15
During a visit in the last week of August, 1970, Alfred Appel interviewed me again. The result was printed, from our careful jottings, in the spring, 1971, issue of Novel, A Forum on Fiction, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
In the twelve years since the American publication of Lolita, you've published twenty-two or so books — new American or Antiterran novels, old Russian works in English, Lolita in Russian — giving one the impression that, as someone has said — John Updike, I think — your oeuvre is growing at both ends. Now that your first novel has appeared (Mashenka, 1926), it seems appropriate that, as we sail into the future, even earlier works should adhere to this elegant formula and make their quantum leap into English.
Yes, my forthcoming Poems and Problems [McGrawHill] will offer several examples of the verse of my early youth, including «The Rain Has Flown», which was composed in the park of our country place, Vyra, in May 1917, the last spring my family was to live there. This «new» volume consists of three sections: a selection of thirty-six Russian poems, presented in the original and in translation; fourteen poems which I wrote directly in English, after 1940 and my arrival in America (all of which were published in The New Yorker), and eighteen chess problems, all but two of which were composed in recent years (the chess manuscripts of the 19401960 period have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are nut worth printing). These Russian poems constitute no more than one percent of the mass of verse which I exuded with monstrous regularity during my youth.
Do the components of that monstrous mass fall into any discernible periods or stages of development?
What can be called rather grandly my European period of verse-making seems to show several distinctive stages: an initial one of passionate and commonplace love verse (not represented in Poems and Problems); a period reflecting utter distrust of the so-called October Revolution; a period (reaching well into the nineteen-twenties) of a kind of private curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and developing Byzantine imagery (this has been mistaken by some readers for an interest in «religion» which, beyond literary stylization, never meant anything to me); a period lasting another decade or so during which I set myself to illustrate the principle of making a short poem contain a plot and tell a story (this in a way expressed my impatience with the dreary drone of the anemic «Paris School» of emigre poetry); and finally, in the late thirties, and especially in the following decades, a sudden liberation from self-imposed shackles, resulting both in a sparser output and in a belatedly discovered robust style. Selecting poems for this volume proved less difficult than translating them.
Why are you including the chess problems with the poems?
Because problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worth-while art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.
Most of your work in Russian [1920 — 1940] appeared under the name of «Sirin». Why did you choose that pseudonym?
In modern times sirin is one of the popular Russian names of the Snowy Owl, the terror of tundra rodents, and is also applied to the handsome Hawk Owl, but in old Russian mythology it is a multicolored bird, with a woman's face and bust, no doubt identical with the «siren», a Greek deity, transporter of souls and teaser of sailors. In 1920, when casting about for a pseudonym and settling for that fabulous fowl, I still had not shaken off the false glamour of Byzantine imagery that attracted young Russian poets of the Blokian era. Incidentally, circa 1910 there had appeared literary collections under the editorial title of Sirin devoted to the so-called «symbolist» movement, and I remember how tickled I was to discover in 1952 when browsing in the Houghton Library at Harvard that its catalogue listed me as actively publishing Blok, Bely, and Bryusov at the age of ten.
An arresting phantasmagoric image of Russian emigre life in Germany is that of film extras playing themselves, as it were, as do Ganin in Mashenka and those characters in your story «The Assistant Producer», whose «only hope and profession was their past — that is, a set of totally unreal people», who, you write, were hired «to represent 'real' audiences in pictures. The dovetailing of one phantasm into another produced upon a sensitive person the impression of living in a Hall of Mirrors, or rather a prison of mirrors, and not even knowing which was the glass and which was yourself». Did Sirin ever do that sort of work?
Yes, I have been a tuxedoed extra as Ganin had been and that passage in Mashenka, retitled Mary in the 1970 translation, is a rather raw bit of «real life». I don't remember the names of those films.
Did you have much to do with film people in Berlin?
Laughter in the Dark [1932] suggests a familiarity.
In the middle thirties a German actor whose name was Fritz Kortner, a most famous and gifted artist of his day, wanted to make a film of Camera Obscura [Englished as Laughter in the Dark]. I went to London to see him, nothing came of it, but a few years later another firm, this one in Paris, bought an option which ended in a blind alley too.
I recall that nothing came of yet another option on Laughter in the Dark when the producer engaged Roger Vadim, ctrca 1960 — Bardot as Margot? — and of course the novel finally reached the nolonger silver screen in 1969, under the direction of Tony Richardson, adapted by Edward Bond, and starring Nicol Williamson and Anna Karina (interesting name, that), the setting changed from old Berlin to Richardson's own mod London. I assume that you saw the movie.
Yes, I did. That name is interesting. In the novel there is a film in which my heroine is given a small part, and I would like my readers to brood over my singular power of prophecy, for the name of the leading lady (Dorianna Karenina) in the picture invented by me in 1931 prefigured that of the actress (Anna Karina) who was to play Margot forty years later in the film Laughter in the Dark, which I viewed at a private screening in Montreux.
Are other works headed for the screen?
Yes, King, Queen, Knave and Ada, though neither is in production yet, Ada will be enormously difficult to do: the problem of having a suggestion of fantasy, continually, but never overdoing it. Bend Sinister was done on West German television, an opera based on Invitation to a Beheading was shown on Danish TV, and my play The Event [1938] appeared on Finnish TV.
The German cinema of the twenties and early thirties produced several masterpieces. Living in Berlin, were you impressed by any of the films of the period? Do you today feel any sense of affinity with directors such as Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg? The former would have been the ideal director for Despair [1934], the latter, who did The Blue Angel, perfect for Laughter in the Dark and King, Queen, Knave [1928], with its world of decor and decadence. And if only F. W. Murnau, who died in 1931, could have directed The Defense [1930], with Emil Jannings as Luzhin!