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
[McGraw-Hill] 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 1940-1960 period
have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are not
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 anйmie "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 worthwhile
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.
/ recall that nothing came of yet another option on
Laughter in the Dark when the producer engaged Roger Vadim,
circa I960-- Bardot as Margot?-- and of course the novel
finally reached the no-longer silver screen in 1969, under the
direction of Tony Richardson, adapted by Edward Bond, and
starring Nicol Wil-liamson and Anna Karma (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!
The names of Sternberg and Lang never meant anything to
me. In Europe I went to the corner cinema about once in a
fortnight and the only kind of picture I liked, and still like,
was and is comedy of the Laurel and Hardy type. I enjoyed
tremendously American comedy-- Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and
Chaplin. My favorites by Chaplin are The Gold Rush
[1925], The Circus [1928], and The Great Dictator
[1940]-- especially the parachute inventor who jumps out of the
window'- and ends in a messy fall which we only see in the
expression on the dictator's face. However, today's Little Man
appeal has somewhat spoiled Chaplin's attraction for me. The
Marx Brothers were wonderful. The opera, the crowded cabin
{A Night at the Opera, 1935], which is pure genius . . .
[Nabokov then lovingly rehearsed the scene in detail,
delighting particularly in the arrival of the manicurist.] I
must have seen that film three times! Laurel and Hardy are
always funny; there are subtle, artistic touches in even their
most mediocre films. Laurel is so wonderfully inept, yet so
very kind. There is a film in which they are at Oxford [A
Chump at Oxford, 1940]. In one scene the two of them are
sitting on a park bench in a labyrinthine garden and the
subsequent happenings conform to the labyrinth. A casual
villain puts his hand through the back of the bench and Laurel,
who is clasping his hands in an idiotic reverie, mistakes the
stranger's hand for one of his own hands, with all kinds of
complications because his own hand is also there. He has to
choose. The choice of a hand.
How many years bas it been since you saw that movie?
Thirty or forty years. [Nabokov then recalled, again in
precise detail, the opening scenes of County Hospital,
1932, in which Stan brings a gift of hardboiled eggs to relieve
the misery of hospitalized Oilie and consumes them himself,
salting them carefully.] More recently, on French TV I saw a
Laurel and Hardy short in which the "dubbers" had the atrocious
taste to have the two men speak fluent French with an English
accent. But I don't even remember if the best Laurel and Hardy
are talkies or not. On the whole, I think what I love about the
silent film is what comes through the mask of the talkies and,
vice versa, talkies are mute in my memory.
Did you only enjoy American films?
No. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [1928] was
superb, and I loved the French films of Renй Clair-- Sous
les Toits de Paris [1929], Le Million [1931], А
Nous la Libertй [1931]-- a new world, a new trend in
cinema.
A brilliant but self-effacing critic and scholar bas
described Invitation to a Beheading {1935-36] as
Zamiatin's We restaged by the Marx Brothers. Is it fair
to say that Invitation to a Beheading is in many ways
akin to the film comedies we've been talking about?
I can't make the comparison between a visual impression
and my scribble on index cards, which I always see first
included quite a number of scenes that I had discarded from the
novel but still preserved in my desk. You mention one of those
scenes in The Annotated Lolita-- Humbert's arrival in
Ramsdale at the charred ruins of the McCoo house. My complete
screenplay of Lolita, all deletions and emendations
restored, will be published by McGraw-Hill in the near future;
I want it out before the musical version.
The musical version?
You look disapproving. It's in the best of hands: Alan Jay
Lemer will do the adaptation and lyrics, John Barry the music,
with settings by Boris Aronson.
I notice that you didn't include W. C. Fields among
your favorites.
For some reason his films did not play in Europe and I
never saw any in the States, either.
Well, Fields' comedy is more eminently American
than the others, less exportable, I suppose. To move from
movies to stills, I've noticed that photography is seen
negatively (no pun intended, no pun!) in books such as
Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading. Are you making
a by now traditional distinction between mechanical process and
artistic inspiration?
