Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  In the past, how did you usually travel, when you were looking for butterflies? Did you go camping, for instance?

  As a youth of seventeen, on the eve of the Russian Revolution, I was seriously planning (being the independent possessor of an inherited fortune) a lepidopterological expedition to Central Asia, and that would have involved naturally a good deal of camping. Earlier, when I was, say, eight or nine, I seldom roamed further than the fields and woods of our country estate near St. Petersburg. At twelve, when aiming ai a particular spot half-a-dozen miles or more distant, I would use a bicycle to get there with my net fastened to the frame; but not many forest paths were passable on wheels; it was possible to ride there on horseback, of course, but, because of our ferocious Russian tabanids, one could not leave a horse haltered in a wood for any length of time: my spirited bay almost climbed up the tree it was tied to one day trying to elude them: big fellows with watered-silk eyes and tiger bodies, and gray little runts with an even more painful proboscis, but much more sluggish: to dispatch two or three of these dingy tipplers with one crush of the gloved hand as they glued themselves to the neck of my mount afforded me a wonderful empathic relief (which a dipierist might not appreciate). Anyway, on my butterfly hunts I always preferred hiking to any other form of locomotion (except, naturally, a flying seat gliding leisurely over the plant mats and rocks of an unexplored mountain, or hovering just above the flowery roof of a rain forest); for when you walk, especially in a region you have studied well, there is an exquisite pleasure in departing from one's itinerary to visit, here and there by the wayside, this glade, that glen, this or that combination of soil and flora — to drop in, as it were, on a familiar butterfly in his particular habitat, in order to see it he has emerged, and it so, how he is doing.

  What is your ideal of a splendid grand-hotel?

  Absolute quiet, no radio playing behind the wall, none in the lift, no footsteps thudding above, no snores coming from below, no gondoliers carousing across the lane, no drunks in the corridor. I remember one awful little scene (and this was in a fiveturret palace with the guidebook sign of a red songbird meaning luxury and isolation!). Upon hearing a commotion just outside the door of my bedroom, I poked out my head, while preparing my curse — which fizzled out when I saw what was happening in the passage. An American of the traveling-executive type was staggering about with a bottle of whisky and his son, a boy of twelve or so, was trying to restrain him, repeating: «Please, Dad, please, come to bed», which reminded me of a similar situation in a Chekhov story.

  What do you think has changed over the last sixty years in the traveling style? You loved wagons-lits.

  Oh,I did. In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long

  model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details. Spacious windows alternated with narrower ones, single or geminate, and some of these were of frosted glass. In a few of the compartments, the beds had been made.

  The then great and glamorous Nord-Express (it was never the same after World War I when its elegant brown became a nouveau-riche blue), consisting solely of such international cars and running but twice a week, connected St. Petersburg with Paris. I would have said: directly with Paris, had passengers not been obliged to change from one train to a superficially similar one at the Russo-German frontier (Verzhbolovo-Eydtkuhnen), where the ample and lazy Russian sixty-and-a-half-inch gauge was replaced by the fifty-six-and-a-half-inch standard of Europe, and coal succeeded birch logs.

  In the far end of my mind I can unravel, I think, at least five such journeys to Paris, with the Riviera or Biarritz as their ultimate destination. In 1909, the year I now single out, our party consisted of eleven people and one dachshund. Wearing gloves and a traveling cap, my father sat reading a book in the compartment he shared with our tutor. My brother and I were separated from them by a washroom. My mother and her maid Natasha occupied a compartment adjacent to ours. Next came my two small sisters, their English governess, Miss I^avington (later governess of the Tsar's children), and a Russian nurse. The odd one of our party, my father's valet, Osip (whom, a decade later, the pedantic Bolsheviks were to shoot, because he appropriated our bicycles instead of turning them over to the nation), had a stranger for companion (Feraudi, a well-known French actor).

  Gone the panache of steam, gone the thunder and blaze, gone the romance of the railroad. The popular train rouge is merely a soupedup tram. As to the European sleeping-cars, they are drab and vulgar now. The «single» I usually take is a stunted compartment with a corner table concealing inadequate toilet facilities (not unlike those in the farcical American «roomette», where to get at the necessary utensil one has to rise and shoulder one's bed like Lazarus). Still, for the person wilh a past, some faded charm remains clinging to those international sleepers which take you straight from Lausanne to Rome or from Sicily to the Piedmont. True, the diningcar theme is muted; sandwiches and wine are supplied by hawkers between stations; and your plastic breakfast is prepared by an overworked, halfdressed conductor in his grubby cubicle next to the car's malodorous W. C; yet my childhood moments of excitement and wonder are still brought back by the mystery of sighing stops in the middle of the night or by the first morning glimpse of rocks and sea.

  What do you think of the super-planes?

  I think their publicity department, when advertising the spaciousness of the seat rows, should stop picturing impossible children fidgeting between their imperturbed mother and a gray-templed stranger trying to read. Otherwise, those great machines are masterpieces of technology. I have never flown across the Atlantic, but I have had delightful hops with Swissair and Air France. They serve excellent liquor and the view at low elevations is heartbreakingly lovely.

