Do you still feel in Exile?
Art is exile. I felt an exile when I was a child in Russia among other children. I kept goal on the soccer field, and all goalkeepers are exiles.Does being a refugee mean being rootless?
Rootlessness is less important than a confirmed refugee’s capacity to branch and blossom in a complete—and very pleasant—void.
In which language do you think, count, and dream?
I do not think in any language, I think in images, with some brief verbal surfacing of a utilitarian sort in any of the three tongues that I know, such as “damn those trucks” or “espéce de crétin.” I dream and count mostly in Russian.
How far do you get involved with your characters while writing? Do you think of them after the book has been published?
I suspect that the Almighty’s interest in Adam and Eve was neither very sincere nor very enduring, despite the success, on the whole, of a really marvelous job. I, too, am completely detached from my characters, while making them and after making them.
What is your opinion of the hippies and the student revolts?
I feel nothing but contemptuous pity for the illiterate drug-dazed hoodlums I have happened to observe, but I do not assume that all hippies are violent cretins. Many of them are young conformists following an American fad, and some are intelligent political agents disguised as students.
What do you think of efforts to enlarge the field of our sensibility and experi- ence’ What do you think of drugs?
Drugs are as degrading as drunkenness. The hallucinations that they arouse ruin health while remaining at the level of the hypnagogic kaleidoscope too well known to the healthy but overworked brain, or of these insipid mirages of mystical neurosis that go back to the Middle Ages. One must be very stupid to follow a fashion which only those whose task is to destroy the mental resistance of still-free nations could approve.
Whom do you write for?
I must say, I have never been interested in commercial success; in other words, I’ve never sought to push my books. I’ve never written except for a single reader, Mr. Nabokov, for him alone. I have a vague impression that my first English books, written and published in the United States—books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the story of Professor Pnin—found readers here and there, for intellectual life in America has an incomparable intensity and variety, but I didn’t pay much attention to this little plashing of gray glory. Then, when I published my Lolita (almost ten years ago), I was at first surprised by its success. To tell the truth, I sometimes think that people buy this book for reasons not artistic, but, how shall I put it, erotic, but all this doesn’t concern me, although I’m very comfortable that this lovely child is made so much of.
Do you feel that your novels are larger than life?
I’m not sure this isn’t an illusion. For me, life is not an independent, objective entity. Its image depends on the observer. And there are too many observers—coming and going, and turning away, and looking again, and shading their eyes again—too many changing observers and changing lights, too many of them to enable one to establish an average picture of life. If you find I see life larger than life, this implies only a difference between you and me—not between life and my vision of life. We all are the makers of reality, and there are as many makers of reality as there are men. The real unreality is the conventional and the common.
Sartre explains your distance from your characters in Despair in terms of your uprootedness, your émigré status.
I think he’s wrong. I’m not rootless. Even if the Revolution hadn’t happened in Russia, I would have lived in France or Italy. My family, which was politically liberal and cosmopolitan, had me live in an international climate where French and German took the same place as Russian. I am not, as Bunin was, a representative of traditional Russia. I feel much closer to Kafka, for example. And after all I am very close to French literature, and I’m not the first Russian writer to say that!
On his new wealth
Now I don’t need to earn a living, I have a girl called Lolita who earns it for me. In short I’m an old pimp and I have a girl who’s on the game... . Oh, don’t write that. ... What do you think, Véra? All right, do as you like.
Should there be co-education at high school?
Young girls mature so much faster than boys. They become voluptuous and get into the habit of wearing tight woollen sweaters that make for enormous distraction. That just defeats the whole process of education.
Pornography?
Have you read the Marquis de Sade? The orgies? Things start with one person, then five, then fifty, then they invite the gardener! (Enormous laugh.) ‘There’s your pornography: quantity without quality. It’s banal, it’s not literature. The intention of art is always pure, always moral. ...
I hate the Marquis de Sade.
**
Psychoanalysis?