No, I do not make that distinction. The mechanical process
can exist in a ludicrous daub, and artistic inspiration can be
found in a photographer's choice of landscape and in his manner
of seeing it.
You once told me that you were born a landscape
painter. Which artists have meant the most to you?
Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters.
And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings
alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent
enthusiasms.
The process of reading and rereading your novels is a
kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic
trompe l'oeil, and in several novels ("Pale Fire
and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil
painting. Would you say something about the pleasures
inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?
A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that
the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his
squiggles to йpater Philistines does not have the talent
or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a
nail.
What about Cubistic callage? That's a kind of
trompe l'oeil.
No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from
all art, be it letters or the little music I know.
The art teacher in Pnin says that Picasso is
supreme, despite his commercial foibles. Kinbote in Pale
Fire likes him too, gracing his rented house with "a beloved
early Picasso: earth boy leading rain-cloud horse, " and your
Kinbotish questioner recalls a reproduction of Picasso's
Chandelier, pot et casserole йmaillйe on your writing desk,
1966 (the same one Kinbote had up on his wall during his
reign as King Charles). Which aspects of Picasso do you admire?
The graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet
colors. But then, starting with Guernica, his production
leaves me indifferent. The aspects of Picasso that I
emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I
also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist I do admire very
much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures,
is Balthus.
How are you progressing with your book on the butterfly
in art?
I am still working, at my own pace, on an illustrated
Butterflies in Art work, from Egyptian antiquity to the
Renaissance. It is a purely scientific pursuit. I find an
entomological thrill in tracking down and identifying the
butterflies represented by old painters. Only recognizable
portraits interest me. Some of the problems that might be
solved are: were certain species as common in ancient times as
they are today? Can the minutiae of evolutionary change be
discerned in the pattern of a five-hundred-year-old wing? One
simple conclusion I have come to is that no matter how precise
an Old Master's brush can be it cannot vie in artistic magic
with some of the colored plates drawn by the illustrators of
certain scientific works in the nineteenth century. An Old
Master did not know that in different species the venation is
different and never bothered to examine its structure. It is
like painting a hand without knowing anything about its bones
or indeed without suspecting it has any. Certain impressionists
cannot afford to wear glasses. Only myopia condones the blurry
generalizations of ignorance. In high art and pure science
detail is everything.
Who are some of the artists who rendered butterflies?
Might they not attribute more symbolism to the insect than you
do?
Among the many Old Masters who depicted butterflies
(obviously netted, or more exactly capped, by their apprentices
in the nearest garden) were Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516), Jan
Brueghel (1568-1625), Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Paolo Porpora
(1617-1673), Daniel Seghers (1590-1661), and many others. The
insect depicted is either part of a still-life (flowers or
fruit) arrangement, or more strikingly a live detail in a
conventional religious picture (Durer, Francesco di Gentile,
etc.). That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something
(e.g.. Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.
In 1968 you told me you hoped to travel to various
European museums for research purposes. Have you been doing
that?
Yes, that's one reason we've been spending so much time in
Italy, and in the future will be traveling to Paris and the
Louvre, and to the Dutch museums. We've been to small towns in
Italy, and to Florence, Venice, Rome, Milano, Naples, and
Pompeii, where we found a very badly drawn butterfly, long and
thin, like a Mayfly. There are certain obstacles: still-lifes
are not very popular today, they are gap-fillers, generally
hanging in dark places or high up. A ladder may be necessary, a
flashlight, a magnifying glass! My object is to identify such a
picture if there are butterflies in it (often it's only
"Anonymous" or "School of -- "), and get an efficient person to
take a photograph. Since I don't find many of those pictures in
the regular display rooms I try to find the curator because
some pictures may turn up in their stacks. It takes so much
time: I tramped through the Vatican Museum in Rome and found
only one butterfly, a Zebra Swallowtail, in a quite
conventional Madonna and Child by Gentile, as realistic
as though it were painted yesterday. Such paintings may throw
light on the time taken for evolution; one thousand years could
show some little change in trend. It's an almost endless
pursuit, but if I could manage to collect at least one hundred
of these things I would publish reproductions of those
particular paintings w^hich include butterflies, and enlarge
parts of the picture with the butterfly in life-size.
