Is there a particular picture of the world which you wish to develop? The past is very present for you, even in a novel of the «future», such as Bend Sinister. Are you a «nostalpist»? In what time would you prefer to live?
In the coming days of silent planes and graceful aircycles, and cloudless silvery skies, and a universal system of padded underground roads to which trucks shall be relegated like Morlocks. As to the past, I would not mind retrieving from various corners of spacetime certain lost comforts, such as baggy trousers and long, deep bathtubs.
You know, you do not have to answer all my Kinbote-like questions.
It would never do to start skipping the tricky ones. Let us continue.
Besides writing novels, what do you, or would you, like most to do?
Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.
What is most characteristic of poshlust in contemporary writing? Are there temptations for you in the sin of poshlust? Have you ever fallen?
«Poshlust», or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudoliterature — these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as «America is no better than Russia» or «We all share in Germany's guilt». The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as «the moment of truth», «charisma», «existential» (used seriously), «dialogue» (as applied to political talks between nations), and «vocabulary» (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports owe Jewish name — that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet, and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouves in latrines, cannon balls, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wallpatterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots — all of it as corny in its own right as the academic «September Morns» and «Florentine Flowergirls» of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bete noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple — she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canape, he admiring wistfully the hostess, And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.
Are there contemporary writers you follow with great pleasure?
There are several such writers, but I shall not name them. Anonymous pleasure hurts nobody.
Do you follow some with great pain?
No. Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as «great literature» by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.
**As an admirer of Borges and Joyce you seem to share their pleasure in teasing the reader with tricks and puns and puzzles. What do you think the relationship should be between reader and author?
I do not recollect any puns in Borges but then I read him only in translation. Anyway, his delicate little tales and miniature Minotaurs have nothing in common with Joyce's great machines. Nor do I find many puzzles in that most lucid of novels, Ulysses. On the other hand, I detest Finnegans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy wordtissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.
What have you learned from Joyce?
Nothing.
Oh, come.
James Joyce has not influenced me in any manner whatsoever. My first brief contact with Ulysses was around 1920 at Cambridge University, when a friend, Peter Mrozovski, who had brought a copy from Paris, chanced to read to me, as he stomped up and down my digs, one or two spicy passages from Molly's monologue, which, entre nous soit dit, is the weakest chapter in the book. Only fifteen years later, when I was already well formed as a writer and reluctant to learn or unlearn anything, I read Ulysses and liked it enormously. I am indifferent to Finnegans Wake as I am to all regional literature written in dialect — even if it be the dialect of genius.
Aren't you doing a book about James Joyce?
But not only about him. What 1 intend to do is publish a number of twentypage essays on several works — Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation, Don Quixote, and others — all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.
What about other influences? Pushkin?
In a way — no more than, say, Tolstoy or Turgenev were influenced by the pride and purity of Pushkin's art.
Gogol?
I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous. At his worst, as in his Ukrainian stuff, he is a worthless writer; at his best, he is incomparable and inimitable.
Anyone else?
H. G. Wells, a great artist, was my favorite writer when I was a boy. The Passionate Friends, Ann Veronica, The Time Machine, The Country of the Blind, all these stories are far better than anything Bennett, or Conrad, or, in fact, any of
Wells' contemporaries would produce. His sociological cogitations can be safely ignored, of course, but his romances and fantasias are superb. There was an awful moment at dinner in our St. Petersburg house one night, when Zinaida Vengerov, his translator, informed Wells, with a toss of her head: «You know, my favorite work of yours is The Lost World». «She means the war the Martians lost», said my father quickly.
Did you learn from your students at Cornell? Was the experience purely a financial one? Did teaching teach you anything valuable?
My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations. Every lecture I delivered had been carefully, lovingly handwritten and typed out, and I leisurely read it out in class, sometimes stopping to rewrite a sentence and sometimes repeating a paragraph — a mnemonic prod which, however, seldom provoked any change in the rhythm of wrists taking it down. I welcomed the few shorthand experts in my audience, hoping they would communicate the information they stored to their less fortunate comrades. Vainly I tried to replace my appearances at the lectern by taped records to be played over the college radio. On the other hand, I deeply enjoyed the chuckle of appreciation in this or that warm spot of the lecture hall at this or that point of my lecture. My best reward comes from those former students of mine who ten or fifteen years later write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I taught them to visualize Emma Bovary's mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement of rooms in the Samsa household or the two homosexuals in Anna Karenin. I do not know if I learned anything from teaching but I know I amassed an invaluable amount of exciting information in analyzing a dozen novels for my students. My salary as you happen to know was not exactly a princely one.