You have written of yourself as looking out «from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time». Why uninhabited?
Well, for the same reason that a desert island is a more deserving island than one with a footprint initialing its beach. Moreover, «uninhabited» makes direct sense here, since most of my former companions are gone.
Does the aristocrat in you despise the fictionist, or is it only English aristocrats who feel queasy about men of letters?
Pushkin, professional poet and Russian nobleman, used to shock the beau monde by declaring that he wrote for his own pleasure but published for the sake of money. I do likewise, but have never shocked anybody — except, perhaps, a former publisher of mine who used to counter my indignant requests by saying that I'm much too good a writer to need extravagant advances.
Is the capacity to recall and to celebrate patches of past time a special quality of yours?
No, I don't think so. I could name many writers, English, Russian, and French, who have done it at least as well as I have. Funny, I notice that when mentioning my three tongues, I list them in that order because it is the best rhythmic arrangement: either dactylic, with one syllable skipped, «English, Russian, and French», or anapestic, «English, Russian, and French». Little lesson in prosody.
Have you ever experienced hallucinations or heard voices or had visions, and if so, have they been illuminating?
When about to fall asleep after a good deal of writing or reading, I often enjoy, if that is the right word, what some drug addicts experience — a continuous series of extraordinary bright, fluidly changing pictures. Their type is different nightly, but on a given night it remains the same: one night it may be a banal kaleidoscope of endlessly recombined and reshaped stained-window designs; next time, comes a subhuman or superhuman face with a formidably growing blue eye; or, and this is the most striking type, I see in realistic detail a long-dead friend turning toward me and melting into another remembered figure against the black velvet of my eyelids' inner side. As to voices, I have described in Speak, Memory the snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my pillowed ear. Reportson those enigmatic phenomena can be found in the case histories collected by psychiatrists but no satisfying interpretation has come my way. Freudians, keep out, please.
Your best memories seem to be golden days, with great green trees, splashes of sun on venerable stone, harmony — a world in which people were going to live for ever. Do you manipulate the past in order to combat life at its less harmonious?
My existence has always remained as harmonious and green as it was throughout the span dealt with in my memoirs, that is from 1903 to 1940. The emotions of my Russian childhood have been replaced by new excitements, by new mountains explored in search of new butterflies, by a cloudless family life, and by the monstrous delights of novelistic invention.
Is writing your novels pleasure or drudgery?
Pleasure and agony while composing the book in my mind; harrowing irritation when struggling with my tools and viscera — the pencil that needs resharpening, the card that has to be rewritten, the bladder that has to be drained, the word that I always misspell and always have to look up. Then the labor of reading the typescript prepared by a secretary, the correction of my major mistakes and her minor ones, transferring corrections to other copies, misplacing pages, trying to remember something that had to be crossed out or inserted. Repeating the process when proof reading. Unpacking the radiant beautiful plump advance copy, opening it — and discovering a stupid oversight committed by me, allowed by me to survive. After a month or so I get used to the book's final stage, to its having been weaned from my brain. I now regard it with a kind of amused tenderness as a man regards not his son, but the young wife of his son.
You say you are not interested in what critics say, yet you got very angry with Edmund Wilson once for commenting on you, and let off some heavy field guns at him, not to say multiple rockets. You must have cared.
I never retaliate when my works of art are concerned. There the arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my «self-assurance». But I do reach for my heaviest dictionary when my scholarship is questioned, as was the case with my old friend Edmund Wilson, and I do get annoyed when people I never met impinge on my privacy with false and vulgar assumptions — as for example Mr. Updike, who in an otherwise clever article absurdly suggests that my fictional character, bitchy and lewd Ada, is, I Quote, «in a dimension or two, Nabokov's wife». I might add that I collect clippings — for information and entertainment.
Do you see yourself sometimes as Nabokov the writer isolated from others, flaming sword to scourge them, an entertainer, a drudge, a genius, which?
The word «genius» is passed around rather generously, isnI it? At least in English, because its Russian counterpart, geniy, is a term brimming with a sort of throaty awe and is used only in the case of a very small number of writers, Shakespeare, Milton, Pushkin, Tolstoy, To such deeply beloved authors as Turgenev and Chekhov Russians assign the thinner term, talant, talent, not genius. It is a bizarre example of semantic discrepancy — the same word being more substantial in one language than in another. Although my Russian and my English are practically coeval, I still feel appalled and puzzled at seeing «genius» applied to any important storyteller, such as Maupassant or Maugham. Genius still means to me, in my Russian fastidiousness and pride of phrase, a unique, dazzling gift, the genius of James Joyce, not the talent of Henry James. I'm afraid I have lost the thread of my reply to your question. What is your next one, please?
Can political ideas solve any of the big problems of an individual's life?
I have always marveled at the neatness of such solutions: ardent Stalinists transforming themselves into harmless Socialists, Socialists finding a sunset harbor in Conservatism, and so forth. I suppose this must be rather like religious conversion, of which I know very little. I can only explain God's popularity by an atheist's panic.
Why do you say you dislike «serious» writers? Don't you just mean «had» artists?
Let me put it this way. By inclination and intent I avoid squandering my art on the illustrated catalogues of solemn notions and serious opinions; and I dislike their pervasive presence in the works of others. What ideas can be traced in my novels belong to my creatures therein and may be deliberately flawed. In my memoirs, quotable ideas are merely passing visions, suggestions, mirages of the mind. They lose their colors or explode like football fish when lifted out of the context of their tropical sea.
Great writers have had strong political and sociological preferences or ideas. Tolstoy was one. Does the presence of such ideas in his work make you think the less of him?
1 go by books, not by authors. 1 consider Anna Karentn the supreme masterpiece of nineteenthcentury literature; it is closely followed by The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I detest Resurrection and The Kreuzer Sonata. Tolstoy's publicistic forays are unreadable. War and Peace, though a little too long, is a rollicking historical novel written for that amorphic and limp creature known as «the general reader», and more specifically for the young. In terms of artistic structurc it docs not satisfy me. I derive no pleasure from its cumbersome message, from the didactic interludes, from the artificial coincidences, with cool Prince Andrey turning up to witness this or that historical moment, this or that footnote in the sources used often uncritically by the author.