Curiously, the Red Admirable is the most popular; I've
collected twenty examples.
That particular butterfly appears frequently in your
own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on
John Shade's arm the minute before he is killed, the insect
appears in King, Queen Knave just after you've withdrawn
the authorial omniscience-- killing the characters, so to
speak-- and in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, you
recall having seen in a Paris park, just
before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a
leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of
Vanessa atalanta?
Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in
my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to
Northern Russia, where it was called "The Butterfly of Doom"
because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar
Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the
underside of its two hind wings seem to read "1881." The Red
Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many other
migratory butterflies.
The painters you admire are for the most part realists,
yet it would not be altogether fair to call you a "realist. "
Should one find this paradoxical? Or does the problem derive
from nomenclature? The problem derives from pigeonholing.
Your youngmanhood coincides with the experimental
decade in Russian painting. Did you follow these developments
closely at the time, and what were (are) your feelings about,
say, Malevich, Kandinsky, or, to choose a more representational
artist, Chagall?
I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my
boyhood-- Sornov, Benois (Peter Ustinov's uncle, you know),
Vrubel, Dobuzhinski, etc. Malevich and Kandinsky mean nothing
to me and I have always found Chagall's stuff intolerably
primitive and grotesque.
Always?
Well, relatively early works such as The Green Jew
and The Promenade have their points, but the frescoes
and windows he now contributes to temples and the Parisian
Opera House plafond are coarse' and unbearable.
What of Tchelitchew, whose Hide and Seek
(another version of Speak, Memory's Find What the Sailor
Has Hidden?^ inpart describes the experience of reading one
of your novels? I know Tchelitchew's work very little.
The latter artist recalls the Ballets Russes. Were you
at all acquainted with that circle, painters as well as dancers
and musicians?
My parents had many acquaintances who painted and danced
and made music. Our house was one of the first where young
Shalyapin sang, and I have foxtrotted with Pavlova in London
half a century ago.
Mr. Hilton Kramer, in a recent article in the
Sunday New York Times (May 3, 1970) writes, "The
accomplishments of at least two living artists who are widely
regarded as among the greatest of their time-- George
Balanchine and Vladimir Nabokov-- are traceable, despite the
changes of venue and language and outlook, to the esthetic
dream that nourished Diaghilev and the artists he gathered
around him in St. Petersburg in the nineties. " This is, I
suppose, what Mary McCarthy meant when she characterized
Pale Fire as a "Faberge gem. " Are these analogies just?
I was never much interested in the ballet. "Faberge gems"
I have dealt with in Speak, Memory (Chapter Five, p.
III). Balanshin, not Balanchine (note the other
mistransliterations). I am at a loss to understand why the
names of most of the people with whom I am paired begin with a
B.
All of which brings to mind another outspoken emigre,
Mr. Stravinsky. Have you had any associations with him?
I know Mr. Stravinski very slightly and have never seen
any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print.
Whom in Parisian literary circles did you meet in the
thirties, in addition to Joyce and the editorial board of
Mesures?
I was on friendly terms with the poet Jules Supervielle.
Him and Jean Pauhan (editor of Nouvelle revue franзaise)
I especially remember.
Did you know Samuel Beckett in Paris?
No, I did not. Beckett is the author of lovely novellas
and wretched plays in the Maeterlinck tradition. The trilogy is
my favorite, expecially Molloy. There is an
extraordinary scene in which he is crawling through a forest by
dragging himself, 'by catching the crook of his walking stick,
his crutch, in the vegetation before him, and pulling himself
up, wearing three overcoats and newspaper underneath them. Then
there are those pebbles, which he is busily transferring from
pocket to pocket. Everything is so gray, so uncomfortable, you
feel that he is in constant bladder discomfort, as old people
sometimes are in their dreams. In this abject condition there
is no doubt some likeness with Kafka's physically uncomfortable
and dingy men. It is that limpness that is so interesting in
Beckett's work.
Beckett has also composed in two tongues, has overseen
the Englishing of his French works. In which language have you
read him?
