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 translated 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.
Who are the great American writers you most admire?
When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom 1 did not read as a boy. My feelings towards James are rather complicated. I really dislike him intensely but now and then the figure in the phrase, the turn of the epithet, the screw of an absurd adverb, cause me a kind of electric tingle, as if some current of his was also passing through my own blood. Hawthorne is a splendid writer. Emerson's poetry is delightful.
You have often said that you «don't belong to any club or group», and I wonder if the historical examples of the ways Russian writers have allowed ideology to determine if not destroy their art, culminating in the Socialist Realism of our own time, have not gone a long way in shaping your own skepticism and aversion to didacticism of any kind. Which «historical examples» have you been most conscious of?
My aversion to groups is rather a matter of temperament than the fruit of information and thought. I was born that way and have despised ideological coercion instinctively all my life. Those «historical examples» by the way are not as clearcut and obvious as you seem to imply. The mystical didacticism of Gogol or the utilitarian moralism of Tolstoy, or the reactionary journalism of Dostoevski, are of their own poor making and in the long run nobody really takes them seriously.
Would you say something about the controversy surrounding the Chernyshevski biography in The Gift? You have commented on this briefly before, but since its suppression in the thirties expresses such a transcendent irony and seems to justify the need for just such a parody, I think your readers would be most interested, especially since so little is known about the emigre communities, their magazines, and the role of intellectuals in these communities. If you would like to describe something of the writer's relationship to this world, please do.
Everything that can be profitably said about Count GodunovCherdyntsev's biography of Chernyshevski has been said by Koncheyev in The Gift. I can only add that I devoted as much honest labor to the task of gathering the material for the Chernyshevski chapter as I did to the composing of Shade's poem in Pale Fire. As to the suppression of that chapter by the editors of Sovremennye Zapiski, it was indeed an unprecedented occurrence, quite out of keeping with their exceptional broadmindedness, for, generally speaking, in their acceptance or rejection of literary works they were guided exclusively by artistic standards. As to the latter part of your question, the revised Chapter Fourteen in Speak, Memory will provide additional lnfomation.
Do you have any opinions about the Russian antiutopian tradition (if it can be called this), from Odoevski's «The Last Suicide» and «A City Wtthout a Name» in Russian Nights to Bryusov'sThe Republic of the Southern Cross and Zamyatin'sWJe (to name only a few)?
I am indifferent to those works.
Is it fair to say that Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are cast as mock antiutopian novels, with their idelogical centers removed — the totalitarian state becoming an extreme and fantastic metaphor for the imprisonment of the mind, thus making consciousness, rather than politics, the subject of these novels?
Yes, possibly.