  What do you think about luggage? Do you think it has lost style, too?

  I think good luggage is always handsome and there is a lot of it around nowadays. Styles, of course, have changed. No longer with us is the kind of elephantine wardrobe trunk, a specimen of which appears in the visually pleasant but otherwise absurd cinema version of Mann's mediocre, but anyway plausible, Death in Venice. I still treasure an elegant, elegantly scuffed piece of luggage once owned by my mother. Its travels through space are finished, but it still hums gently through time for I use it to keep old family letters and such curious documents as my birth certificate. I am a couple of years younger than this antique valise, fifty centimeters long by thirty-six broad and sixteen high, technically a heavyish ne'cessaire de voyage of pigskin, with «H.N». elaborately interwoven in thick silver under a similar coronet. It had been bought in 1897 for my mother's wedding trip to Florence. In 1917 it transported from St. Petersburg to the Crimea and then to London a handful of jewels. Around 1930, it lost to a pawnbroker its expensive receptacles of crystal and silver leaving empty the cunningly contrived leathern holders on the inside of the lid. But that loss has been amply recouped during the thirty years it then traveled with me — from Prague to Paris, from St. Nazaire to New York and through the mirrors of more than two hundred motel rooms and rented houses, in forty-six states. The fact that of our Russian heritage the hardiest survivor proved to be a traveling bag is both logical and emblematic.

  What is a «perfect trip» for you?

  Any first walk in any new place — especially a place where no lepidopterist has been before me. There still exist unexplored mountains in Europe and I still can walk twenty kilometers a day. The ordinary stroller might feel on sauntering out a twinge of pleasure (cloudless morning, village still asleep, one side of the street already sunlit, should try to buy English papers on my way back, here's the turn, I believe, yes, footpath to Cataratta), but the cold of the metal net-stick in my right
hand magnifies the pleasure to almost intolerable bliss.

  22

  This interview, conducted by a docile способный anonym, is preserved in a fragmentary transcript dated October, 1972.

  There are two Russian books on which I would like you to comment. The first is Dr. Zhivago. I understand you never wished to review it?

  Some fifteen years ago, when the Soviets were hypocritically denouncing Pasternak's novel (with the object of increasing foreign sales, the results of which they would eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad); when the badgered and bewildered author was promoted by the American press to the rank of an iconic figure; and when his Zhivago vied with my Lalage for the top rungs of the bestseller's ladder; I had the occasion to answer a request for a review of the book from Robert Bingham of The Reporter, New York.

  And you refused?

  Oh, I did, The other day I found in my files a draft of that answer, dated at Goldwin Smith Hall, Ithaca, N.Y., November 8, 1958. I told Bingham that there were several reasons preventing me from freely expressing my opinion in print. The obvious one was the fear of harming the author. Although I never had much influence as a critic, I could well imagine a pack of writers emulating my «eccentrie» outspokenness and causing, in the long run, sales to drop, thus thwarting the Bolshevists in their hopes and making their hostage more vulnerable than ever. There were other reasons — but I certainly left out of consideration one point that might have made me change my mind and write that devastating review after all — the exhilarating prospect of seeing it attributed to competitive chagrin by some ass or goose.

  Did you tell Robert Bingham what you thought of Dr. Zhivago?

  What I told him — is what — I still think today. Any intelligent Russian would see at once that the book is pro-Bolshevist and historically false, if only because it ignores the Liberal Revolution of spring, 1917, while making the saintly doctor accept with delirious joy the Bolshevist coup d'etat seven months later — all of which is in keeping with the party line. Leaving out politics, I regard the book as a sorry thing, clumsy, trivial, and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, and trite coincidences.

  Yet you have a high opinion of Pasternak as a lyrical poet?

  Yes, I applauded his getting the Nobel Prize on the strength of his verse. In Dr. Zhivago, however, the prose does not live up to his poetry. Here and there, in a landscape or simile, one can distinguish, perhaps, faint echoes of his poetical voice, but those occasional fioriture are insufficient to save his novel from the provincial banality so typical of Soviet literature for the past fifty years. Precisely that link with Soviet tradition endeared the hook to our progressive readers. I deeply sympathized with Pasternak's predicament in a police state; yet neither the vulgarities of the Zhivago style nor a philosophy that sought refuge in a sickly sweet brand of Christianism could ever transform that sympathy into a fellow writer's enthusiasm.

  The book, however, has become something of a classic. How do you explain its reputation?

  Well, all I know is that among Russian readers of today readers, I mean, who represent that country's wonderful underground intelligentsia and who manage to obtain and distribute works of dissident authors — Dr. Zhivago is not prized as universally and unquestioningly as it is, or at least was, by Americans. When the novel appeared in America, her leftwing idealists were delighted to discover in it a proof that «a great book» could be produced after all under the Soviet rule. It was for them the triumph of Leninism. They were comforted by the fact that for better or worse its author remained on the side of angelic Old Bolsheviks and that nothing in his book even remotely smacked of the true exile's indomitable contempt for the beastly regime engendered by Lenin.