I've read him in both French and English. Beckett's French
is a schoolmaster's French, a preserved French, but in English
you feel the moisture of verbal association and of the
spreading live roots of his prose.
I have a "theory" that the French translation of
Despair (1939)-- not to mention the books she could have
read in Russian-- exerted a great influence on the so-called
New Novel. In his Preface to Mme. Sarraute's Portrait d'un
inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists,
a rather more intelligent remark-- don't you think?-- than his
comments of eight years before when, reviewing Despair,
he said that as an emigre writer-- landless-- you bad no
subject matter. "But what is the question?" you might ask at
this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New Novel?
Answer: The French New Novel does not really exist apart
from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.
But what do you think of Sartre's remark?
Nothing. I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just
don't know what an "anti-novel" is specifically. Every original
novel is "anti-" because it does not resemble the genre or kind
of its predecessor.
/ know that you admire Robbe-Grillet. What about some
of the others loosely grouped under the "New Novel" tag: Claude
Simon? Michel Butor? and Raymond Queneau, a wonderful writer,
who, while not a member of l'йcole, anticipates it in
several ways?
Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling
masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French
literature. I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and
I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle
revue franзaise. We met once at a party and talked about
another famous fillette. I do not care for Butor. But
Robbe-Grillet is so unlike the others. One cannot, one should
not lump them together. By the way, when we visited
Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had
dressed herself а la gamine in my honor, pretending to
be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when
we met again at a publisher's luncheon in a restaurant. After
pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked,
"Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle? It was very
funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in his
photographs, roared with laughter.
Someone has called the New Novel "the detective story
taken seriously" (there it is again, the influence of the
French edition of Despair). Parodistic or not, you take
it "seriously, " given the number of times you've transmuted
the properties of the genre. Would you say something about why
you've returned to them so often?
My boyhood passion for the Sherlock Holmes and Father
Brown stories may yield some twisted clue.
You once said l hat Robbe-Grillet's shifts of levels
belong to psychology-- "psychology at its best. "Are you
apsychological novelist?
All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists, T
guess. Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is Franz
Hellens, a Belgian, who is very important. Do you know
of him?
No, I don't. When was he active, in which period did he
write? The post-Baudelaire period.
Could you be more specific?
Hellens was a tall, lean, quiet, very dignified man of
whom I saw a good deal in Belgium in the middle thirties when I
was reading my own stuff in lecture halls for large emigre
audiences. La femme partagйe (1929), a novel, I like
particularly, and there are three or four other books that
stand out among the many that Hellens wrote. I tried to get
someone in the States to publish him-- Laughlin, perhaps-- but
nothing came of it. Hellens would get excellent reviews, was
beloved in Belgium, and what friends he had in Paris tried to
brighten and broaden his reputation. It is a shame that he is
read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful
Monsieur Sartre.
What you say about Hellens and Queneau is most
interesting, in part because journalists always find it more
"colorful" to stress your negative remarks about other writers.
Yes, "good copy" is the phrase. As a private person, I
happen to be good-natured, straightforward, plain-spoken, and
intolerant of bogus art. A writer for whom I have the deepest
admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War
of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on
the Moon.
And as final food for thought, sir, what is the meaning of
life? [A rather blurry reproduction of Tolstoy's photographed
face follows this question in the interviewer's typescript].
For solutions see p. 000 (thus says a MS note in the
edited typescript of my Poems and Problems which I have
just received). In other words: Let us wait for the page proof.
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
[McGraw-Hill] 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 1940-1960 period
have been mislaid and the earlier unpublished jottings are not
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 anйmie "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 worthwhile
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.
/ recall that nothing came of yet another option on
Laughter in the Dark when the producer engaged Roger Vadim,
circa I960-- Bardot as Margot?-- and of course the novel
finally reached the no-longer silver screen in 1969, under the
direction of Tony Richardson, adapted by Edward Bond, and
starring Nicol Wil-liamson and Anna Karma (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!
