I might have compared myself to a Colossus of Rhodes bestriding the gulf between the thermodynamics of Snow and the Laurentomania of Leavis, had that gulf not been a mere dimple of a ditch that a small frog could straddle. The terms «physics» and «egghead» as used nowadays evoke in me the dreary image of applied science, the knack of an electrician tinkering with bombs and other gadgets. One of those «Two Cultures» is really nothing but utilitarian technology; the other is Bgrade novels, ideological fiction, popular art. Who cares if there exists a gap between such «physics» and such «humanities»? Those Eggheads are terrible Philistines. A real good head is not oval but round.
Where, through what window, do lepidoptera come in?
My passion for lepidopterological research, in the field, in the laboratory, in the library, is even more pleasurable than the study and practice of literature, which is saying a good deal. Lepidopterists are obscure scientists. Not one is mentioned in Webster. But never mind. I have reworked the classification of various groups of butterflies, have described and figured several species and subspecies. My names for the microscopic organs that I have been the first to see and portray have safely found their way into biological dictionaries (compare this to the wretched entry under «nymphet» in Webster's latest edition). The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill which accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. Science means to me above all natural science. Not the ability to repair a radio set; quite stubby fingers can do that. Apart from this basic consideration, I certainly welcome the free interchange of terminology, between any branch of science and any raceme of art. There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts. Aphoristicism is a symptom of arteriosclerosis.
In Pale Fire, Kinbote complains that «The coming of summer represented a problem in optics». The Eye is welltitled, since you plumb these problems throughout your fiction; the apprehension of «reality» is a miracle of vision, and consciousness is virtually an optical instrument in your work. Have you studied the science of optics at all, and would you say something about your own visual sense, and how you feel it has served your fiction?
I am afraid you are quoting this out of context, Kinbote was simply annoyed by the spreading foliage of summer interfering with his Tompeeping. Otherwise you are right in suggesting that 1 have good eyes. Doubting Tom should have worn spectacles. It is true, however, that even with the best of visions one must touch things to be quite sure of «reality».
You have said that Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Luis Borges are among your favorite contemporary writers. Do you find them to be at all similar? Do you think Robbe-Grillet's novels are as free of «psychology» as he claims?
Robbe Grillet's claims are preposterous. Those manifestos, those dodoes, die with the dadas. His fiction is magnificently poetical and original, and the shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology — psychology at its best. Borges is also a man of infinite talent, but his miniature labyrinths and the roomy ones of Robbe-Grillet are quite differently built, and the lighting is not the same.
I recall your humorous remarks at Cornell about two writers experiencing «telepathy» (1 believe you were comparing Dickens and Flaubert). You and Borges were both born in 1899 (but so was Ernest Hemingway!). Your Bend Sinister and Borges' story «The Circular Ruins» are conceptually similar, but you do not read Spanish and that story was first translated into English in 1949, two years after Bend Sinister’s birth, just as in Borges' «The Secret Miracle», Hladik has created a verse drama uncannily similar to your recently Englished play, The Waltz Invention, which precedes Borges' tale, but which he could not have read in Russian. When were you first aware of Borges' fictions, and have you and he had any kind of association or contact, other than telepathic?
I read a Borges story for the first time three or four years ago. Up till then I had not been aware of his existence, nor do I believe he knew, or indeed knows, anything about me. That is not very grand in the way of telepathy. There are affinities between Invitation to a Beheading and The Castle, but I had not yet read Kafka when I wrote my novel. As to Hemingway, I read him for the first time in the early forties, something about bells, balls, and bulls, and loathed it. Later I read his admirable «The Killers» and the wonderful fish story which I was asked to translate into Russian but could not for some reason or other.
Your first book was a translation of Lewis Carroll into Russian. Do you see any affinities between Carrolls idea of «nonsense» and your bogus or «mongrel» languages in Bend Sinister and Pale Fire?
In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll. No, I do not think that his invented language shares any roots with mine. He has a pathetic affinity with H. H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and halfundressed, or rather semiundraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.
You have had wide experience as a translator and have made fictive use of translation. What baste problems of existence do you find implicit in the art and act of translation?
There is a certain small Malayan bird of the thrush family which is said to sing only when tormented in an unspeakable way by a specially trained child at the annual Feast of Flowers. There is Casanova making love to a harlot while looking from a window at the nameless tortures inflicted on Damiens. These are the visions that sicken me when I read the «poetical» translations from martyred Russian poets by some of my famous contemporaries. A tortured author and a deceived reader, this is the inevitable outcome of arty paraphrase. The only object and justification of translation is the conveying of the most exact information possible and this can be only achieved by a literal translation, with notes.
Mention of translation brings me to one of the Kinbotian problems faced by critics who comment on your Russian novels in translation, but who themselves have no Russian, It has been said that translations such as The Defense and Despair must contain many stylistic revisions (certainly the puns), and moreover are in general much richer in language than Laughter in the Dark, written at about the same time but, unlike the others, translated in the thirties. Would you comment on this? If the style of Laughter in the Dark suggests it should have preceded Despair, perhaps it actually was written much earlier: in the BBC interview of four years ago,4* you said that you wrote Laughter in the Dark when you were twentysix, which would have been 1925, thus making it your first novel. Did you actually write it this early, or is the reference to age a slip in memory, no doubt caused by the distracting presence of the BBC machinery. (* 4 Peter Duval-Smith, «Vladimir Nabokov on his Life and Work», Listener, LXVIII (Nov. 22, 1962), 85658. Reprinted as «What Vladimir Nabokov Thinks of his Work», Vogue, CXLI (March 1, 1963), 15255.)
I touched up details here and there in those novels and reinstated a scene in Despair, as the Foreword explains. That «twentysix» is certainly wrong. It is either a telescopation or I must have been thinking of Mashenka, my first novel written in 1925. The Russian original version (Kamera Obskura) of Laughter in the Dark was written in 1931, three years before Otchayanie (Despair), and an English translation by Winifred Roy, insufficiently revised by me, appeared in London in 1936. A year later, on the Riviera, I attempted — not quite successfully — to English the thing anew for BobbsMerrill, who published it in New York in 1938.