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pedantically arguing with the instructor who has to admit Pnin
is right. A combination of chance circumstances in 1956
prevented me from actually writing that chapter, then other
events intervened, and it is only a mummy now.
In a television interview last year, you singled out
Bely's St. Petersburg, along with works by Joyce, Kafka,
and Proust, as one of the greatest achievements in
twentieth-century prose (an endorsement, by the way, which has
prompted Grove Press to reissue St. Petersburg, with
your statement across the front cover). I greatly admire this
novel but, unhappily enough, it is relatively unknown in
America. What are its qualities which you most admire? Bely and
Joyce are sometimes compared; is the comparison a just one?
Petersburg is a splendid fantasy, but this is a
question I plan to answer elsewhere. There does exist some
resemblance in manner between Petersburg and certain
passages in Ulysses.
Although I've never seen it discussed as such, the
Ableukhov father-son relationship to me constitutes a doubling,
making Petersburg one of the most interesting and
fantastic permutations of the Doppelganger theme. Since
this kind of doubling (if you would agree it is one) is surely
the kind you'd find more congenial, say, than the use Mann
makes of the motif in Death in Venice, would you comment
on ifs implications?
Those murky matters have no importance to me as a writer.
Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist. Incidentally, your
handwriting is very like mine.
Bely lived in Berlin in 1922-23. Did you know him
there? You and Joyce lived in Paris at the sane time; did you
ever meet him?
Once, in 1921 or 1922, at a Berlin restaurant where I was
dining with two girls. I happened to be sitting back to back
with Andrey Bely who was dining with another writer, Aleksey
Tolstoy, at the table behind me. Both writers were at the time
frankly pro-Soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia),
and a White Russian, which I still am in that particular sense,
would certainly not wish to speak to a bolsbevizan
(fellow traveler). I was acquainted with Aleksey Tolstoy but of
course ignored him. As to Joyce, I saw him a few times in Paris
in the late thirties. Paul and Lucy Leon, close friends of his,
were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a
French lecture I had been asked to deliver on ! Pushkin under
the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the
Nouvelle revue frangaise). I had happened to replace at
the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that
winter, author of a best-selling novel, I remember its title,
La Rue du Chat qui Peche, but not the lady's name. A
number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden
illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might
result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round
up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The
house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had
occurred among the lady's fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me
for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the
froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I
started to speak. A source of unforgettable consolation!
was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons' followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian "mead," and everybody gave him a different answer. In this connection, there is a marvelous howler in the standard English version of The Brothers Karamazov: a supper table at Zosima's abode is described with the translator hilariously misreading "Medoc" (in Russian transliteration in the original text), a French wine greatly appreciated in Russia, as medok,!
the diminutive of myod (mead). It would have been fun to recall that I spoke of this to Joyce but unfortunately I came across this incarnation of The Karamazovs some ten years later.
You mentioned Aleksey Tolstoy a moment ago. Would you
say something about him?
He was a writer of some talent and has two or three
science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. But I
wouldn't care to categorize writers, the only category being
originality and talent. After all, if we start sticking group
labels, we'll have to put The Tempestinthe SF category,
and of course thousands of other valuable works.
Tolstoy was initially an anti-Bolshevik, and his early
work precedes the Revolution. Are there any writers totally of
the Soviet period whom you admire?
There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose
certain plots and certain characters they could get away with
it in the political sense, in other words, they wouldn't be
told what to write and how to finish the novel. llf and Petrov,
two wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a
rascal adventurer as protagonist, whatever they wrote about his
adventures could not be criticized from a political point of
view, since a perfect rascal or a madman or a delinquent or any
person who was outside Soviet society-- in other words, any
picaresque character-- could not be accused either of being a
bad Communist or not being a good Communist. Thus Ilf and
Petrov, Zoshchenko, and Olesha managed to publish some
absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete
independence, since these charac! ters, plots, and themes could
not be treated as political ones. Until the early thirties they
managed to get away with it. The poets had a parallel system.
They thought, and they were right at first, that if they stuck
to the garden-- to pure poetry, to lyrical imitations, say, of
gypsy songs, such as llya. Selvinski's-- that then they were
safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing, as if the "I"
of the poem were a perfect imbecile, crooning in a dream,
distorting words, playing with words as a half-insane person
would. All these people were enormously gifted but the regime
finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one,
in nameless camps.