The names of Sternberg and Lang never meant anything to
me. In Europe I went to the corner cinema about once in a
fortnight and the only kind of picture I liked, and still like,
was and is comedy of the Laurel and Hardy type. I enjoyed
tremendously American comedy-- Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and
Chaplin. My favorites by Chaplin are The Gold Rush
[1925], The Circus [1928], and The Great Dictator
[1940]-- especially the parachute inventor who jumps out of the
window'- and ends in a messy fall which we only see in the
expression on the dictator's face. However, today's Little Man
appeal has somewhat spoiled Chaplin's attraction for me. The
Marx Brothers were wonderful. The opera, the crowded cabin
{A Night at the Opera, 1935], which is pure genius . . .
[Nabokov then lovingly rehearsed the scene in detail,
delighting particularly in the arrival of the manicurist.] I
must have seen that film three times! Laurel and Hardy are
always funny; there are subtle, artistic touches in even their
most mediocre films. Laurel is so wonderfully inept, yet so
very kind. There is a film in which they are at Oxford [A
Chump at Oxford, 1940]. In one scene the two of them are
sitting on a park bench in a labyrinthine garden and the
subsequent happenings conform to the labyrinth. A casual
villain puts his hand through the back of the bench and Laurel,
who is clasping his hands in an idiotic reverie, mistakes the
stranger's hand for one of his own hands, with all kinds of
complications because his own hand is also there. He has to
choose. The choice of a hand.
How many years bas it been since you saw that movie?
Thirty or forty years. [Nabokov then recalled, again in
precise detail, the opening scenes of County Hospital,
1932, in which Stan brings a gift of hardboiled eggs to relieve
the misery of hospitalized Oilie and consumes them himself,
salting them carefully.] More recently, on French TV I saw a
Laurel and Hardy short in which the "dubbers" had the atrocious
taste to have the two men speak fluent French with an English
accent. But I don't even remember if the best Laurel and Hardy
are talkies or not. On the whole, I think what I love about the
silent film is what comes through the mask of the talkies and,
vice versa, talkies are mute in my memory.
Did you only enjoy American films?
No. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc [1928] was
superb, and I loved the French films of Renй Clair-- Sous
les Toits de Paris [1929], Le Million [1931], А
Nous la Libertй [1931]-- a new world, a new trend in
cinema.
A brilliant but self-effacing critic and scholar bas
described Invitation to a Beheading {1935-36] as
Zamiatin's We restaged by the Marx Brothers. Is it fair
to say that Invitation to a Beheading is in many ways
akin to the film comedies we've been talking about?
I can't make the comparison between a visual impression
and my scribble on index cards, which I always see first
included quite a number of scenes that I had discarded from the
novel but still preserved in my desk. You mention one of those
scenes in The Annotated Lolita-- Humbert's arrival in
Ramsdale at the charred ruins of the McCoo house. My complete
screenplay of Lolita, all deletions and emendations
restored, will be published by McGraw-Hill in the near future;
I want it out before the musical version.
The musical version?
You look disapproving. It's in the best of hands: Alan Jay
Lemer will do the adaptation and lyrics, John Barry the music,
with settings by Boris Aronson.
I notice that you didn't include W. C. Fields among
your favorites.
For some reason his films did not play in Europe and I
never saw any in the States, either.
Well, Fields' comedy is more eminently American
than the others, less exportable, I suppose. To move from
movies to stills, I've noticed that photography is seen
negatively (no pun intended, no pun!) in books such as
Lolita and Invitation to a Beheading. Are you making
a by now traditional distinction between mechanical process and
artistic inspiration?
No, I do not make that distinction. The mechanical process
can exist in a ludicrous daub, and artistic inspiration can be
found in a photographer's choice of landscape and in his manner
of seeing it.
You once told me that you were born a landscape
painter. Which artists have meant the most to you?
Oh, many. In my youth mostly Russian and French painters.
And English artists such as Turner. The painters and paintings
alluded to in Ada are for the most part more recent
enthusiasms.
The process of reading and rereading your novels is a
kind of game of perception, a confrontation of novelistic
trompe l'oeil, and in several novels ("Pale Fire
and Ada among others) you allude to trompe l'oeil
painting. Would you say something about the pleasures
inherent in the trompe l'oeil school?