  Let us now turn

  (The fragment stops here)

  LETTERS TO EDITORS

  Playboy (1961)

  2 The London Times (1962)

  3 Encounter (1966)

  4 To Sunday Times (1967)

  5 Encounter (1967)

  6 The Neu Statesman (1967)

  7 Esquire (1969)

  8 The New York Times (1969)

  9 Time (1971)

  10 The New York Times Book Review (1971)

  11 The New York Times Book Review (1972)

  TO THE EDITOR OF PLAYBOY

  published July, 1961

  The amusing memoir by Maurice Girodias {Pornologist on Olympus, Playboy, April) contains a number of inaccuracies. My correspondence with Mr. Girodias, and with my literary agent about Mr. Girodias, will soon be published in an appendix to a full account of Lolita's tribulations, and will demonstrate what caused the «deterioration» ot our relations and reveal which of us was «so absorbed by the financial aspect of the nymphet phenomenon» as to be «blinded to other realities». Here I shall limit myself to the discussion of only one of Mr. Girodias' delusions. I wish to refute Mr. Girodias' bizarre charge that I was aware of his presence at the Gallimard cocktail party in October, 1959. Since I had never met the man, and was not familiar with his face, I could hardly have «identified» him as he «slowly progressed toward» me. I am extremely distrait (as Humbert Humbert would have put it in his affected manner) and am liahle not to make out mumbled presentations, especially in the hubbub and crush of that kind of affair. One can know obscure mythological or historical figures by their atrnbutes and emblems, and had Mr. Girodias appeared in a punning charade, carrying a plate with an author's head, I might have recognized him. But he came plateless, and, while apologizing for my abstraction, I must affirm here that I did not talk to Mr. Girodias about his brother's translation, or anything else, and that I remained completely and blissfuly ignorant of having exchanged a polite grin with the Olympian Pornologist. Incidentally, in the course of describing our fictitious colloquy, Mr. Girodias compares my physical motions to those of a dolphin. This, I admit, is nicely observed. I do, alas, resemble a dolphin — and can do nothing about it, except remark, in conclusion, lhai Mr. Girodias speaks of those gentle cetaceans with the frightening appetite of an elasmobranch fish.

  Nice. France

  2- TO THE EDITOR OF THE LONDON TIMES

  published May 30, 1962

  I find my name listed in the program of the Edinburgh International Festival among those of writers invited to take part in its Writers' Conference. In the same list I find several writers whom I respect but also some others — such as Ilya Ehrenburg, Bertrand Russell, and J. P. Sartre — with whom I would not consent to participate in any festival or conference whatsoever. Needless to say that I am supremely indifferent to the «problems of a writer and the future of the novel» that are to be discussed at the conference.

  I would have preferred to bring this to the notice of the Festival Committee in a more private way had I received an invitation to the Conference before my name appeared on its program.

  3 TO THE EDITOR OF ENCOUNTER

  published April, 1966

  I am glad that Mr. Fussell has nothing against my notes on prosody provided they remain attached to a work of repelling length and limited appeal. I am amused by his objecting to them when published in the form of a separate, easily available little volume. In my turn, I object to his assuming that my dislike for the French pseudoclassical style as borrowed and reworked by English poets is based «on the eighteenth century's performance in tetrametric verse». Before dragging in Pope's pentameter and Sterne's prose in redemption of a literary era, he should have looked up what I say about Pope and Sterne in my Eugene Onegin commentary. I do not know who «Baron Corvo» and (Professor?) Firbank are, or what bearing «Camp» (Campus?) products have on the texture of tetrameters; but I am quite certain that there is no connection between random samples of tetrametric rhythms as discussed in a serious study and what Mr. Fussell comically calls «the overtones of the English Protestant sense of duty». The presence or absence of scuds in a given passage may often be accidental but only a Philistine can assert that the accidental is «undiscussable». If Mr. Fussell is p
uzzled by my having had to invent terms for new or unfamiliar concepts, it only means that he has not understood my explanations and examples. The purpose of my little investigation was to describe (not to «interpret») certain aspects of verse structure. I suspected that my views would irritate the conservative professional in his fondly tilled field, but I was hardly prepared for the sparkling flow of academic kitsch with which Mr. Fussell now regales me.

  4 TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUNDAY

  TIMES, LONDON published January /, 1967

  I strongly object to the remark in «The Red Letter Forgers» (December 18, 1966) about my father who, according to your four investigators, was shot by a monarchist because «he was suspected of being too Leftwing». This nonsense is distasteful to me for several reasons: it is remarkably similar to the glib data distorting truth in Soviet sources; it implies that the chieftains of the Russian emigration were bandits; and the reason it gives for the murder is false.

  My father had been one of the leaders of the Constitutional-Democratic party in Russia long before the Revolution, and his articles in the emigre Rul — the only influential Russian-language daily in Berlin — merely continued the strain of West European liberalism, in the large sense, that had marked his life since at least 1904.