Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Yes, the design of Pnin was complete in my mind when I composed the first chapter which, I believe, in this case was actually the first of the seven I physically set down on paper. Alas, there was to be an additional chapter, between Four (in which, incidentally, the boy at St. Mark's and Pnin both dream of a passage from my drafts of Pale Fire, the revolution in Zembla and the escape of the king — that is telepathy for you!) and Five (where Pnin drives a car). In that still uninked chapter, which was beautifully clear in my mind down to the last curve, Pnin recovering in the hospital from a sprained back teaches himself to drive a car in hed by studying a 1935 manual of automobilism found in the hospital library and by manipulating the levers of his cot. Only one of his colleagues visits him there — Professor Blorenge. The chapter ended with Pnin's taking his driver's examination and pedantically arguing with the instructor who has to admit Pnin is right. A combination of chance circumstances in 1956 prevented me from actually writing that chapter, then other events intervened, and it is only a mummy now.

  In a television interview last year, you singled out Bely's St. Petersburg, along with works by Joyce, Kafka, and Proust, as one of the greatest achievements in twentiethcentury prose (an endorsement, by the way, which has prompted Grove Press to reissue St. Petersburg, with your statement across the front cover). I preatly admire this novel but, unhappily enough, it is relatively unknown in America. What are its qualities which you most admire? Bely and Joyce are sometimes compared; is the comparison a just one?

  Petersburg is a splendid fantasy, but this is a question I plan to answer elsewhere. There does exist some resemblance in manner between Petersburg and certain passages in Ulysses.

  Although I've never seen it discussed as such, the Ableukhov father-son relationship to me constitutes a doubling, making Petersburg one of the most interesting and fantastic permutations of the Doppelganger theme. Since this kind of doubling (if you would agree it is one) is surely the kind you'd find more congenial, say, than the use Mann makes of the motif in Death in Venice, would you comment on its implications?

  Those murky matters have no importance to me as a writer. Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist. Incidentally, your handwriting is very like mine.

  Bely lived in Berlin in 1922 — 23. Did you know him there? You and Joyce lived in Paris at the same time; did you ever meet him?

  Once, in 1921 or 1922, at a Berlin restaurant where I was dining with two girls. I happened to be sitting back to back with Andrey Bely who was dining with another writer, Aleksey Tolstoy, at the table behind me. Both writers were at the time frankly pro-Soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia), and a White Russian, which I still am in that particular sense, would certainly not wish to speak to a bolshevizan (fellow traveler). I was acquainted with Aleksey Tolstoy but of course ignored him.

  As to Joyce, I saw him a few times in Paris in the late thirties. Paul and Lucy Leon, close friends of his, were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a French lecture I had been asked to deliver on Pushkin under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the Nouvelle revue francaise).

  I had happened to replace at the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that winter, author of a bestselling novel, I remember its title, La Rue du Chat out Peche, but not the lady's name. A number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had occurred among the lady's fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I started to speak.

  A source of unforgettable consolation was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons' followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian «mead», and everybody gave him a different answer. In this connection, there is a marvelous howler in the standard English version of The Brothers Karamazov: a supper table at Zosima's abode is described with the translator hilariously misreading «Medoc» (in Russian transliteration in the original text), a French wine greatly appreciated in Russia, as medok, the diminutive of myod (mead). It would have been fun to recall that I spoke of this to Joyce but unfortunately I came across this incarnation of The Karamazovs some ten years later.

  You mentioned Aleksey Tolstoy a moment ago. Would you say something about him?

  He was a writer of some talent and has two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. But I wouldn't care to categorize writers, the only category being originality and talent. After all, if we start sticking group labels, we'll have to put The Tempest in the SF category, and of course thousands of other valuable works.

  Tolstoy was initially an antiBolshevik, and his early work precedes the Revolution. Are there any writers totally of the Soviet period whom you admire?

  There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose certain plots and certain characters they could get away with it in the political sense, in other words, they wouldn't be told what to write and how to finish the novel.

  Ilf and Petrov, two wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer as protagonist, whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized from a political point of view, since a perfect rascal or a madman or a delinquent or any person who was outside Soviet society — in other words, any picaresque character — could not be accused either of being a bad Communist or not being a good Communist. Thus Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, and Olesha managed to publish some absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete independence, since these characters, plots, and themes could not be treated as political ones. Until the early thirties they managed to get away with it.

