Strong opinions

by Vladimir Nabokov

  BERLIN

  My first Russian novel was written in Berlin in 1924 — this was Mary, in Russian Mashenka, and the first translation of any of my books was Mashenka in German under the title Sie kommt — kommt Sie?, published by Ullstein in 1928. My next seven novels were also written in Berlin and all of them had, entirely or in part, a Berlin background. This is the

  German contribution to the atmosphere and production of all my eight Russian novels written in Berlin. When I moved there from England in 1921, I had only a smattering of German picked up in Berlin during an earlier stay in the winter of 1910 when by brother and I went there with a Russian tutor to have our teeth fixed by an American dentist. In the course of my Cambridge University years I kept my Russian alive by reading Russian literature, my main subject, and by composing an appalling quantity of poems in Russian. Upon moving to Berlin I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak German fluently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made easier by the fact that I lived in a closed emigre circle of Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers, magazines, and books. My only forays into the local language were the civilities exchanged with my successive landlords or landladies and the routine necessities of shopping: Icb mbcbte etwas Scbinken. I now regret that I did so poorly; I regret it from a cultural point of view. The little I ever did in that respect was to translate in my youth the Heine songs for a Russian contralto — who, incidentally, wanted the musically significant vowels to coincide in fullness of sound, and therefore I turned Icb grolle n'tcbt into “Net, zloby net”, instead of the unsingable old version “Ya ne serzhus”. Later I read Goethe and Kafka en regard as I also did Homer and Horace. And of course since my early boyhood I have been tackling a multitude of German butterfly books with the aid of a dictionary.

  AMERICA

  In America, where 1 wrote all my fiction in English, the situation was different. I had spoken English with the same ease as Russian, since my earliest infancy. I had already written one English novel in Europe besides translating in the thirties two of my Russian books. Linguistically, though perhaps not emotionally, the transition was endurable. And in reward of whatever wrench I experienced, I composed in America a few Russian poems which are incomparably better than those of my European period.

  LEPIDOPTERA

  My actual work on lepidoptera is comprised within the span of only seven or eight years in the nineteen forties, mainly at Harvard, where I was Research Fellow in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. This entailed some amount of curatorship but most of my work was devoted to the classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired for ever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard Museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life. Summers were spent by my wife and me in hunting butterflies, mostly in the Rocky Mountains. In the last fifteen years I have collected here and there, in North America and Europe, but have not published any scientific papers on butterflies, because the writing of new novels and the translating of my old ones encroached too much on my life: the miniature hooks of a male butterfly are nothing in comparison to the eagle claws of literature which tear at me day and night. My entomological library in Montreux is smaller, in fact, than the heaps of butterfly books I had as a child.

  I am the author or the reviser of a number of species and subspecies mainly in the New World. The author's name, in such cases, is appended in Roman letters to the italicized name he gives to the creature. Several butterflies and one moth have been named for me, and in such cases my name is incorporated in that of the described insect, becoming «nabokovi», followed by the describer's name. There is also a genus Nabokovia Hemming, in South America. All my American collections are in museums, in New York, Boston, and Ithaca. The butterflies I have been collecting during the last decade, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, are not yet spread. They are still papered, that is kept in little glazed envelopes which are stored in tin boxes. Eventually they will be relaxed in damp towels, then pinned, then spread, and dried again on setting boards, and finally, labeled and placed in the glassed drawers of a cabinet to be preserved, I hope, in the splendid entomological museum in Lausanne.

  FAMILY

  I have always been an omnivorous consumer of books, and now, as in my boyhood, a vision of the night's lamplight on a bedside tome is a promised treat and a guiding star throughout the day. Other keen pleasures are soccer matches on the TV, an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer, sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems. Less ordinary, perhaps, is the unruffled flow of a family life which during its long course — almost half a century — has made absolute fools of the bogeys of environment and the bores of circumstance at all stages of our expatriation. Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflected color in the inner mirrors of my books.

  It was in Berlin that we married, in April, 1925, in the midst of my writing my first Russian novel. We were ridiculously poor, her tather was ruined, my widowed mother subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms of German military families; I taught tennis and English, and nine years later, in 1934, at the dawn of a new era, our only son was born. In the late thirties we migrated to France. My stuff was beginning to be translated, my readings in Paris and elsewhere were well attended; but then came the end of my European stage: in May, 1940, we moved to America.