A disgusting racket. Psychoanalysis has something Bolshevik: internal police. And the symbols: those umbrellas, those staircases! Good for the Viennese, perhaps. But for an American of our time, who has no umbrella and uses only elevators? .. . Let’s be serious: Freudianism is dangerous for art: symbols kill the thing, the individual dream. And sexuality! But this depends on art, not the other way around, you see: it’s poetry that has refined love, over the centuries.
**
“Freudian voodoo!” Nabokov replied vehemently. “That's my béte noire. I think he has been one of the most pernicious influences on literature, children and schools. It’s a medieval mind dealing in medieval symbols.
The initial witch doctor and all the little witch doctors. The rather complicated question on which I will write later. A craze that’s passing ..
And why do you object to Freud so strongly?
For the same reason that I object to kitsch and astrology.
**
When did you start learning English?
English was the fashionable language in the kind of Russian family to which I happen to belong. We had English nurses, English governesses, English tutors; and my first books—the books that were read to me—were English books. In the morning Miss Sheldon would read to me Little Lord Fauntleroy; in the afternoon Mademoiselle Miauton, [my French] governess would read to me Les Misérables. And of course I remember all the pictures in Chums or in the Boys’ Own Paper, and later on there was my father’s library, which was full of English and French books; and I just read and read and read.
“I read English before I read Russian. I spoke English with my mother and my nurse—with my brother, I remember, I always spoke French. That was typical. The children would speak one language together and another language at table and another with their father and mother. Sometimes as many as four languages would be spoken.
“After I started going to school, at 11, my tutor stayed on and would tutor me at night for the next day. You learned a great deal that way.
“And we had wonderful courses in French literature. The French governess would read to us three hours a day—the English governess, too. We had all the English magazines and some of the American ones—Little Folks and St. Nicholas.
"I started reading Turgenev and Tolstoy when I was very small. My wife read Anna Karenina at 6. Her nurse said, ‘Come, come, Ill tell that to you in my own words.’ “Even then she knew to beware of condensations,” Nabokov added, laughing.
“I started writing Russian verse very early—when I was 13—and published a little book of verse when I was 15.”
***
Which are your favorite contemporary writers?
Shakespeare.
We said “contemporary.”
Always Shakespeare.
And which Italian writers do you like most?
I know only three languages, Russian, English and French, and hardly ever read translations. In any period of, say, twenty-five years, there is a very small number of absolutely first-rate living novelists, three or four, with that je ne sais quoi about them which designates them as certain to survive.
On D’Annunzio
I read him as a young man, I liked “The Rain in the Pine Forest”. I never knew a man whose head so surprisingly resembled an egg as that of D’Annunzio. .. . I read little, and almost nothing of modern literature. | read a D’Annunzio book in a French translation, but I do not know if the translation was good or bad. So I can’t express an opinion.
Have you read Marcuse?
I have seen excerpts. I wonder if anywhere—perhaps in some African or Asiatic tongue—“Marcuse” is a diminutive of “Marx.” Perhaps the youngest Marx Brother. What I read was intolerably trivial.
Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint?
It is a ridiculous book. It has no literary worth whatever. It is so obvious and not at all funny—a ridiculous book.
Pasternak?
Pasternak is a poet, not a prose writer. Dr: Zhivago, as a novel, is nowhere—though quite in line with the Soviet conservative literary style. It wanders like Gone with the Wind and is filled with all kinds of blunders and melodramatic situations. Compared to Pasternak, Mr. Steinbeck is a genius.
Doctor Zhivago?
A mediocre melodrama with Trotskyist tendencies. It is an antiliberal work, undoubtedly pro-Bolshevik, even if anti-Stalinist. The book is badly written, very badly. Pasternak was never a good prose writer. He is, of course, a good poet. Not as great, of course, as Blok, but good.
Pasternak?