A good trompe l'oeil painting proves at least that
the painter is not cheating. The charlatan who sells his
squiggles to йpater Philistines does not have the talent
or the technique to draw a nail, let alone the shadow of a
nail.
What about Cubistic callage? That's a kind of
trompe l'oeil.
No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from
all art, be it letters or the little music I know.
The art teacher in Pnin says that Picasso is
supreme, despite his commercial foibles. Kinbote in Pale
Fire likes him too, gracing his rented house with "a beloved
early Picasso: earth boy leading rain-cloud horse, " and your
Kinbotish questioner recalls a reproduction of Picasso's
Chandelier, pot et casserole йmaillйe on your writing desk,
1966 (the same one Kinbote had up on his wall during his
reign as King Charles). Which aspects of Picasso do you admire?
The graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet
colors. But then, starting with Guernica, his production
leaves me indifferent. The aspects of Picasso that I
emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I
also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist I do admire very
much, though not only because he paints Lolita-like creatures,
is Balthus.
How are you progressing with your book on the butterfly
in art?
I am still working, at my own pace, on an illustrated
Butterflies in Art work, from Egyptian antiquity to the
Renaissance. It is a purely scientific pursuit. I find an
entomological thrill in tracking down and identifying the
butterflies represented by old painters. Only recognizable
portraits interest me. Some of the problems that might be
solved are: were certain species as common in ancient times as
they are today? Can the minutiae of evolutionary change be
discerned in the pattern of a five-hundred-year-old wing? One
simple conclusion I have come to is that no matter how precise
an Old Master's brush can be it cannot vie in artistic magic
with some of the colored plates drawn by the illustrators of
certain scientific works in the nineteenth century. An Old
Master did not know that in different species the venation is
different and never bothered to examine its structure. It is
like painting a hand without knowing anything about its bones
or indeed without suspecting it has any. Certain impressionists
cannot afford to wear glasses. Only myopia condones the blurry
generalizations of ignorance. In high art and pure science
detail is everything.
Who are some of the artists who rendered butterflies?
Might they not attribute more symbolism to the insect than you
do?
Among the many Old Masters who depicted butterflies
(obviously netted, or more exactly capped, by their apprentices
in the nearest garden) were Hieronymous Bosch (1450-1516), Jan
Brueghel (1568-1625), Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Paolo Porpora
(1617-1673), Daniel Seghers (1590-1661), and many others. The
insect depicted is either part of a still-life (flowers or
fruit) arrangement, or more strikingly a live detail in a
conventional religious picture (Durer, Francesco di Gentile,
etc.). That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something
(e.g.. Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.
In 1968 you told me you hoped to travel to various
European museums for research purposes. Have you been doing
that?
Yes, that's one reason we've been spending so much time in
Italy, and in the future will be traveling to Paris and the
Louvre, and to the Dutch museums. We've been to small towns in
Italy, and to Florence, Venice, Rome, Milano, Naples, and
Pompeii, where we found a very badly drawn butterfly, long and
thin, like a Mayfly. There are certain obstacles: still-lifes
are not very popular today, they are gap-fillers, generally
hanging in dark places or high up. A ladder may be necessary, a
flashlight, a magnifying glass! My object is to identify such a
picture if there are butterflies in it (often it's only
"Anonymous" or "School of -- "), and get an efficient person to
take a photograph. Since I don't find many of those pictures in
the regular display rooms I try to find the curator because
some pictures may turn up in their stacks. It takes so much
time: I tramped through the Vatican Museum in Rome and found
only one butterfly, a Zebra Swallowtail, in a quite
conventional Madonna and Child by Gentile, as realistic
as though it were painted yesterday. Such paintings may throw
light on the time taken for evolution; one thousand years could
show some little change in trend. It's an almost endless
pursuit, but if I could manage to collect at least one hundred
of these things I would publish reproductions of those
particular paintings w^hich include butterflies, and enlarge
parts of the picture with the butterfly in life-size.
Curiously, the Red Admirable is the most popular; I've
collected twenty examples.
