A pretty thought but not mine.
The twelve-year-old Ada’s precocious sexuality is bound to bring comparison to Lolita. Is there any other connection between the two girls in your mind? Do you have the same affection for her as for Lolita? Is it, as Van says, that “all bright kids are depraved”?
The fact that Ada and Lolita lose their virginity at the same age is about the only peg on which to hang a comparison. Incidentally, Lolita, diminutive of Dolores, a little Spanish gypsy, is mentioned many times throughout Ada.
You once remarked that you are an «indivisible monist». Please elaborate.
Monism, which implies a oneness of basic reality, is seen to be divisible when, say, «mind» sneakily splits away from «matter» in the reasoning of a muddled monist or halfhearted materialist.
What are your future writing plans? You have mentioned publishing a book on Joyce and Kafka and your Cornell lectures. Will they appear soon? Are you thinking about another novel? Can you say anything about it now? Any poetry?
I have been working for the last months on an English translation of some of my Russian poems (dating from 1916 to this day) commissioned by McGrawHill. In 1968 I finished revising for the Princeton Press a second edition of my Eugene Onegin which will be even more gloriously and monstrously literal than the first.
Do you ever consider returning to America? To California, as you mentioned a few years ago? Can you say why you left the US? Do you still feel in some way American?
I am an American, I feel American, and I like that feeling. I live in Europe for family reasons, and I pay a US federal income tax on every cent I earn at home or abroad. Frequently, especially in spring, 1 dream of going to spend my purpleplumed sunset in California, among the larkspurs and oaks, and in the serene silence of her university libraries.
Would you ever want to teach or lecture again?
No. Much as I like teaching, the strain of preparing lectures and delivering them would be too fatiguing today, even if 1 used a tape recorder. In this respect 1 have long come to the conclusion that the best teaching is done by records which a student can run as many times as he wants, or has to, in his soundproof cell. And at the end of the year he should undergo an old-fashioned, difficult, four-hour-long examination, with monitors walking between the desks.
Are you interested in working on the movie of Ada? With its tactile, sensual beauty and its overlapping visual images, Ada seems a natural for films. There are stories of film executives converging on Montreux to read and bid on the book. Did you meet them? Did they ask many questions or seek your advice?
Yes, film people did converge on my hotel in Montreux — keen minds, great enchanters. And, yes, I would indeed like very much to write, or help writing, a screenplay that would reflect Ada.
Some of your funniest remarks in recent novels have concerned driving and the problems of the road (including the image of the author groping with time as with the contents of a glove compartment). Do you drive? Enjoy motoring? Do you travel much? What means do you prefer? Have you plans to travel in the next year or so?
In the summer of 1915, in northern Russia, I, an adventurous lad of sixteen, noticed one day that our chauffeur had left the family convertible throbbing all alone before its garage (part of the huge stable at our place in the country); next moment 1 had driven the thing, with a sickly series of bumps, into the nearest ditch. That was the first time I ever drove a car. The second and last time was thirtyfive years later, somewhere in the States, when my wife let me take the wheel for a few seconds and I narrowly missed crashing into the only car standing at the far side of a spacious parking lot. Between 1949 and 1959 she has driven me more than 150,000 miles all over North America mainly on butterfly-hunting trips.
Salinger and Updike seem to be the only US writers you have praised. Have you any additions to the list? Have you read Norman Mailers recent political and social reportage (Armies of the Night)? So, do you admire it? Do you admire any American poets in particular?
This reminds me: You know, it sounds preposterous, but I was invited last year to cover that political convention in Chicago in the company of two or three others writers. I did not go, naturally, and still believe it must have been some sort of joke on the part of Esquire — inviting me who can't tell a Democrat from a Republican and hates crowds and demonstrations.
What is your opinion of Russian writers like Solzhenitzyn, Abram Tertz, Andrey Voznesenski, who have been widely read in the last couple of years in the US?
It is only from a literary point of view that I could discuss fellow artists, and that would entail, in the case of the brave Russians you mention, a professional examination not only of virtues but also of flaws. I do not think that such objectivity would be fair in the livid light of the political persecution which brave Russians endure.
How often do you see your son? How do you and he collaborate on translating your work? Do you work together from the start of a project or do you act as editor or adviser?
We chose the hub of Europe for domicile not to be too far from our son Dmitri who lives near Milan. We see him not as often as we would like, now that his operatic career (he has a magnificent bass voice) requires him to travel to various countries. This defeats somewhat our purpose of residing in Europe. It also means that he cannot devote as much time as before to co-translating my old stuff.
In Ada Van says that a man who loses his memory will room in heaven with guitarists rather than great or even mediocre writers. What would be your preference in celestial neighbors?
It would be fun to hear Shakespeare roar with ribald laughter on being told what Freud (roasting in the other place) made of his plays. It would satisfy one's sense of justice to see H. G. Wells invited to more parties under the cypresses than slightly bogus Conrad. And I would love to find out from Pushkin whether his duel with Ryleev, in May, 1820, was really fought in the park of Batovo (later my grandmother's estate) as I was the first to suggest in 1964.
Will you speak briefly about the emigre life of the twenties and thirties? Where, for instance, were you a tennis instructor? Whom did you teach? Mr. Appel mentioned that he thought you gave lectures to emigri groups. If so, what were your subjects? It seems you must have traveled a good deal. Is that true?
I gave tennis lessons to the same people, or friends of the same people, to whom I gave lessons of English or French since around 1921, when 1 still shuttled between Cambridge and Berlin, where my father was coeditor of an emigre Russian language daily, and where I more or less settled after his death in 1922. In the thirties I was frequently asked to give public readings of my prose and verse by emigre organizations. In the course of those activities I traveled to Paris, Prague, Brussels and London, and then, one blessed day in 1939, Aldanov, a fellow writer and a dear friend, said to me: «Look, next summer or the one after that, I am invited to lecture at Stanford in California but I cannot go, so would you like to replace me?» That's how the third spiral of my life started to coil.
Where and when did you meet your wife? Where and when did you marry? Can you or she describe her background and girlhood briefly? In what city and/or country did you court her? If I am correct that she is also Russian, did you or any of your brothers and sisters meet her when you were children?
I met my wife, Vera Slonim, at one of the emigre charity balls in Berlin at which it was fashionable for Russian young ladies to sell punch, books, flowers, and toys. Her father was a St. Petersburg jurist and industrialist, ruined by the revolution. We might have met years earlier at some party in St. Petersburg where we had friends in common. We married in 1925, and were at first extremely hard up.