How about the name of your extraordinary creature, Professor PNIN?
The «p» is sounded, that's all. But since the «p» is mute in English words starting with «pn», one is prone to insert a supporting «uh» sound — «Puhnin» — which is wrong. To get the «pn» right, try the combination «Up North», or still better «Up, Nina!», leaving out the initial «u». Pnorth, Pnina, Pnin. Can you do that? . . . That's fine.
You're responsible for brilliant summaries of the lives and works of Pushkin and Gogol. How would you summarize your own?
It is not so easy to summarize something which is not quite finished yet. However, as I've pointed out elsewhere, the first part of my life is marked by a rather pleasing chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia, the next twenty in Western Europe, and the twenty years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America. I've been living in Europe again for five years now, but I cannot promise to stay around another fifteen so as to retain the rhythm. Nor can I predict what new books I may write. My best Russian novel is a thing called, in English, The Gift. My two best American ones are Lolita and Pale Fire.
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.