other than this?
My choice of «when» would be influenced by that of «where». As a matter ot tact, 1 would have to construct a mosaic of time and space to suit my desires and demands. It would be too complicated to tabulate all the elements of this combination. But I know pretty well what it should include. It should include a warm climate, daily baths, an absence of radio music and traffic noise, the honey ot ancient Persia, a complete microfilm library, and the unique and indescribable rapture of learning more and more about the moon and the planets. In other words, I think I would like my head to be in the United States of the nineteen-sixties, but would not mind distributing some of my other organs and limbs through various centuries and countries.
With what living writers do you feel a particular sympathy?
When Mr. N. learns from an interview that Mr. X., another writer, has named as his favorites Mr. A., Mr. B. and Mr. N., this inclusion may puzzle Mr. N. who considers, say, Mr. A-s work to be primitive and trite. 1 would not like to puzzle Mr. C, Mr. D., or Mr. X., all of whom I like.
Do you anticipate that more of your works will be made into films? On the basis of Lolita, does the prospect please you?
I greatly admired the film Lolita as a film — but was sorry not to have been given an opportunity to collaborate in its actual making. People who liked my novel said the film was too reticent and incomplete. If, however, all the next pictures based on my books are as charming as Kubrick's, I shall not grumble too much.
Which of the languages you speak do you consider the most beautiful?
My head says English, my heart, Russian, my ear, French.
Why do you prefer Montreux as a headquarters? Do you in any way miss the America you parodied so exquisitely in Lolita? Do you find that Europe and the US are coming to resemble each other to a discouraging degree?
I think I am trying to develop, in this rosy exile, the same fertile nostalgia in regard to America, my new country, as I evolved for Russia, my old one, in the first postrevolution years of WestEuropean expatriation. Of course, I miss America — even Miss America. If Europe and America are coming to resemble each other more and more — why should I be discouraged? Amusing, perhaps, and, perhaps, not quite true, but certainly not discouraging in any sense I can think of. My wife and I are very fond of Montreux, the scenery of which I needed for Pale Fire, and still need for another hook. There are also family reasons for our living in this part of Europe. I have a sister in Geneva and a son in Milan. He is a graduate of Harvard who came to Italy to complete his operatic training, which he combines with racing an Italian car in major events and translating the early works of his father from Russian into English.
What is your prognosis for the health of Russian letters?
There is no plain answer to your question. The trouble is that no government however intelligent or humane is capable of generating great artists, although a bad government certainly can pester, thwart, and suppress them. We must also remember — and this is very important — that the only people who flourish under all types of government are the Philistines. In the aura of mild regimes there is exactly as rare a chance of a great artist's appearing on the scene as there is in the less happy times of despicable dictatorships. Therefore I cannot predict anything though I certainly hope that under the influence of the West, and especially under that of America, the Soviet police state will gradually wither away. Incidentally, I deplore the attitude of foolish or dishonest people who ridiculously equate Stalin with McCarthy, Auschwitz with the atom bomb, and the ruthless imperialism of the USSR with the earnest and unselfish assistance extended by the USA to nations in distress.
P.S.
Dear Miss Howard, allow me to add the following three points:
1) My answers must be published accurately and completely: verbatim, if quoted; in a faithful version, if not.
2) I must see the proofs of the interview — semifinal and final.
3) I have the right to correct therein all factual errors and specific slips («Mr. Nabokov is a small man with long hair», etc.)
5
In September, 1965, Robert Hughes visited me here to make a filmed interview for the Television 13 Educational Program in New York. At our initial meetings I read from prepared cards, and this part of the interview is given below. The rest, represented by some fifty pages typed from the tape, is too colloquial and rambling to suit the scheme of the present book.
As with Gogol and even James Agee, there is occasionally confusion about the pronunciation of your last name. How does one pronounce it correctly?
It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the «a» of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the «o» — filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. Nobowcough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a birdwatcher's or caterpillarpicker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word ''nobody» when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokcoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians al
so do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open ''o» as in «Knickerbocker». My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle uo» of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful «Nabahkov» is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer — rhyming with «redeemer» — not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think).
How about the name of your extraordinary creature, Professor PNIN?
The «p» is sounded, that's all. But since the «p» is mute in English words starting with «pn», one is prone to insert a supporting «uh» sound — «Puhnin» — which is wrong. To get the «pn» right, try the combination «Up North», or still better «Up, Nina!», leaving out the initial «u». Pnorth, Pnina, Pnin. Can you do that? . . . That's fine.
You're responsible for brilliant summaries of the lives and works of Pushkin and Gogol. How would you summarize your own?
It is not so easy to summarize something which is not quite finished yet. However, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the first part of my life is marked by a rather pleasing chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia, the next twenty in Western Europe, and the twenty years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America. I've been living in Europe again for five years now, but I cannot promise to stay around another fifteen so as to retain the rhythm. Nor can I predict what new books I may write. My best Russian novel is a thing called, in English, The Gift. My two best American ones are Lolita and Pale Fire.
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