Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  I am now in the process of translating Lolita into Russian, which is like completing the circle of my creative life. Or rather starting a new spiral. I've lots of difficulties with technical terms, especially with those pertaining to the motor car, which has not really blended with Russian life as it, or rather she, has with American life. I also have trouble with finding the right Russian terms for clothes, varieties of shoes, items of furniture, and so on. On the other hand, descriptions of tender emotions, of my nymphet's grace and of the soft, melting American landscape slip very delicately into lyrical Russian. The book will be published in America or perhaps Paris; traveling poets and diplomats will smuggle it into Russia, I hope. Shall I read three lines of this Russian version? Of course, incredible as it may seem, perhaps not everybody remembers the way Lolita starts in English. So perhaps I should do the first lines in English first. Note that for the necessary effect of dreamy tenderness both «l»s and the «t» and indeed the whole word should be iberized and not pronounced the American way with crushed T's, a coarse «t», and a long «o»: «Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Loleeta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta». Now comes the Russian. Here the first syllable of her name sounds more like an «ah» sound than an «o» sound, but the rest is like Spanish: {Reads in Russian) «Lahleeta, svet moey zhizni, ogon' moih chresel. Greh moy, dusha moya». And so on.

  Beyond what's stated and implied in your various prefaces, have you anything to add about your readers and/or your critics?

  Well, when I think about critics in general, I divide the family of critics into three subfamilies. First, professional reviewers, mainly hacks or hicks, regularly filling up their allotted space in the cemeteries of Sunday papers. Secondly, more ambitious critics who every other year collect their magazine articles into volumes with allusive scholarly titles — The Undiscovered Country, that kind of thing. And thirdly, my fellow writers, who review a book they like or loathe. Many bright blurbs and dark feuds have been engendered that way. When an author whose work I admire praises my work, I cannot help experiencing, besides a ripple of almost human warmth, a sense of harmony and satisfied logic. But I have also the idiotic feeling that he or she will very soon cool down and vaguely turn away if I do not do something at once, but I don't know what to do, and I never do anything, and next morning cold clouds conceal the bright mountains. In all other cases, I must confess, I yawn and forget. Of course, every worthwhile author has quite a few clowns and criticules — wonderful word: criticules, or criticasters — around him, demolishing one another rather than him with their slapsticks. Then, also, my various disgusts which I like to voice now and then seem to irritate people. I happen to find secondrate and ephemeral the works of a number of puffedup writers — such as Camus. Lorca, Kazantzakis, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Thomas Wolfe, and literally hundreds of other «great» secondraters. And for this, of course, I'm automatically disliked by their campfollowers, kitschfollowers, fashionfollowers, and all kinds of automatons. Generally speaking, I'm supremely indifferent to adverse criticism in regard to my fiction. But on the other hand, I enjoy retaliating when some pompous dunce finds fault with my translations and divulges a farcical ignorance of the Russian language and literature.

  Would you describe your first reactions to America? And how you first came to write in English?

  I had started rather sporadically to compose in English a few years before migrating to America, where I arrived in the lilac mist of a May morning, May 28, 1940. In the late thirties, when living in Germany and France, I had translated two of my Russian books into English and had written my first straight English novel, the one about Sebastian Knight. Then, in America, I stopped writing in my native tongue altogether except for an occasional poem which, incidentally, caused my Russian poetry to improve rather oddly in urgency and concentration. My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful — like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion. I have described the writing of Lolita in the afterpiece appended in '58 to the

  American edition. The book was first published in Paris at a time when nobody else wanted it, 10 years ago now — 10 years — how time crawls!

  As to Pale Fire, although I had devised some odds and ends of Zemblan lore in the late fifties in Ithaca, New York, I felt the first real pang of the novel, a rather complete vision of its structure in miniature, and jotted it down — I have it in one of my pocket diaries — while sailing from New York to France in 1959. The American poem discussed in the book by His Majesty, Charles of Zembla, was the hardest stuff 1 ever had to compose. Most of it 1 wrote in Nice, in winter, walking along the Promenade des Anglais or rambling in the neighboring hills. A good deal of Kinbote's commentary was written here in the Montreux Palace garden, one of the most enchanting and inspiring gardens I know.* (Now disfigured by a tennis court and a parking place). I'm especially fond of its weeping cedar, the arboreal counterpart of a very shaggy dog with hair hanging over its eyes.

  What is your approach to the teaching of literature?

  I can give you some examples. When studying Kafka's famous story, my students had to know exactly what kind of insect Gregor turned into (it was a domed beetle, not the flat cockroach of sloppy translators) and they had to be able to describe exactly the arrangement of the rooms, with the position of doors and furniture, in the Samsa family's flat. They had to know the map of Dublin for Ulysses. I believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths.

