(Sirin has a long, thin, noble face, a high forehead. He speaks quickly and with passion. But a kind of prudence prevents him from speaking of himself.)
Your interests?
Setting aside the work of writing, which for me is very arduous and meticulous, then all that remains is zoology, which I studied in Cambridge, the Romance languages, and a great love of tennis, football, and boxing. I seem to be not a bad goalkeeper.
You have been accused of being “un-Russian.”
Ridiculous! I’ve been accused of having been influenced by German writers whom I don’t even know. In fact, I read German very badly. It would be more accurate to talk of a French influence: I love Flaubert and Proust. It’s curious, but I felt a closeness to Western culture while I was still in Russia. Here in the West, on the other hand, I haven’t consciously learned anything, yet I’ve felt most keenly the fascination of Gogol and, closer to us, Chekhov.
Why are all the heroes of a physically and morally healthy, sporty individual so messed up?
Messed up?…Yes, perhaps you’re right. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps there’s more significance and interest to be found in a person’s suffering than in a tranquil life. Human nature reveals itself more fully—I think that’s it. There’s something enthralling about suffering. Right now I’m writing a novel, Despair. It’s narrated in the first person by a Russified German. It is the story of a crime. One more person “messed up.”
What are your working methods?
In what I write mood plays the central role, while everything that comes from pure reason recedes into the background. The idea of my novel forms unexpectedly, it’s born in a minute. That’s important. All that remains is to expose the photographic plate, which has been fixed somewhere deep inside. Everything’s there already, all the main elements; I need only to write the novel itself, to do the hard technical work. An author in the course of his work never identifies himself with the main characters of the novel; his hero lives an independent, autonomous life; everything in this life is predetermined, and no one has the capacity to alter its measured course.
The initial impetus is paramount. There are writers who look upon their work as trade: each day a certain number of pages must be written. But I believe in a kind of inner intuition, in writerly inspiration. Sometimes I write without a break, twelve hours in a row; I’m sick while this goes on, I feel terrible. Yet at other times I have to rework and rewrite innumerable times; there are stories I’ve worked on for two months. And then trifles take a lot of time, the details of the treatment—some landscape or other, the color of the trams in the provincial town where my hero ends up, all the technical minutiae of the work. Sometimes I have to rewrite and rework every word. This is the only area where I’m patient and not lazy. For instance, in order to write Luzhin, I had to spend a lot of time on chess. Incidentally, Alekhine claimed that I had it in mind to depict Tartakower.1 But I don’t know him at all. My Luzhin is the purest fruit of my imagination. Just like Aldanov’s Semyon Isidorovich Kremenetsky,2 in whom people try at all cost to find the features of some well-known Petersburg lawyer now living in the emigration. And, of course, they did find them. But Aldanov is too careful a writer to copy his portrait from a living person. His Kremenetsky was born and lived in Aldanov’s imagination alone. Glory and praise to the writer whose heroes seem to be people living our everyday lives among us.
* “U V. V. Sirina [At V. V. Sirin’s],” Poslednie novosti, Nov. 3, 1932, 2. Interview by Andrey Sedykh (Yakov Tsvibak), in both the leading émigré newspaper, Paris’s Poslednie novosti, and the leading newspaper of the Baltic emigration, Riga’s Segodnya (very slightly reworked, as “Vstrecha s V. V. Sirinym” [“Meeting with V. V. Sirin”], Nov. 4, 1932, 8), before Nabokov-Sirin’s first public reading in Paris.