On June 26, 1969, Allene Talmey, Associate Editor of Vogue, New York, sent me the questions answered below. The interview appeared in the Christmas number of that journal.
Magic, sleight-of-hand, and other tricks have played quite a role in your fiction. Are they for amusement or do they serve yet another purpose?
Deception is practiced even more beautifully by that other V.N., Visible Nature. A useful purpose is assigned science to animal mimicry, protective patterns and shapes, yet their refinement transcends the crude purpose of mere survival. In art, an individual style is essentially as futile and as organic as a fata morgana. The sleight-of-hand you mention is hardly more than an insect's sleight-of-wing. A wit might say that it protects me from halfwits. A grateful spectator is content to applaud the grace with which the masked performer melts into Nature's background.
In your autobiography, Speak, Memory, you describe a series of concurrent, insignificant events around the world «forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events», of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair at Ithaca, New York) is the nucleus. How does this open out on your larger belief in the precedence of the imagination over the mind?
The simultaneousness of these random events, and indeed the fact of their occurring at all as described by the central percipient, would only then conform to «reality» if he had at his disposal the apparatus to reproduce those events optically within the frame of one screen; but the central figure in the passage you quote is not equipped with any kind of video attached to his lawn chair and must therefore rely on the power of pure imagination. Incidentally, I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination — hence my inverted commas around «reality». Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy, that drop of water on a glass slide which gives distinctness and relief to the observed organism.
1969 marks the fiftieth anniversary of your first publication. What do that first book and your latest, Ada, have in common? What of your intention and technique has changed, what has remained?
My first publication, a collection of love poems, appeared not fifty, but fiftythree years ago. Several copies of it still lurk in my native country. The versification is fair, the lack of originality complete. Ten years later, in 1926, my first novel, printed abroad, in Russian,*[ *Mashenka, translated as Mary (McGrawHill, New York, 1970).] rendered that boyhood romance with a more acceptable glow, supplied, no doubt, by nostalgia, invention, and a dash of detachment. Finally, upon reaching middle age and, with it, a certain degree of precision in the use of my private English, I devoted a chapter of my Speak, Memory to the same theme, this time adhering faithfully to the actual past. As to flashes of it in my fiction, I alone can judge if details that look like bits of my «real» self in this or that novel of mine are as authentic as Adam's rib in the most famous of garden scenes. The best part of a writer's biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. Only in that light can one properly assess the relationship, if any, between my first heroine and my recent Ada. While two ancestral parks may be generically alike, true art deals not with the genus, and not even with the species, but with an aberrant individual of the species. Raisins of fact in the cake of fiction are many stages removed from the initial grape. I have accumulated enough aphorisms here to make it seem that your question about Ada has been answered.
You are reported to have said that you live more in the future than in the present or past — in spite of your preoccupation with memory. Can you say why this is so?
I do not recall the exact wording of that statement. Presumably I meant that in professional action I look forward, rather than back, as I try to foresee the evolution of the work in progress, try to perceive the fair copy in the crystal of my inkstand, try to read the proof, long before it is printed, by projecting into an imagined section of time the growth of the book, whose every line belongs to the present moment, which in its turn is nothing but the ever rising horizon of the past. Using another, more emotional metaphor, I might concede, however, that I keep the tools of my trade, memories, experiences, sharp shining things, constantly around me, upon me, within me, the way instruments are stuck into the loops and flaps of a mechanician's magnificently elaborate overalls.
You are often superficially linked to a handful of international writers like Beckett and Borges. Do you feel any affinity with them or with your other contemporaries?
Oh, I am well aware of those commentators: slow minds, hasty typewriters! They would do better to link Beckett with Maeterlinck and Borges with Anatole France. It might prove more instructive than gossiping about a stranger.
You have witnessed extraordinary changes in your lifetime and maintained an «esthetic distance». Would you consider this a matter of your temperament or a quality you had to cultivate?
My aloofness is an illusion resulting from my never having belonged to any literary, political, or social coterie. I am a lone lamb. Let me submit, however, that I have bridged the «esthetic distance» in my own way by means of such absolutely final indictments of Russian and German totalitarianism as my novels Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister.
Gogol found a most congenial biographer in you. Whom would you choose, free of time, to be your biographer, and why would you make your choice?
This congeniality is another illusion. I loathe Gogol's moralistic slant, I am depressed and puzzled by his utter inability to describe young women, I deplore his obsession with religion. Verbal inventiveness is not really a bond between authors, it is merely a garland. He would have been appalled by my novels and denounced as vicious the innocent, and rather superficial, little sketch of his life that I produced twenty-five years ago. Much more successful, because based on longer and deeper research, was the life of Chernyshevski (in my novel The Gift), whose works I found risible, but whose fate moved me more strongly than did Gogol's. What Chernyshevski would have thought of it is another question — but at least the plain truth of documents is on my side. That, and only that, is what I would ask of my biographer — plain facts, no symbolsearching, no jumping at attractive but preposterous conclusions, no Marxist bunkum, no Freudian rot.