  I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game.

  How did you come to live in Switzerland?

  The older I get and the more I weigh, the harder it is for me to get out of this or that comfortable armchair or deckchair into which I have sunk with an exhalation of content. Nowadays I find it as difficult to travel from Montreux to Lausanne as to travel to Paris, London, or New York. On the other hand, I'm ready to walk 10 or 15 miles per day, up and down mountain trails, in search of butterflies, as I do every summer. One of the reasons I live in Montreux is because I find the view from my easy chair wonderfully soothing and exhilarating according to my mood or the mood of the lake. I hasten to add that not only am I not a tax dodger, but that I also have to pay a plump little Swiss tax on top of my massive American taxes which are so high they almost cut off that beautiful view. I feel very nostalgic about America and as soon as I muster the necessary energy I shall return there for good.

  Where is the easy chair?

  The easy chair is in the other room, in my study. It was a metaphor, after all: the easy chair is the entire hotel, the garden, everything.

  Where would you live in America?

  I think I would like to live either in California, or in New York, or in Cambridge, Mass. Or in a combination of these three.

  Because of your mastery of our language, you are frequently compared with Joseph Conrad.

  Well, I'll put it this way. When a boy, I was a voracious reader, as all boy writers seem to be, and between 8 and 14 I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions — romantic in the large sense — of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people.

  But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of all, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished cliches and primitive clashes. He once wrote that h
e preferred Mrs. Garnett's translation of Anna Karenin to the original! This makes one dream — «ca fait rever» as Flaubert used to say when faced with some abysmal stupidity. Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a person called Tagore, another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called «great books». That, for instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or Pasternak's melodramatic and vilely written Zhivago or Faulkner's corncobby chronicles can be considered «masterpieces», or at least what journalists call «great books», is to me an absurd delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulysses; Kafka's Transformation., Biely's Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time.

  What do you think of American writing? I noticed there are no American masterpieces on your list. What do you think of American writing since 1945?

  Well, seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years. The sexy, phony type of best seller, the violent, vulgar novel, the novelistic treatment of social or political problems, and, in general, novels consisting mainly of dialogue or social comment — these are absolutely banned from my bedside. And the popular mixture of pornography and idealistic humbuggery makes me positively vomit.

  What do you think of Russian writing since 1945?

  Soviet literature . . . Well, in the first years after the Bolshevik revolution, in the twenties and early thirties, one could still distinguish through the dreadful platitudes of Soviet propaganda the dying voice of an earlier culture. The primitive and banal mentality of enforced politics — any politics — can only produce primitive and banal art.

  This is especially true of the so-called «social realist» and «proletarian» literature sponsored by the Soviet police state. Its jackbooted baboons have gradually exterminated the really talented authors, the special individual, the fragile genius. One of the saddest cases is perhaps that of Osip Mandelshtam — a wonderful poet, the greatest poet among those trying to survive in Russia under the Soviets — whom that brutal and imbecile administration persecuted and finally drove to death in a remote concentration camp. The poems he heroically kept composing until madness eclipsed his limpid gifts are admirable specimens of a human mind at its deepest and highest. Reading them enhances one's healthy contempt for Soviet ferocity. Tyrants and torturers will never manage to hide their comic stumbles behind their cosmic acrobatics. Contemptuous laughter is all right, but it is not enough in the way of moral relief. And when I read Mandelshtam's poems composed under the accursed rule of those beasts, I feel a kind of helpless shame, being so free to live and think and write and speak in the free part of the world.That's the only time when liberty is bitter.

  WALKING IN MONTREUX WITH INTERVIEWER

  This is a ginkgo — the sacred tree of China, now rare in the wild state. The curiously veined leaf resembles a butterfly — which reminds me of a little poem:

  The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,

  A muscat grape,

  Is an old-fashioned butterfly, illspread, In shape.

  This, in my novel Pale Fire, is a short poem by John Shade — by far the greatest of invented poets.

  PASSING A SWIMMING POOL

  I don't mind sharing the sun with sunbathers but I dislike immersing myself in a swimming pool. It is after all only a big tub where other people join you — makes one think of those horrible Japanese communal bathtubs, full of a floating family, or a shoal of businessmen.

  DOG NEAR TELEPHONE BOOTH

  Must remember the life line of that leash from the meek dog to the talkative lady in that telephone booth. «A long wait» — good legend for an oil painting of the naturalistic school.