By my loose approximation, there remain three novels,
some fifty stories, and six plays still in Russian. Are there
any plans to translate these? What o/The Exploit,
written during what seems to have been your most fecund
period as a "Russian writer"-- would you tell us something,
however briefly, about this book?
Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was
thirty years ago but some of it will probably be published in
English by and by. My son is now working on the translation of
The Exploit. It is the story of a Russian expatriate, a
romantic young man of my set and time, a lover of adventure for
adventure's sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of
unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it
decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then
cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear,
the glory and rapture of that victory.
/ understand that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
was written in English in 1938. It is very dramatic to think
of you bidding farewell to one language and embarking on a new
life in another in this way. Why did you decide to write in
English at this time, since you obviously could not have known
for certain you would emigrate two years later? How much more
writing in Russian did you do between Sebastian Knight
and your emigration to America in 1940, and once there, did
you ever compose in Russian again?
Oh, I did know I would eventually land in America. I
switched to English after convincing myself on the strength of
my translation of Despair that I could use English as a
wistful standby for Russian. I still feel the pangs of that
substitution, they have not been allayed by the Russian poems
(my best) that I wrote in New York, or the 1954 Russian version
of Speak, Memory, or even my recent two-years-long work
on the Russian translation of Lolita, which will be
published in 1967. I wrote Sebastian Knight in Paris,
1938. We had that year a charming flat on rue Saigon, between
the Etoile and the Bois. It consisted of a huge handsome room
(which served as parlor, bedroom, and nursery) with a small
kitchen on one side and a large sunny bathroom on the ot! her.
This apartment had been some bachelor's delight but was not
meant to accommodate a family of three. Evening guests had to
be entertained in the kitchen so as not to interfere with my
future translator's sleep. And the bathroom doubled as my
study. Here is the Doppelganger theme for you.
Do you remember any of those "evening guests"?
I remember Vladislav Hodasevich, the greatest poet of his
time, removing his dentures to eat in comfort, just as a
grandee would do in the past.
Many people are surprised to learn that you have
written seven plays, which is strange, since your novels are
filled with "theatrical" effects that are patently
unnovelistic. Is it just to say that your frequent allusions to
Shakespeare are more than a matter of playful or respectful
homage? What do you think of the drama as a form? What are the
characteristics of Shakespeare's plays which you find most
congenial to your own esthetic?
The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest
the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure
of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that
Is the thing, not the play. My most ambitious venture in the
domain of drama is a huge screenplay based on Lolita. I
wrote it for Kubrick who used only bits and shadows of it for
his otherwise excellent film.
When I was your student, you never mentioned the
Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce's Ulysses. But you
did supply "special information" in introducing many of the
masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses, the
arrangement of streets and lodgings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, a diagram of the interior of a railway coach on the
Moscow-Petersburg express in Anna Karenin, and a floor
plan of the Sarnsa apartment in The Metamorphosis and an
entomological drawing of Gregor. Would you be able to suggest
some equivalent for your own readers?
Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the
harping on those essentially easy and vulgar "Homeric
parallelisms" would only distract one's attention from the real
beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter
titles which already were "explaining" the book to non-readers.
In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of
three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the
butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub
will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.
Incidentally, one of my colleagues came into my office
recently with the breathless news that Gregor is not a
cockroach (be had read an article to that effect). I told him
I've known that for 12 years, and took out my notes to show him
my drawing from what was for one day only Entomology 312. What
kind of beetle, by the way, was Gregor?
It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths,
and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room
was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could
have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung
beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths.
How are you progressing in your novel. The Texture
of Time? Since the donnees for some of your novels
seem to be present, however fleetingly, in earlier novels,
would it be fair to suggest that Chapter Fourteen of Bend
Sinister contains the germ for your latest venture?
In a way, yes; but my Texture of Time, now almost
half-ready, is only the central rose-web of a much ampler and
richer novel, entitled Ada, about passionate, hopeless,
rapturous sunset love, with swallows darting beyond the stained
window and that radiant shiver . . .
Speaking of donnees; At the end o/Pale Fire,
Kinbote says of Shade and bis poem, "I even suggested to him
a good title-- the title of the book in me whose pages he was
to cut: Solus Rex; instead of which I saw Pale Fire,
which meant to me nothing."' In 1940 Sovremennye Zapiski
published a long section from your "unfinished" novel.