  The poets had a parallel system. They thought, and they were right at first, that if they stuck to the garden — to pure poetry, to lyrical imitations, say, of gypsy songs, such as Ilya Selvinski's — that then they were safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing, as if the «I» of the poem were a perfect imbecile, crooning in a dream, distorting words, playing with words as a halfinsane person would. All these people were enormously gifted but the regime finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps.

  By my loose approximation, there remain three novels, some fifty stories, and six plays still in Russian. Are there any plans to translate these? What of The Exploit, written during what seems to have been your most fecund period as a «Russian wrtter» — would you tell us something, however briefly, about this book?

  Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was thirty years ago but some of it will probably be published in English by and by. My son is now working on the translation of The Exploit. It is the story of a Russian expatriate, a romantic young man or my set and time, a lover of adventure for adventure's sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear, the glory and rapture of that victory.

  I understand that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was written in English in 1938. It is very dramatic to think of you bidding farewell to one language and embarking on a new life in another in this way. Why did you decide to write in English at this time, since you obviously could not have known for certain you would emigrate two years later? How much more writing in Russian did you do between Sebastian Knight and your emigration to America in 1940, and once there, did you ever compose in Russian again?

  Oh, I did know I would eventually land in America. I switched to English after convincing myself on the strength of my translation of Despair
that I could use English as a wistful standby for Russian. 6 [6 In 1936, while living in Berlin, Nabokov translated Despair tor the English firm John Long, who published it in 1937. The most recent and final edition of Despair (New York, 1966) is, as Nabokov explains m lls Foreword, a revision of bolh the early translation and of Otcbayanie itself.] I still feel the pangs of that substitution, they have not been allayed by the Russian poems (my best) that I wrote in New York, or the 1954 Russian version of Speak, Memory, or even my recent twoyearslong work on the Russian translation of Lolita, which will be published in 1967. I wrote Sebastian Knight in Paris, 1938. We had that year a charming flat on rue Saigon, between the Etoile and the Bois. It consisted of a huge handsome room (which served as parlor, bedroom, and nursery) with a small kitchen on one side and a large sunny bathroom on the other. This apartment had been some bachelor's delight but was not meant to accommodate a family of three. Evening guests had to be entertained in the kitchen so as not to interfere with my future translator's sleep. And the bathroom doubled as my study. Here is the Doppelgdnger theme for you.

  Do you remember any of those «evening guests»?

  I remember Vladislav Hodasevich, the greatest poet of his time, removing his dentures to eat in comfort, just as a grandee would do in the past.

  Many people are surprised to learn that you have written seven plays, which is strange, since your novels are filled with «theatrical» effects that are patently unnovelistic. Is it just to say that your frequent allusions to Shakespeare are more than a matter of playful or respectful homage? What do you thtnk of the drama as a form? What are the characteristics of Shakespeare's plays which you find most congenial to your own esthetic?

  The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. My most ambitious venture in the domain of drama is a huge screenplay based on Loltta. I wrote it for Kubrick who used only bus and shadows of it for his otherwise excellent film.

  When I was your student, you never mentioned the Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce's Ulysses. But you did supply «special information» in introducing many of the masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses, the arrangement of streets and lodgings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a diagram of the interior of a railway coach on the MoscowPetersburg express in Anna Karenin, and a floor plan of the Samsa apartment in The Metamorphosis and an entomological drawing of Gregor. Would you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers?

  Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those essentially easy and vulgar «Homeric parallelisms» would only distract one's attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter titles which already were «explaining» the book to nonreaders. In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.

  Incidentally, one of my colleagues came into my office recently with the breathless news that Gregor is not a cockroach (he had read an article to that effect). I told him I've known that for 12 years, and took out my notes to show him my drawing from what was for one day only Entomology 312. What kind of beetle, by the way, was Gregor?

  It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wingsheaths, and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths.

  How are you progressing in your novel, The Texture of Time? Since the donnees for some of your novels seem to be present, however fleetingly, in earlier novels, would it be fair to suggest that Chapter Fourteen of Bend Sinister contains the germ for your latest venture?

  In a way, yes; but my Texture of Time, now almost half-ready, is only the central roseweb of a much ampler and richer novel, entitled Ada, about passionate, hopeless, rapturous sunset love, with swallows darting beyond the stained window and that radiant shiver . . .