  BOYS KICKING A BALL IN A GARDEN

  Many years have passed since 1 gathered a soccer ball to my breast. I was an erratic but rather spectacular goalkeeper in my Cambridge University days 45 years ago. After that I played on a German team when I was about 30, and saved my last game in 1936 when I regained consciousness in the pavilion, knocked out by a kick but still clutching the ball which an impatient teammate was trying to pry out of my arms.

  DURING A STROLL NEAR VILLENEUVE

  Late September m Central Europe is a bad season for collecting butterflies. This is not Arizona, alas.

  In this grassy nook near an old vineyard above the Lake of Geneva, a few fairly fresh females of the yery common Meadow Brown still flutter about here and there — lazy old widows. There's one.

  Here is a little sky-blue butterfly, also a very common thing, once known as the Clifden Blue in England.

  The sun is getting hotter. I enjoy hunting in the buff but I doubt anything interesting can be obtained today. This pleasant lane on the banks of Geneva Lake teems with butterflies in summer. Chapman's Blue and Mann's White, two rather local things, occur not far from here. But the white butterflies we see in this particular glade, on this nice but commonplace autumn day, are the ordinary Whites: the Small White and Green-Veined White.

  Ah, a caterpillar. Handle with care. Its golden-brown coat can cause a nasty itch. This handsome worm will become next year a fat, ugly, drab-colored moth.

  IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: WHAT SCENES ONE WOULD LIKE TO HAVE FILMED

  Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost.

  The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold.

  Herman Melville at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.

  Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics.

  The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.

  6

  This interview (published in Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, vol. VIII, no. 2, spring 1967) was conducted on September 25, 27, 28, 29, 1966, at Montreux, Switzerland. Mr. Nabokov and his wife have for the last six years lived in an opulent hotel built in 1835, which still retains its nineteenth-century atmosphere. Their suite of rooms is on the sixth floor, overlooking Lake Geneva, and the sounds of the lake are audible through the open doors of their small balcony. Since Mr. Nabokov does not like to talk off the cuff (or «Off the Nabocuff», as he said) no tape recorder was used. Mr. Nabokov either wrote out his answers to the questions or dictated them to the interviewer; in some instances, notes from the conversation were later recast as formal questionsandanswers. The interviewer was Nabokov's student at Cornell University in 1954, and the references are to Literature 311312 (MWF, 12), a course on the Masterpieces of European Fiction (Jane Austen, Gogol, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Stevenson, Kafka, Joyce, and Proust). Its enrollment had reached four hundred by the time of Nabokov's resignation in 1959. The footnotes to the interview, except where indicated, are provided by the interviewer, Alfred Appel, Jr.

  For years bibliographers and literary journalists didn't know whether to group you under «Russian» or «American». Now that you're living in Switzerland there seems to be complete agreement that you're American. Do you find this kind of distinction at all important regarding your identity as a writer?

  I have always maintained, even as a schoolboy in Russia, that the nationality of a worthwhile writer is of secondary importance. The more distinctive an insect's aspect, the less apt the taxonomist is to glance first of all at the locality label under the pinned specimen in order to decide which of several vaguely described races it should be assigned to. The writer's art is his real passport. His identity should be immediately recognized by a special pattern or unique coloration. His habitat may confirm the correctness of the determination but should not lead to it. Locality labels are known to have been faked by unscrupulous insect dealers. Apart from these considerations 1 think of myself today as an American writer who has once been a Russian one.

  The Russian writers you have translate
d and written about all precede the so-called «age of realism» which is more celebrated by English and American readers than is the earlier period. Would you say something about your temperamental or artistic affinities with the great writers of the 183040 era of masterpieces? Do you see your own work falling under such general rubrics as a tradition of Russian humor?

  The question of the affinities I may think I have or not have with nineteenth-century Russian writers is a classificational, not a confessional matter. There is hardly a single Russian major writer of the past whom pigeon-holers have not mentioned in connection with me. Pushkin's blood runs through the veins of modern Russian literature as inevitably as Shakespeare's through those ot English literature.

  Many of the major Russian writers, such as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Bely, have distinguished themselves in both poetry and prose, an uncommon accomplishment in English and American literature. Does this signal fact have anything to do with the special nature of Russian literary culture, or are there technical or linguistic resources which make this kind of versatility more possible in Russian? And as a writer of both prose and poetry, what distinctions do you make between them?

  On the other hand, neither Gogol nor Tolstoy nor Chekhov were distinguished versificators. Moreover, the dividing line between prose and poetry in some of the greatest English or American novels is not easy to draw. I suppose you should have used the term «rhymed poetry» in your question, and then one might answer that Russian rhymes are incomparably more attractive and more abundant than English ones. No wonder a Russian prose writer frequents those beauties, especially in his youth.