Solus Rex, under that title. Does Pale Fire represent
the "cutting" of its pages? What is the relationship between
it, the other untranslat! ed fragment from Solus Rex
("Ultima Thule,'" published in Novyy Journal, New
York, 1942) and Pale Fire?
My Solus Rex might have disappointed Kinbote less
than Shade's poem. The two countries, that of the Lone King and
the Zembla land, belong to the same biological zone. Their
subarctic bogs have much the same butterflies and berries. A
sad and distant kingdom seems to have haunted my poetry and
fiction since the twenties. It is not associated with my
personal past. Unlike Northern Russia, both Zembla and Ultima
Thule are mountainous, and their languages are of a phony
Scandinavian type. If a cruel prankster kidnapped Kinbote and
placed him, blindfolded, in the Ultima Thule countryside,
Kinbote would not know-- at least not immediately-- by the sap
smells and bird calls that he was not back in Zembla, but he
would be tolerably sure that he was not on the banks of the
Neva.
This may be like asking a father to publicly declare
which of his children is most loved, but do you have one novel
towards which you feel the most affection, which you esteem
over all others?
The most affection, Lolita, the greatest esteem,
Priglashenie na Kazn '.
And as a closing question, sir, may I return to Pale
Fire: where, please, are the crown jewels bidden?
In the ruins, sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana
(q.v.); but do not tell it to the Russians.
is right. A combination of chance circumstances in 1956
prevented me from actually writing that chapter, then other
events intervened, and it is only a mummy now.
In a television interview last year, you singled out
Bely's St. Petersburg, along with works by Joyce, Kafka,
and Proust, as one of the greatest achievements in
twentieth-century prose (an endorsement, by the way, which has
prompted Grove Press to reissue St. Petersburg, with
your statement across the front cover). I greatly admire this
novel but, unhappily enough, it is relatively unknown in
America. What are its qualities which you most admire? Bely and
Joyce are sometimes compared; is the comparison a just one?
Petersburg is a splendid fantasy, but this is a
question I plan to answer elsewhere. There does exist some
resemblance in manner between Petersburg and certain
passages in Ulysses.
Although I've never seen it discussed as such, the
Ableukhov father-son relationship to me constitutes a doubling,
making Petersburg one of the most interesting and
fantastic permutations of the Doppelganger theme. Since
this kind of doubling (if you would agree it is one) is surely
the kind you'd find more congenial, say, than the use Mann
makes of the motif in Death in Venice, would you comment
on ifs implications?
Those murky matters have no importance to me as a writer.
Philosophically, I am an indivisible monist. Incidentally, your
handwriting is very like mine.
Bely lived in Berlin in 1922-23. Did you know him
there? You and Joyce lived in Paris at the sane time; did you
ever meet him?
Once, in 1921 or 1922, at a Berlin restaurant where I was
dining with two girls. I happened to be sitting back to back
with Andrey Bely who was dining with another writer, Aleksey
Tolstoy, at the table behind me. Both writers were at the time
frankly pro-Soviet (and on the point of returning to Russia),
and a White Russian, which I still am in that particular sense,
would certainly not wish to speak to a bolsbevizan
(fellow traveler). I was acquainted with Aleksey Tolstoy but of
course ignored him. As to Joyce, I saw him a few times in Paris
in the late thirties. Paul and Lucy Leon, close friends of his,
were also old friends of mine. One night they brought him to a
French lecture I had been asked to deliver on ! Pushkin under
the auspices of Gabriel Marcel (it was later published in the
Nouvelle revue frangaise). I had happened to replace at
the very last moment a Hungarian woman writer, very famous that
winter, author of a best-selling novel, I remember its title,
La Rue du Chat qui Peche, but not the lady's name. A
number of personal friends of mine, fearing that the sudden
illness of the lady and a sudden discourse on Pushkin might
result in a suddenly empty house, had done their best to round
up the kind of audience they knew I would like to have. The
house had, however, a pied aspect since some confusion had
occurred among the lady's fans. The Hungarian consul mistook me
for her husband and, as I entered, dashed towards me with the
froth of condolence on his lips. Some people left as soon as I
started to speak. A source of unforgettable consolation!
was the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team. Another time my wife and I had dinner with him at the Leons' followed by a long friendly evening of talk. I do not recall one word of it but my wife remembers that Joyce asked about the exact ingredients of myod, the Russian "mead," and everybody gave him a different answer. In this connection, there is a marvelous howler in the standard English version of The Brothers Karamazov: a supper table at Zosima's abode is described with the translator hilariously misreading "Medoc" (in Russian transliteration in the original text), a French wine greatly appreciated in Russia, as medok,!
the diminutive of myod (mead). It would have been fun to recall that I spoke of this to Joyce but unfortunately I came across this incarnation of The Karamazovs some ten years later.