That particular butterfly appears frequently in your
own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on
John Shade's arm the minute before he is killed, the insect
appears in King, Queen Knave just after you've withdrawn
the authorial omniscience-- killing the characters, so to
speak-- and in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, you
recall having seen in a Paris park, just
before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a
leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of
Vanessa atalanta?
Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in
my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to
Northern Russia, where it was called "The Butterfly of Doom"
because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar
Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the
underside of its two hind wings seem to read "1881." The Red
Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many other
migratory butterflies.
The painters you admire are for the most part realists,
yet it would not be altogether fair to call you a "realist. "
Should one find this paradoxical? Or does the problem derive
from nomenclature? The problem derives from pigeonholing.
Your youngmanhood coincides with the experimental
decade in Russian painting. Did you follow these developments
closely at the time, and what were (are) your feelings about,
say, Malevich, Kandinsky, or, to choose a more representational
artist, Chagall?
I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my
boyhood-- Sornov, Benois (Peter Ustinov's uncle, you know),
Vrubel, Dobuzhinski, etc. Malevich and Kandinsky mean nothing
to me and I have always found Chagall's stuff intolerably
primitive and grotesque.
Always?
Well, relatively early works such as The Green Jew
and The Promenade have their points, but the frescoes
and windows he now contributes to temples and the Parisian
Opera House plafond are coarse' and unbearable.
What of Tchelitchew, whose Hide and Seek
(another version of Speak, Memory's Find What the Sailor
Has Hidden?^ inpart describes the experience of reading one
of your novels? I know Tchelitchew's work very little.
The latter artist recalls the Ballets Russes. Were you
at all acquainted with that circle, painters as well as dancers
and musicians?
My parents had many acquaintances who painted and danced
and made music. Our house was one of the first where young
Shalyapin sang, and I have foxtrotted with Pavlova in London
half a century ago.
Mr. Hilton Kramer, in a recent article in the
Sunday New York Times (May 3, 1970) writes, "The
accomplishments of at least two living artists who are widely
regarded as among the greatest of their time-- George
Balanchine and Vladimir Nabokov-- are traceable, despite the
changes of venue and language and outlook, to the esthetic
dream that nourished Diaghilev and the artists he gathered
around him in St. Petersburg in the nineties. " This is, I
suppose, what Mary McCarthy meant when she characterized
Pale Fire as a "Faberge gem. " Are these analogies just?
I was never much interested in the ballet. "Faberge gems"
I have dealt with in Speak, Memory (Chapter Five, p.
III). Balanshin, not Balanchine (note the other
mistransliterations). I am at a loss to understand why the
names of most of the people with whom I am paired begin with a
B.
All of which brings to mind another outspoken emigre,
Mr. Stravinsky. Have you had any associations with him?
I know Mr. Stravinski very slightly and have never seen
any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print.
Whom in Parisian literary circles did you meet in the
thirties, in addition to Joyce and the editorial board of
Mesures?
I was on friendly terms with the poet Jules Supervielle.
Him and Jean Pauhan (editor of Nouvelle revue franзaise)
I especially remember.
Did you know Samuel Beckett in Paris?
No, I did not. Beckett is the author of lovely novellas
and wretched plays in the Maeterlinck tradition. The trilogy is
my favorite, expecially Molloy. There is an
extraordinary scene in which he is crawling through a forest by
dragging himself, 'by catching the crook of his walking stick,
his crutch, in the vegetation before him, and pulling himself
up, wearing three overcoats and newspaper underneath them. Then
there are those pebbles, which he is busily transferring from
pocket to pocket. Everything is so gray, so uncomfortable, you
feel that he is in constant bladder discomfort, as old people
sometimes are in their dreams. In this abject condition there
is no doubt some likeness with Kafka's physically uncomfortable
and dingy men. It is that limpness that is so interesting in
Beckett's work.
Beckett has also composed in two tongues, has overseen
the Englishing of his French works. In which language have you
read him?
I've read him in both French and English. Beckett's French
is a schoolmaster's French, a preserved French, but in English
you feel the moisture of verbal association and of the
spreading live roots of his prose.
