You mentioned Aleksey Tolstoy a moment ago. Would you say something about him?
He was a writer of some talent and has two or three science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. But I wouldn't care to categorize writers, the only category being originality and talent. After all, if we start sticking group labels, we'll have to put The Tempest in the SF category, and of course thousands of other valuable works.
Tolstoy was initially an antiBolshevik, and his early work precedes the Revolution. Are there any writers totally of the Soviet period whom you admire?
There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose certain plots and certain characters they could get away with it in the political sense, in other words, they wouldn't be told what to write and how to finish the novel.
Ilf and Petrov, two wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a rascal adventurer as protagonist, whatever they wrote about his adventures could not be criticized from a political point of view, since a perfect rascal or a madman or a delinquent or any person who was outside Soviet society — in other words, any picaresque character — could not be accused either of being a bad Communist or not being a good Communist. Thus Ilf and Petrov, Zoshchenko, and Olesha managed to publish some absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete independence, since these characters, plots, and themes could not be treated as political ones. Until the early thirties they managed to get away with it.
The poets had a parallel system. They thought, and they were right at first, that if they stuck to the garden — to pure poetry, to lyrical imitations, say, of gypsy songs, such as Ilya Selvinski's — that then they were safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing, as if the «I» of the poem were a perfect imbecile, crooning in a dream, distorting words, playing with words as a halfinsane person would. All these people were enormously gifted but the regime finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one, in nameless camps.
By my loose approximation, there remain three novels, some fifty stories, and six plays still in Russian. Are there any plans to translate these? What of The Exploit, written during what seems to have been your most fecund period as a «Russian wrtter» — would you tell us something, however briefly, about this book?
Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was thirty years ago but some of it will probably be published in English by and by. My son is now working on the translation of The Exploit. It is the story of a Russian expatriate, a romantic young man or my set and time, a lover of adventure for adventure's sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear, the glory and rapture of that victory.
I understand that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was written in English in 1938. It is very dramatic to think of you bidding farewell to one language and embarking on a new life in another in this way. Why did you decide to write in English at this time, since you obviously could not have known for certain you would emigrate two years later? How much more writing in Russian did you do between Sebastian Knight and your emigration to America in 1940, and once there, did you ever compose in Russian again?
Oh, I did know I would eventually land in America. I switched to English after convincing myself on the strength of my translation of Despair that I could use English as a wistful standby for Russian. 6 [6 In 1936, while living in Berlin, Nabokov translated Despair tor the English firm John Long, who published it in 1937. The most recent and final edition of Despair (New York, 1966) is, as Nabokov explains m lls Foreword, a revision of bolh the early translation and of Otcbayanie itself.] I still feel the pangs of that substitution, they have not been allayed by the Russian poems (my best) that I wrote in New York, or the 1954 Russian version of Speak, Memory, or even my recent twoyearslong work on the Russian translation of Lolita, which will be published in 1967. I wrote Sebastian Knight in Paris, 1938. We had that year a charming flat on rue Saigon, between the Etoile and the Bois. It consisted of a huge handsome room (which served as parlor, bedroom, and nursery) with a small kitchen on one side and a large sunny bathroom on the other. This apartment had been some bachelor's delight but was not meant to accommodate a family of three. Evening guests had to be entertained in the kitchen so as not to interfere with my future translator's sleep. And the bathroom doubled as my study. Here is the Doppelgdnger theme for you.
Do you remember any of those «evening guests»?
I remember Vladislav Hodasevich, the greatest poet of his time, removing his dentures to eat in comfort, just as a grandee would do in the past.
Many people are surprised to learn that you have written seven plays, which is strange, since your novels are filled with «theatrical» effects that are patently unnovelistic. Is it just to say that your frequent allusions to Shakespeare are more than a matter of playful or respectful homage? What do you thtnk of the drama as a form? What are the characteristics of Shakespeare's plays which you find most congenial to your own esthetic?
The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play. My most ambitious venture in the domain of drama is a huge screenplay based on Loltta. I wrote it for Kubrick who used only bus and shadows of it for his otherwise excellent film.
When I was your student, you never mentioned the Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce's Ulysses. But you did supply «special information» in introducing many of the masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses, the arrangement of streets and lodgings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a diagram of the interior of a railway coach on the MoscowPetersburg express in Anna Karenin, and a floor plan of the Samsa apartment in The Metamorphosis and an entomological drawing of Gregor. Would you be able to suggest some equivalent for your own readers?
Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the harping on those essentially easy and vulgar «Homeric parallelisms» would only distract one's attention from the real beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter titles which already were «explaining» the book to nonreaders. In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.
Incidentally, one of my colleagues came into my office recently with the breathless news that Gregor is not a cockroach (he had read an article to that effect). I told him I've known that for 12 years, and took out my notes to show him my drawing from what was for one day only Entomology 312. What kind of beetle, by the way, was Gregor?