You mentioned Aleksey Tolstoy a moment ago. Would you
say something about him?
He was a writer of some talent and has two or three
science fiction stories or novels which are memorable. But I
wouldn't care to categorize writers, the only category being
originality and talent. After all, if we start sticking group
labels, we'll have to put The Tempestinthe SF category,
and of course thousands of other valuable works.
Tolstoy was initially an anti-Bolshevik, and his early
work precedes the Revolution. Are there any writers totally of
the Soviet period whom you admire?
There were a few writers who discovered that if they chose
certain plots and certain characters they could get away with
it in the political sense, in other words, they wouldn't be
told what to write and how to finish the novel. llf and Petrov,
two wonderfully gifted writers, decided that if they had a
rascal adventurer as protagonist, whatever they wrote about his
adventures could not be criticized from a political point of
view, since a perfect rascal or a madman or a delinquent or any
person who was outside Soviet society-- in other words, any
picaresque character-- could not be accused either of being a
bad Communist or not being a good Communist. Thus Ilf and
Petrov, Zoshchenko, and Olesha managed to publish some
absolutely first-rate fiction under that standard of complete
independence, since these charac! ters, plots, and themes could
not be treated as political ones. Until the early thirties they
managed to get away with it. The poets had a parallel system.
They thought, and they were right at first, that if they stuck
to the garden-- to pure poetry, to lyrical imitations, say, of
gypsy songs, such as llya. Selvinski's-- that then they were
safe. Zabolotski found a third method of writing, as if the "I"
of the poem were a perfect imbecile, crooning in a dream,
distorting words, playing with words as a half-insane person
would. All these people were enormously gifted but the regime
finally caught up with them and they disappeared, one by one,
in nameless camps.
By my loose approximation, there remain three novels,
some fifty stories, and six plays still in Russian. Are there
any plans to translate these? What o/The Exploit,
written during what seems to have been your most fecund
period as a "Russian writer"-- would you tell us something,
however briefly, about this book?
Not all of that stuff is as good as I thought it was
thirty years ago but some of it will probably be published in
English by and by. My son is now working on the translation of
The Exploit. It is the story of a Russian expatriate, a
romantic young man of my set and time, a lover of adventure for
adventure's sake, proud flaunter of peril, climber of
unnecessary mountains, who merely for the pure thrill of it
decides one day to cross illegally into Soviet Russia, and then
cross back to exile. Its main theme is the overcoming of fear,
the glory and rapture of that victory.
/ understand that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
was written in English in 1938. It is very dramatic to think
of you bidding farewell to one language and embarking on a new
life in another in this way. Why did you decide to write in
English at this time, since you obviously could not have known
for certain you would emigrate two years later? How much more
writing in Russian did you do between Sebastian Knight
and your emigration to America in 1940, and once there, did
you ever compose in Russian again?
Oh, I did know I would eventually land in America. I
switched to English after convincing myself on the strength of
my translation of Despair that I could use English as a
wistful standby for Russian. I still feel the pangs of that
substitution, they have not been allayed by the Russian poems
(my best) that I wrote in New York, or the 1954 Russian version
of Speak, Memory, or even my recent two-years-long work
on the Russian translation of Lolita, which will be
published in 1967. I wrote Sebastian Knight in Paris,
1938. We had that year a charming flat on rue Saigon, between
the Etoile and the Bois. It consisted of a huge handsome room
(which served as parlor, bedroom, and nursery) with a small
kitchen on one side and a large sunny bathroom on the ot! her.
This apartment had been some bachelor's delight but was not
meant to accommodate a family of three. Evening guests had to
be entertained in the kitchen so as not to interfere with my
future translator's sleep. And the bathroom doubled as my
study. Here is the Doppelganger theme for you.
Do you remember any of those "evening guests"?