I have a "theory" that the French translation of
Despair (1939)-- not to mention the books she could have
read in Russian-- exerted a great influence on the so-called
New Novel. In his Preface to Mme. Sarraute's Portrait d'un
inconnu (1947), Sartre includes you among the antinovelists,
a rather more intelligent remark-- don't you think?-- than his
comments of eight years before when, reviewing Despair,
he said that as an emigre writer-- landless-- you bad no
subject matter. "But what is the question?" you might ask at
this point. Is Nabokov precursor of the French New Novel?
Answer: The French New Novel does not really exist apart
from a little heap of dust and fluff in a fouled pigeonhole.
But what do you think of Sartre's remark?
Nothing. I'm immune to any kind of opinion and I just
don't know what an "anti-novel" is specifically. Every original
novel is "anti-" because it does not resemble the genre or kind
of its predecessor.
/ know that you admire Robbe-Grillet. What about some
of the others loosely grouped under the "New Novel" tag: Claude
Simon? Michel Butor? and Raymond Queneau, a wonderful writer,
who, while not a member of l'йcole, anticipates it in
several ways?
Queneau's Exercices de style is a thrilling
masterpiece and, in fact, one of the greatest stories in French
literature. I am also very fond of Queneau's Zazie, and
I remember some excellent essays he published in Nouvelle
revue franзaise. We met once at a party and talked about
another famous fillette. I do not care for Butor. But
Robbe-Grillet is so unlike the others. One cannot, one should
not lump them together. By the way, when we visited
Robbe-Grillet, his petite, pretty wife, a young actress, had
dressed herself а la gamine in my honor, pretending to
be Lolita, and she continued the performance the next day, when
we met again at a publisher's luncheon in a restaurant. After
pouring wine for everyone but her, the waiter asked,
"Voulez-vous un Coca-Cola, Mademoiselle? It was very
funny, and Robbe-Grillet, who looks so solemn in his
photographs, roared with laughter.
Someone has called the New Novel "the detective story
taken seriously" (there it is again, the influence of the
French edition of Despair). Parodistic or not, you take
it "seriously, " given the number of times you've transmuted
the properties of the genre. Would you say something about why
you've returned to them so often?
My boyhood passion for the Sherlock Holmes and Father
Brown stories may yield some twisted clue.
You once said l hat Robbe-Grillet's shifts of levels
belong to psychology-- "psychology at its best. "Are you
apsychological novelist?
All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists, T
guess. Speaking of precursors of the New Novel, there is Franz
Hellens, a Belgian, who is very important. Do you know
of him?
No, I don't. When was he active, in which period did he
write? The post-Baudelaire period.
Could you be more specific?
Hellens was a tall, lean, quiet, very dignified man of
whom I saw a good deal in Belgium in the middle thirties when I
was reading my own stuff in lecture halls for large emigre
audiences. La femme partagйe (1929), a novel, I like
particularly, and there are three or four other books that
stand out among the many that Hellens wrote. I tried to get
someone in the States to publish him-- Laughlin, perhaps-- but
nothing came of it. Hellens would get excellent reviews, was
beloved in Belgium, and what friends he had in Paris tried to
brighten and broaden his reputation. It is a shame that he is
read less than that awful Monsieur Camus and even more awful
Monsieur Sartre.
What you say about Hellens and Queneau is most
interesting, in part because journalists always find it more
"colorful" to stress your negative remarks about other writers.
Yes, "good copy" is the phrase. As a private person, I
happen to be good-natured, straightforward, plain-spoken, and
intolerant of bogus art. A writer for whom I have the deepest
admiration is H. G. Wells, especially his romances: The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man, The Country of the Blind, The War
of the Worlds, and the moon fantasia The First Men on
the Moon.
And as final food for thought, sir, what is the meaning of
life? [A rather blurry reproduction of Tolstoy's photographed
face follows this question in the interviewer's typescript].
For solutions see p. 000 (thus says a MS note in the
edited typescript of my Poems and Problems which I have
just received). In other words: Let us wait for the page proof.