  FAME

  Soviet politicians have a rather comic provincial way of applauding the audience that applauds them. I hope I won't be accused of facetious sufficiency if I say in response to your compliments that I have the greatest readers any author has ever had. I see myself as an American writer raised in Russia, educated in England, imbued with the culture of Western Europe; I am aware of the blend, but even the most lucid plum pudding cannot sort out its own ingredients, especially whilst the pale fire still flickers around it. Field, Appel, Proffer, and many others in the USA, Zimmer in Germany, Vivian Darkbloom (a shy violet in Cambridge), have all added their erudition to my inspiration, with brilliant results. I would like to say a lot about my heroic readers in Russia but am prevented from doing so — by many emotions besides a sense of responsibility with which I still cannot cope in any rational way.

  SWITZERLAND

  Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets — just west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson sun! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in charming surroundings.

  All Is Vanity

  The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere «vanity», and if not then the «all» is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and «frustration» in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters — in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera — are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel — and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.

  20

  The New York newspaper for which this interview, conducted by correspondence in 1972, was intended, refused to publish it. My interviewer's questions have been abridged or stylized in the following version.

  Critics of Transparent Things seem to have had difficulty in describing its theme.

  Its theme is merely a beyond-the-cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies. Amongst the reviewer
s several careful readers have published some beautiful stuff about it. Yet neither they nor, of course, the common criticule discerned the structural knot of the story. May I explain that simple and elegant point?

  You certainly may.

  Allow me to quote a passage from my first page which baffled the wise and misled the silly: «When we concentrate on a material object . . . the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object». A number of such instances of falling through the present's «tension film» are given in the course of the book. There is the personal history of a pencil. There is also, in a later chapter, the past of a shabby room, where, instead of focusing on Person and the prostitute, the spectral observer drifts down into the middle of the previous century and sees a Russian traveler, a minor Dostoevski, occupying that room, between Swiss gambling house and Italy.

  Another critic has said —

  Yes, I am coming to that. Reviewers of my little book made the lighthearted mistake of assuming that seeing through things is the professional function of a novelist. Actually, that kind of generalization is not only a dismal commonplace but is specifically untrue. Unlike the mysterious observer or observers in Transparent Things, a novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

  So who is that observer; who are those italicized «we» in the fourteenth line of the novel; who, for goodness'sake, is the «I» in its very first line?

  The solution, my friend, is so simple that one is almost embarrassed to furnish it. But here goes. An incidental but curiously active component of my novel is Mr. R., an American writer of German extraction. He writes English more correctly than he speaks it. In conversation R. has an annoying habit of introducing here and there the automatic «you know» of the German emigre, and, more painfully yet, of misusing, garbling, or padding the commonest American cliche. A good specimen is his intrusive, though well meant, admonition in the last line of my last chapter: «Easy, you know, does it, son». _

  Some reviewers saw in Mr. R. a portrait or parody of Mr. N.

  Exactly. They were led to that notion by mere flippancy of thought because, I suppose, both writers are naturalized U.S. citizens and both happen, or happened, to live in Switzerland. When Transparent Things starts, Mr. R. is already dead and his last letter has been filed away in the «repository» in his publisher's office (see my Chapter Twenty-One). Not only is the surviving writer an incomparably better artist than Mr. R., but the latter, in his Tralatitions, actually squirts the venom of envy at the infuriatingly smiling Adam von Librikov (Chapter Nineteen), an anagrammatic alias that any child can decode. On the threshold of my novel Hugh Person is welcomed by a ghost or ghosts — by his dead father, perhaps, or dead wife; more probably, by the late Monsieur Kronig, former director of the Ascot Hotel; still more probably by Mr. R.'s phantom. This promises a thriller: whose ghost will keep intruding upon the plot? One thing, however, is quite transparent and certain. As intimated already in this exegesis, it is no other than a discarnate, but still rather grotesque, Mr. R. who greets newly-dead Hugh in the last line of the book.

  I see. And what are you up to now, Baron Librikov? Another novel? Memoirs? Cocking a snoot at dunderheads?

  Two volumes of short stories and a collection of essays are by now almost completed, and a new wonderful novel has its little foot in the door. As to cocking a snoot at dunderheads, I never do that. My books, all my books, are addressed not to «dunderheads»; not to the cretins who believe that I like long Latinate words; not to the learned loonies who find sexual or religious allegories in my fiction; no, my books are addressed to Adam von L., to my family, to a few intelligent friends, and to all my likes in all the crannies of the world, from a carrel in America to the nightmare depths of Russia.

  21

  Simona Morini came to interview me on February 3, 1972, in Montreux. Our exchange appeared in Vogue, New York, April 15, 1972. Three passages (pp. 2001, 2012 and 204), are borrowed, with modifications, from Speak, Memory, G. P. Putnam's Sons, N. Y., 1966.

  The world has been and is open to you. With your Proustian sense of places, what is there in Montreux that attracts you so?