I remember Vladislav Hodasevich, the greatest poet of his
time, removing his dentures to eat in comfort, just as a
grandee would do in the past.
Many people are surprised to learn that you have
written seven plays, which is strange, since your novels are
filled with "theatrical" effects that are patently
unnovelistic. Is it just to say that your frequent allusions to
Shakespeare are more than a matter of playful or respectful
homage? What do you think of the drama as a form? What are the
characteristics of Shakespeare's plays which you find most
congenial to your own esthetic?
The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest
the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure
of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that
Is the thing, not the play. My most ambitious venture in the
domain of drama is a huge screenplay based on Lolita. I
wrote it for Kubrick who used only bits and shadows of it for
his otherwise excellent film.
When I was your student, you never mentioned the
Homeric parallels in discussing Joyce's Ulysses. But you
did supply "special information" in introducing many of the
masterpieces: a map of Dublin for Ulysses, the
arrangement of streets and lodgings in Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde, a diagram of the interior of a railway coach on the
Moscow-Petersburg express in Anna Karenin, and a floor
plan of the Sarnsa apartment in The Metamorphosis and an
entomological drawing of Gregor. Would you be able to suggest
some equivalent for your own readers?
Joyce himself very soon realized with dismay that the
harping on those essentially easy and vulgar "Homeric
parallelisms" would only distract one's attention from the real
beauty of his book. He soon dropped these pretentious chapter
titles which already were "explaining" the book to non-readers.
In my lectures I tried to give factual data only. A map of
three country estates with a winding river and a figure of the
butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for a cartographic cherub
will be the endpaper in my revised edition of Speak, Memory.
Incidentally, one of my colleagues came into my office
recently with the breathless news that Gregor is not a
cockroach (be had read an article to that effect). I told him
I've known that for 12 years, and took out my notes to show him
my drawing from what was for one day only Entomology 312. What
kind of beetle, by the way, was Gregor?
It was a domed beetle, a scarab beetle with wing-sheaths,
and neither Gregor nor his maker realized that when the room
was being made by the maid, and the window was open, he could
have flown out and escaped and joined the other happy dung
beetles rolling the dung balls on rural paths.
How are you progressing in your novel. The Texture
of Time? Since the donnees for some of your novels
seem to be present, however fleetingly, in earlier novels,
would it be fair to suggest that Chapter Fourteen of Bend
Sinister contains the germ for your latest venture?
In a way, yes; but my Texture of Time, now almost
half-ready, is only the central rose-web of a much ampler and
richer novel, entitled Ada, about passionate, hopeless,
rapturous sunset love, with swallows darting beyond the stained
window and that radiant shiver . . .
Speaking of donnees; At the end o/Pale Fire,
Kinbote says of Shade and bis poem, "I even suggested to him
a good title-- the title of the book in me whose pages he was
to cut: Solus Rex; instead of which I saw Pale Fire,
which meant to me nothing."' In 1940 Sovremennye Zapiski
published a long section from your "unfinished" novel.
Solus Rex, under that title. Does Pale Fire represent
the "cutting" of its pages? What is the relationship between
it, the other untranslat! ed fragment from Solus Rex
("Ultima Thule,'" published in Novyy Journal, New
York, 1942) and Pale Fire?
My Solus Rex might have disappointed Kinbote less
than Shade's poem. The two countries, that of the Lone King and
the Zembla land, belong to the same biological zone. Their
subarctic bogs have much the same butterflies and berries. A
sad and distant kingdom seems to have haunted my poetry and
fiction since the twenties. It is not associated with my
personal past. Unlike Northern Russia, both Zembla and Ultima
Thule are mountainous, and their languages are of a phony
Scandinavian type. If a cruel prankster kidnapped Kinbote and
placed him, blindfolded, in the Ultima Thule countryside,
Kinbote would not know-- at least not immediately-- by the sap
smells and bird calls that he was not back in Zembla, but he
would be tolerably sure that he was not on the banks of the
Neva.
This may be like asking a father to publicly declare
which of his children is most loved, but do you have one novel
towards which you feel the most affection, which you esteem
over all others?
The most affection, Lolita, the greatest esteem,
Priglashenie na Kazn '.
And as a closing question, sir, may I return to Pale
Fire: where, please, are the crown jewels bidden?
In the ruins, sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana
(q.v.); but do not tell it to the Russians.