The maps and diagrams — your entomological proof that Gregor Samsa was a dung beetle and not a cockroach — are now well-known artifacts of your teaching literature at Cornell. What other refreshing antidotes to current literary criticism might you suggest?
In my academic days I endeavored to provide students of literature with exact information about details, about such combinations of details as yield the sensual spark without which a book is dead. In that respect, general ideas are of no importance. Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago. Here diagrams are most helpful. Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced. Without a visual perception of the larch labyrinth in Mansfield Park that novel loses some of its stereographic charm, and unless the facade of Dr. Jekyll's house is distinctly reconstructed in the student's mind, the enjoyment of Stevenson's story cannot be perfect.
There is a great deal of easy talk about the «death of language» and the «obsolescence of books». What are your views on the future of literature?
I am not overly preoccupied with tomorrow's books. All I would welcome is that in the future editions of my works, especially in paperback, a few misprints were corrected.
Is it right for a writer to give interviews?
Why not? Of course, in a strict sense a poet, a novelist, is not a public figure, not an exotic potentate, not an international lover, not a person one would be proud to call Jim. I can quite understand people wanting to know my writings, but
I cannot sympathize with anybody wanting to know me. As a human specimen, I present no particular fascination. My habits are simple, my tastes banal. I would not exchange my favorite fare (bacon and eggs, beer) for the most misspelt menu in the world. I irritate some of my best friends by the relish with which I list the things I hate — nightclubs, yachts, circuses, pornographic shows, the soulful eyes of naked men with lots of Guevara hair in lots of places. It may seem odd that such a modest and unassuming person as I should not disapprove of the widespread practice of self-description. No doubt some literary interviews are pretty awful: trivial exchanges between sage and stooge, or even worse, the French kind, starting «Jeanne Dupont, qui itesvous?» (who indeed!) and sporting such intolerable vulgarisms as «insolite» and «ecriture» (French weeklies, please note!). I do not believe that speaking about myself can encourage the sales of my books. What I really like about the better kind of public colloquy is the opportunity it affords me to construct in the presence of my audience the semblance of what I hope is a plausible and not altogether displeasing personality.
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During a visit in the last week of August, 1970, Alfred Appel interviewed me again. The result was printed, from our careful jottings, in the spring, 1971, issue of Novel, A Forum on Fiction, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
In the twelve years since the American publication of Lolita, you've published twenty-two or so books — new American or Antiterran novels, old Russian works in English, Lolita in Russian — giving one the impression that, as someone has said — John Updike, I think — your oeuvre is growing at both ends. Now that your first novel has appeared (Mashenka, 1926), it seems appropriate that, as we sail into the future, even earlier works should adhere to this elegant formula and make their quantum leap into English.
Yes, my forthcoming Poems and Problems [McGrawHill] will offer several examples of the verse of my early youth, including «The Rain Has Flown», which was composed in the park of our country place, Vyra, in May 1917, the last spring my family was to live there. This «new» volume consists of three sections: a selection of thirty-six Russian poems, presented in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after 1940 and my arrival in America (all of which were published in The New Yorker), and eighteen chess problems, all but two of which were composed in recent years (the chess manuscripts of the 19401960 period have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are nut worth printing). These Russian poems constitute no more than one percent of the mass of verse which I exuded with monstrous regularity during my youth.
Do the components of that monstrous mass fall into any discernible periods or stages of development?
What can be called rather grandly my European period of verse-making seems to show several distinctive stages: an initial one of passionate and commonplace love verse (not represented in Poems and Problems); a period reflecting utter distrust of the so-called October Revolution; a period (reaching well into the nineteen-twenties) of a kind of private curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and developing Byzantine imagery (this has been mistaken by some readers for an interest in «religion» which, beyond literary stylization, never meant anything to me); a period lasting another decade or so during which I set myself to illustrate the principle of making a short poem contain a plot and tell a story (this in a way expressed my impatience with the dreary drone of the anemic «Paris School» of emigre poetry); and finally, in the late thirties, and especially in the following decades, a sudden liberation from self-imposed shackles, resulting both in a sparser output and in a belatedly discovered robust style. Selecting poems for this volume proved less difficult than translating them.
Why are you including the chess problems with the poems?
Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worth-while art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.
Most of your work in Russian [1920 — 1940] appeared under the name of «Sirin». Why did you choose that pseudonym?
In modern times sirin is one of the popular Russian names of the Snowy Owl, the terror of tundra rodents, and is also applied to the handsome Hawk Owl, but in old Russian mythology it is a multicolored bird, with a woman's face and bust, no doubt identical with the «siren», a Greek deity, transporter of souls and teaser of sailors. In 1920, when casting about for a pseudonym and settling for that fabulous fowl, I still had not shaken off the false glamour of Byzantine imagery that attracted young Russian poets of the Blokian era. Incidentally, circa 1910 there had appeared literary collections under the editorial title of Sirin devoted to the so-called «symbolist» movement, and I remember how tickled I was to discover in 1952 when browsing in the Houghton Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten.