  My sense of places is Nabokovian rather than Proustian. With regard to Montreux there are many attractions — nice people, near mountains, regular mails, headquarters at a comfortable hotel. We dwell in the older part of the Palace Hotel, in its original part really, which was all that existed a hundred and fifty years ago (you can still see that initial inn and our future windows in old prints of 1840 or so). Our quarters consist of several tiny rooms with two and a half bathrooms, the result of two apartments having been recently fused. The sequence is: kitchen, living-dining room, my wife's room, my room, a former kitchenette now full of my papers, and our son's former room, now converted into a study. The apartment is cluttered with books, folders, and files. What might be termed rather grandly a library is a back room housing my published works, and there are additional shelves in the attic whose skylight is much frequented by pigeons and Alpine choughs. I am giving this meticulous description to refute a distortion in an interview published recently in another New York magazine — a long piece with embarrassing misquotations, wrong intonations, and false exchanges in the course of which I am made to dismiss the scholarship of a dear friend as «pedantry» and to poke ambiguous fun at a manly writer's tragic fate.

  Is there any truth in the rumor that you are thinking of leaving Montreux forever?

  Well, there is a rumor that sooner or later everybody living now in Montreux will leave it forever.

  Lolita is an extraordinary Baedecker of the United States. What fascinated you about American motels?

  The fascination was purely utilitarian. My wife used to drive me (Plymouth, Oldsmobile, Buick, Buick Special, Impala — in that order of brand) during several seasons, many thousands of miles every season, for the sole purpose of collecting Lepidoptera — all of which are now in three museums (Natural History in New York City, Comparative Zoology at Harvard, Comstock Hall at Cornell). Usually we spent only a day or two in each motor-court, but sometimes, if the hunting was good, we stayed for weeks in one place. The main raison d'etre of the motel was the possibility of walking out straight into an aspen grove with lupines in full bloom or onto a wild mountainside. We also would make many sorties on the way between motels. All this I shall he describing in my next memoir, Speak On, Memory, which will deal with many curious things (apart from butterfly lore) — amusing happenings at Cornell and Harvard, gay tussles with publishers, my friendship with Edmund Wilson, et cetera.

  You were in Wyoming and Colorado looking for butterflies. What were these places like to you?

  My wife and I have collected not only in Wyoming and Colorado, but in most of the states, as well as in Canada.

  The list of localities visited between 1940 and 1960 would cover many pages. Each butterfly, killed by an expert nip of its thorax, is slipped immediately into a little glazed envelope, about thirty of which fit into one of the BandAid containers which represent, with the net, my only paraphernalia in the field. Captures can be kept, before being relaxed and set, for any number of years in those envelopes, if properly stored. The exact locality and date are written on every envelope besides being jotted down in one's pocket diary. Though my captures are now in American museums, 1 have preserved hundreds of labels and notes. Here are just a few samples picked out at random:

  Road to Terry Peak from Route 85, near Lead, 6500 — 7000 feet, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, July 20, 1958.

  Above Tomboy Road, between Social Tunnel and Bullion Mine, at about 10,500 feet, nearTelluride, San Miguel County, W. Colorado, July 3, 1951.

  Near Karner, between Albany and Schenectady, New York, June 2, 1950.

  Near Columbine Lodge, Estes Park, E. Colorado, about 9000 feet, June 5, 1947.

  Soda Mt., Oregon, about 5500 feet, August 2, 1953.

  Above Portal, road to Rustler Park, betwe
en 5500 and 8000 feet, Chiricahua Mts., Arizona, April 30, 1953.

  Fernie, three miles east of Elco, British Columbia, July 10, 1958.

  Granite Pass, Bighorn Mts., 8950 feet, E. Wyoming, July 17, 1958.

  Near Crawley Lake, Bishop, California, about 7000 feet, June 3, 1953.

  Near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, April 21, 1959. Etcetera, et cetera.

  Where do you go for butterflies now?

  To various good spots in the Valais, the Tessin, the Grisons; to the hills of Italy: to the Mediterranean islands; to the mountains of southern France and so forth. I am chiefly devoted to European and North American butterflies of high altitudes, and have never visited the Tropics. The little mountain trains cog-wheeling up to alpine meadows, through sun and shade, along rock face or coniferous forest are tolerable in action and delightful in destination, bringing one as they do to the starting point of a daylong hike. My favorite method of locomotion, though, is the cableway, and especially the chairlift. I find enchanting and dreamy in the best sense of the word to glide in the morning sun from valley to timberline in that magic seat, and watch from above my own shadow — with the ghost of a butterfly net in the ghost of a fist — as it keeps gently ascending in sitting profile along the flowery slope below, among dancing Ringlets and skimming Fritillaries. Some day the butterfly hunter will find even finer dream lore when floating upright over mountains, carried by a diminutive rocket strapped to his back.