  Speaking of données: At the end of Pale Fire, Kinbote says of Shade and his poem, «I even suggested to him a good title — the title of the book in me whose pages he was to cut: Solus Rex; instead of which I saw Pale Fire, which meant to me nothing». In 1940 Sovremennye Zapiski published a long section from your '«unfinished» novel, Solus Rex, under that title. Does Pale Fire represent the «cutting» of its pages? What is the relationship between it, the other untranslated fragment from Solus Rex («Ultima Thule», published in Novyy Journal, New York, 1942) and Pale Fire?

  My Solus Rex might have disappointed Kinbote less than Shade's poem. The two countries, that of the Lone King and the Zembla land, belong to the same biological zone. Their subarctic bogs have much the same butterflies and berries. A sad and distant kingdom seems to have haunted my poetry and fiction since the twenties. It is not associated with my personal past. Unlike Northern Russia, both Zembla and Ultima Thule are mountainous, and their languages are of a phony Scandinavian type. If a cruel prankster kidnapped Kinbote and placed him, blindfolded, in the Ultima Thule countryside, Kinbote would not know — at least not immediately — by the sap smells and bird calls that he was not back in Zembla, but he would be tolerably sure that he was not on the banks of the Neva.

  This may be like asking a father to publicly declare which of his children is most loved, but do you have one novel towards which you feel the most affection, which you esteem over all others?

  The most affection, Lolita; the greatest esteem, Priglashenie na Kazn'. 7*

  And as a closing question, sir, may I return to Pale Fire: where, please, are the crown jewels bidden? 8*

  In the ruins, sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana (q.v.); but do not tell it to the Russians.

  7* Invitation to a Beheading

  8* One hesitates to explain a joke, but readers unfamiliar with Pale Fire should be informed that the hiding place of the Zemblan crown jewels is never revealed in the text, and the Index entry under «crown jewels», to which the reader must now refer, is less than helpful. «Kobaltana» is also in the Index.

  7

  Most of the questions were submitted by Herbert Gold, during a visit to Montreux in September, 1966. The rest (asterisked) were mailed to me by George A. Plimpton. The combined set appeared in 1 he Paris Review oi October, 1967.

  Good morning. Let me ask forty-odd questions.

  Good morning. I am ready.

  Your sense of the immorality of the relationship between Humbert Humbert and Lolita is very strong. In Hollywood and New York, however, relationships are frequent between men of forty and girls very little older than Lolita. They marry — to no particular public outrage; rather, public cooing.

  No, it is not my sense of the immorality of the Humbert HumbertLolita relationship that is strong; it is Humbert's sense. He cares, I do not. I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere. And, anyway, cases of men in their forties marrying girls in their teens or early twenties have no bearing on Lolita whatever. Humbert was fond of «little girls» — not simply «young girls». Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and «sex kittens». Lolita was twelve, not eighteen, when Humbert met her. You may remember that by the time she is fourteen, he refers to her as his «aging mistress».

  One critic has said about you that «his feelings are like no one else's». Does this make sense to you? Or does it mean that you know your feelings better than others know theirs? Or that you have discovered yourself at other levels? Or simply that your history is unique?

  I do not recall that article; but if a critic makes such a statement, it must surely mean that he has explored the feelings of literally millions of people, in at least three countries, before reaching his conclusion. If so, I am a rare fowl indeed. If, on the other hand, he has merely limited himself to quizzing members of his family or club, his sta
tement cannot he discussed seriously.

  Another critic has written that your «worlds are static. They may become tense with obsession, but they do not break apart like the worlds of everyday reality. « Do you agree? Is there a static quality in your view of things?

  Whose «reality»? «Everyday» where? Let me suggest that the very term «everyday reality» is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known. I suspect you have invented that expert on «everyday reality». Neither exists.

  He does (names him). A third critic has said that you «diminish» your characters «to the point where they become ciphers in a cosmic farce». I disagree; Humbert, while comic, retains a touching and insistent quality — that of the spoiled artist.

  I would put it differently: Humbert Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear «touching». That epithet, in its true, teariridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl. Besides, how can I «diminish» to the level of ciphers, et cetera, characters that I have invented myself? One can «diminish» a biographee, but not an eidolon,

  **E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?