An arresting phantasmagoric image of Russian emigre life in Germany is that of film extras playing themselves, as it were, as do Ganin in Mashenka and those characters in your story «The Assistant Producer», whose «only hope and profession was their past — that is, a set of totally unreal people», who, you write, were hired «to represent 'real' audiences in pictures. The dovetailing of one phantasm into another produced upon a sensitive person the impression of living in a Hall of Mirrors, or rather a prison of mirrors, and not even knowing which was the glass and which was yourself». Did Sirin ever do that sort of work?
Yes, I have been a tuxedoed extra as Ganin had been and that passage in Mashenka, retitled Mary in the 1970 translation, is a rather raw bit of «real life». I don't remember the names of those films.
Did you have much to do with film people in Berlin?
Laughter in the Dark [1932] suggests a familiarity.
In the middle thirties a German actor whose name was Fritz Kortner, a most famous and gifted artist of his day, wanted to make a film of Camera Obscura [Englished as Laughter in the Dark]. I went to London to see him, nothing came of it, but a few years later another firm, this one in Paris, bought an option which ended in a blind alley too.
I recall that nothing came of yet another option on Laughter in the Dark when the producer engaged Roger Vadim, ctrca 1960 — Bardot as Margot? — and of course the novel finally reached the nolonger silver screen in 1969, under the direction of Tony Richardson, adapted by Edward Bond, and starring Nicol Williamson and Anna Karina (interesting name, that), the setting changed from old Berlin to Richardson's own mod London. I assume that you saw the movie.
Yes, I did. That name is interesting. In the novel there is a film in which my heroine is given a small part, and I would like my readers to brood over my singular power of prophecy, for the name of the leading lady (Dorianna Karenina) in the picture invented by me in 1931 prefigured that of the actress (Anna Karina) who was to play Margot forty years later in the film Laughter in the Dark, which I viewed at a private screening in Montreux.
Are other works headed for the screen?
Yes, King, Queen, Knave and Ada, though neither is in production yet, Ada will be enormously difficult to do: the problem of having a suggestion of fantasy, continually, but never overdoing it. Bend Sinister was done on West German television, an opera based on Invitation to a Beheading was shown on Danish TV, and my play The Event [1938] appeared on Finnish TV.
The German cinema of the twenties and early thirties produced several masterpieces. Living in Berlin, were you impressed by any of the films of the period? Do you today feel any sense of affinity with directors such as Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg? The former would have been the ideal director for Despair [1934], the latter, who did The Blue Angel, perfect for Laughter in the Dark and King, Queen, Knave [1928], with its world of decor and decadence. And if only F. W. Murnau, who died in 1931, could have directed The Defense [1930], with Emil Jannings as Luzhin!
The names of Sternberg and Lang never meant anything to me. In Europe I went to the corner cinema about once
in a fortnight and the only kind of picture I liked, and still like, was and is comedy of the Laurel and Hardy type. I enjoyed tremendously American comedy — Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Chaplin. My favorites by Chaplin are The Gold Rush [1925], The Circus [1928], and The Great Dictator [1940] — especially the parachute inventor who jumps out of the window and ends in a messy fall which we only see in the expression on the dictator's face. However, today's Little Man appeal has somewhat spoiled Chaplin's attraction for me. The Marx Brothers were wonderful. The opera, the crowded cabin [A Night at the Opera, 1935], which is pure genius . . . [Nabokov then lovingly rehearsed the scene in detail, delighting particularly in the arrival of the manicurist.] I must have seen that film three times! Laurel and Hardy are always funny; there are subtle, artistic touches in even their most mediocre films. Laurel is so wonderfully inept, yet so very kind. There is a film in which they are at Oxford [A Chump at Oxford, 19401 • In one scene the two of them are sitting on a park bench in a labyrinthine garden and the subsequent happenings conform to the labyrinth. A casual villain puts his hand through the back of the bench and Laurel, who is clasping his hands in an idiotic reverie, mistakes the stranger's hand for one of his own hands, with all kinds of complications because his own hand is also there. He has to choose. The choice of a hand.
How many years has it been since you saw that movie?
Thirty or forty years. [Nabokov then recalled, again in precise detail, the opening scenes of County Hospital, 1932, in which Stan brings a gift of hardboiled eggs to relieve the misery of hospitalized Ollie and consumes them himself, salting them carefully.] More recently, on French 1 V 1 saw a Laurel and Hardy short in which the «dubbers» had the atrocious taste to have the two men speak fluent French with an English accent. But I don't even remember if the best Laurel and Hardy are talkies or not. On the whole, I think what 1 love about the silent film is what comes through the mask of the talkies and, vice versa, talkies are mute in my memory.
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