An American friend gave us a Scrabble set in Cyrillic alphabet, manufactured in Newtown, Conn.; so we play Russian skrebl for an hour or two after dinner. Then I read in bed — periodicals or one of the novels that proud publishers optimistically send me. Between eleven and midnight begins my usual fight with insomnia. Such are my habits in the cold season. Summers I spend in the pursuit of lepidoptera on flowery slopes and mountain screes; and, of course, after my daily hike of fifteen miles or more, I sleep even worse than in winter. My last resort in this business of relaxation is the composing of chess problems. The recent publication of two of them (in The Sunday Times and The Evening News of London) gave me more pleasure, I think, than the printing of my first poems half a century ago in St. Petersburg.
VN's social circle?
The tufted ducks and crested grebes of Geneva Lake. Some of the nice people in my new novel. My sister Elena in Geneva. A few friends in Lausanne and Vevey. A steady stream of brilliant American intellectuals visiting me in the riparian solitude of a beautifully reflected sunset. A Mr. Van Veen who travels down from his mountain chalet every other day to meet a dark lady, whose name I cannot divulge, on a street corner that I glimpse from my mammothtusk tower. Who else? A Mr. Vivian Badlook.
VN’s feelings about his work?
My feelings about my work are, on the whole, not unfriendly. Boundless modesty and what people call «humility» are virtues scarcely conducive to one's complacently dwelling upon one's own work — particularly when one lacks them. I see it segmented into four stages. First comes meditation (including the accumulation of seemingly hap hazard notes, the secret arrowheads of research); then the actual writing, and rewriting, on special index cards that my stationer orders for me: «special» because those you buy here come lined on both sides, and if, in the process of writing, a blast of inspiration sweeps a card onto the floor, and you pick it up without looking, and go on writing, it may happen — it has happened — that you fill in its underside, numbering it, say, 107, and then cannot find your 103 which hides on the side, used before. When the fair copy on cards is ready, my wife reads it, checking it for legibility and spelling, and has it transferred onto pages by a typist who knows English; the reading of galleys is a further part of that third stage. After the book is out, foreign rights come into play. I am trilingual, in the proper sense of writing, and not only speaking, three languages (in that sense practically all the writers I personally know or knew in America, including a babel of paraphrasts, are strictly monolinguists). Lolita I have translated myself in Russian (recently published in New York by Phaedra, Inc.); but otherwise I am able to control and correct only the French translations of my novels. That process entails a good deal of wrestling with booboos and boners, but on the other hand allows me to reach my fourth, and final, stage — that of rereading my own book a few months after the original printing. What judgment do I then pronounce? Am I still satisfied with my work? Does the afterglow of achievement correspond to the foreglow of conception? It should and it does.
VN's opinions: on the modern world; on contemporary politics; on contemporary writers; on drug addicts who might consider Lolita «square»?
I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a «modern world» on which an artist should have any definite and important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even carried to extravagant lengths. A hundred years ago, in Russia, the most eloquent and influential reviewers were leftwing, radical, utilitarian, political critics, who demanded that Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene. In those distant times, in that remote country, a typical critic would insist that a literary artist be a «reporter on the topics of the day», a social commentator, a class-war correspondent.
That was half a century before the Bolshevist police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive (really, regressive) trend characteristic of the eighteen sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the old days, to be sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable prose artist who composed Anna Karenin (which should be transliterated without the closing «a» — she was not a ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the leftwing progressive Philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror politicosocial soapbox gesticulations instead of dwelling on an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature.
The dreary principles once voiced in the reign of Alexander the Second and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the decrees of gloomy police states (Kosygin's dour face expresses that gloom far better than Stalin's dashing mustache) come to my mind whenever I hear today retro-progressive book reviewers in America and England plead for a little more social comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of a «modern world» continuously flowing around us belongs to the same type of abstraction as say, the «quaternary period» of paleontology. What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mir («world» in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in. My mirage is produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with the sign No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. Of course, good minds do exist whose caravans of general ideas lead somewhere — to curious bazaars, to photogenic temples; but an independent novelist cannot derive much true benefit from tagging along.
I would also want to establish first a specific definition of the term politics, and that might mean dipping again in the remote past. Let me simplify matters by saying that in my parlor politics as well as in open-air statements (when subduing, for instance, a glib foreigner who is always glad to join our domestic demonstrators in attacking America), I content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is good for me. I will abstain from details (they might lead to a veritable slalom of qualificatory parentheses), adding merely that I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather that such views as 1 have shade otf into a vague old-fashioned liberalism. Much less vaguely — quite adamantically, or even adamantinely — I am aware of a central core of spirit in me that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as China.
A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss yawning between the barbedwire tangle of police states and the spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western Europe. I am bored by writers who join the socialcomment racket. I despise the corny Philistine fad of flaunting fourletter words. I also refuse to find merit in a novel just because it is by a brave Black in Africa or a brave White in Russia — or by any representative of any single group in America. Frankly, a national, folklore, class, masonic, religious, or any other communal aura involuntarily prejudices me against a novel, making it harder for me to peel the offered fruit so as to get at the nectar of possible talent. I could name, but will nut, a number of modern artists whom I read purely for pleasure, and not for edification. I find comic the amalgamation of certain writers under a common label of, say, «Cape Codpiece Peace Resistance» or «Welsh WorkingUpperclass Rehabilitation» or «New Hairwave School». Incidentally, I frequently hear the distant whining of people who complain in print that 1 dislike the writers whom they venerate such as Faulkner, Mann, Camus, Dreiser, and of course Dostoevski. But I can assure them that because I detest certain writers I am not impairing the wellbeing of the plaintiffs in whom the images of my victims happen to form organic galaxies of esteem. I can prove, indeed, that the works of those authors really exist independently and separately from the organs of affection throbbing in the systems of irate strangers.