Doctor Zhivago is false, melodramatic, badly written. It is false to history and false to art. The people are dummies. That awful girl is absurd. It reminds me very much of novels written by Russians, of, I am ashamed to say, the gentler sex. Pasternak is not a bad poet. But in Zhivago he is vulgar. Simple. If you take his beautiful metaphors there is nothing behind them. Even in his poems: what is that line, Véra? “To be a woman is a big step.” It is ridiculous.
This kind of thing recurs. Very typical of poems written in the Soviet era. A person of Zhivago’s class and his set, he wouldn’t stand in the snow and read about the Bolshevist regime and feel a tremendous glow.
There was a /iberal revolution at that time. Kerensky. If Kerensky had had more luck—but he was a liberal, you see, and he couldn’t just clap the Bolsheviks into jail. It was not done. He was a very average man, I should say. The kind of person you might find in the Cabinet of any democratic country. He spoke very well, with his hand in his bosom like Napoleon, because it had almost been broken by handshakes.
Yet people like Edmund Wilson and Isaiah Berlin, they have to love Zhivago to prove that good writing can come out of Soviet Russia. They ignore that it is really a bad book. There are some absolutely ridiculous scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping for instance. You know about eavesdropping. If it is not brought in as parody it is almost philistine. It is the mark of the amateur in literature. And that marvelous scene where he had to get rid of the little girl to let the characters make love, and he sends her out skating. In Siberia. To keep warm they give her her mother’s scarf. And then she sleeps deeply in a hut while there is all this going on. Obviously Pasternak just didn’t know what to do with her.
He’s like Galsworthy. Galsworthy in one of his novels gave a character a cane and a dog and simply didn’t know how to get rid of them.
And the metaphors. Unattached comparisons. Suppose I were to say “as passionately adored and insulted as a barometer in a mountain hotel” (he said, looking out at the rain), it would be a beautiful metaphor.
But who is it about? The image is top-heavy. There is nothing to attach it to. And there is a pseudo-religious strain in the book which almost shocks me. Zhivago is so feminine that I sometimes wonder if it might have been partly written by Pasternak’s mistress.
As a translator of Shakespeare he is very poor. He is considered great only by people who don’t know Russian. An example. (His wife helped him to remember a line of a Pasternak translation.) What he has turned it into in Russian is this: “all covered with grease and keeps wiping the pig-iron.” You see. It is ridiculous. What would be the original?
GILLIATT: “Greasy Joan doth keel the pot?” Yes. “Keeps wiping the pig-iron”!
Pasternak himself has been very much helped by translation. Sometimes when you translate a cliché—you know, a cloud has a silver lining—it can sound like Milton because it is in another language.
***
Switzerland?
It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dos- toevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.
What do you think of Switzerland?
It’s perfect, but I don’t like the cows much. They drive off the butterflies.
***
Helen Lawrenson’s article, “The Man Who Scandalized the World,” in your issue of August 1960, contains some absurd misstatements: (...)
Finally, let me quote this incredible passage: “He . . . of course, feels that in the good old days of the Czar, ‘a freedom-loving Russian had more freedom than under Lenin,’ without, however, specifying whether he meant freedom-loving aristocrats or freedom-loving serfs.” Irony, of course, is all right, but when starved by ignorance it chokes on its own tail; for surely any schoolgirl should know that no serfs existed in Russia since 1861, one year before the liberation of slaves in this country, and all lovers of freedom certainly realize that it was Lenin who restored serfdom in Russia.
I’m afraid I must ask you to print the following correction to the article published in her memory in Russkaya mysl’ (no. 2048).' The article contains a phrase (supposedly said by me to Princess Shakhovskoy) foisted on me by Mr. Berezov’s imagination: “But what am I to do, Aunt, if American readers are only interested in such themes?” I could not have said this, not only because I never called Princess Shakhovskoy “Aunt,” or discussed Lolita with her, but, most important, because I consider Lolita my best book. Only buoyant blockheads who haven’t actually read the work they’re criticizing could explain away its composition as a vulgar calculation to please some vulgar taste. I doubt that Mr. Berezov was consciously trying to join their number.
Think, Write, Speak
Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV
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