What did you read when you were a boy?
Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry — English, Russian and French — than in any other fiveyear period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several — Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke — have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. I was never exposed in the twenties and thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of the not quite first-rate tliot and ot definitely secondrate Pound. 1 read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend's house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did.
What are your reading habits today?
Usually I read several books at a time — old books, new books, fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything — and when the bedside heap of a dozen volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the end of one week, I accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch — mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called «powerful» novel — full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialogue — in fact, when I receive a new novel from a hopeful publisher — «hoping that 1 like the book as much as he does» — I check first of all how much dialogue there is, and if it looks too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from my bed.
Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy reading?
I do have a few favorites — for example, Robbe-Grillet and Borges. How freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths! I love their lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.
Many critics feel that this description applies no less aptly to your own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose and poetry intermingle as art forms?
Except that I started earlier — that's the answer to the first part of your question. As to the second: Well, poetry, of course, includes all creative writing; 1 have never been able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation. As in today's scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our concept of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the metaphor.
You have also written that poetry represents «the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words». But many feel that the «irrational» has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?
This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion. In point of fact, the greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, 1 don't believe that any science today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call «science» the cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is that yesterday's neutron or today's truth dies tomorrow. But even in a better sense of «science» — as the study of visible and palpable nature, or the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy — the situation remains as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.
Man's understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
To be quite candid — and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary целительный little chill — I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.
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On August 18, 1964, Jane Howard of Life magazine sent me eleven questions. I have kept the typescript of my replies. In mid-September she arrived in Montreux with the photographer Henry Grossman. Text and pictures appeared in the November 20 issue of Life.
What writers and persons and places have influenced you most?
In my boyhood I was an extraordinarily avid reader. By the age of 14 or 15 I had read or re-read all Tolstoy in Russian, all Shakespeare in English, and all Flaubert in French — besides hundreds of other books. Today I can always tell when a sentence I compose happens to resemble in cut and intonation that of any of the writers I loved or detested half a century ago; but I do not believe that any particular writer has had any definite influence upon me. As to the influence of places and persons, I owe many metaphors and sensuous associations to the North Russian landscape of my boyhood, and I am also aware that my father was responsible for my appreciating very early in life the thrill of a great poem.
Have you ever seriously contemplated a career other than in letters?
Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime — but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.
Which of your writings has phased you most?
I would say that of all my books Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow — perhaps because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived. I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don't seem to name their daughters Lolita any more. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings. Well-wishers have tried to translate Lolita into Russian, but with such execrable results that I'm now doing a translation myself. The word «jeans», for example, is translated in Russian dictionaries as «wide, short trousers» — a totally unsatisfactory definition.