“I’m very proud that America has not brought charges. It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful.”
The author himself says of the charge of pornography: “Foolish.” And of conflicting theories on the meaning of Lolita: “Just a story, a fairy tale, as all stories are.”…
“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, I’ll 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.”
Lolita was written in English, but Nabokov insists that he could have done better in Russian. “It’s simply that my knowledge of Russian is infinitely greater than my knowledge of English.”…
“What do you think of the Angry Young Men?” I asked Nabokov.
“What are they?”
“What do you think of the Beat Generation?”
This drew fire—an outburst in the passionate Russian manner.
“I don’t like anything that becomes a movement, a school! I don’t like labels, clubs. I don’t like groups!
“It just doesn’t mean anything to me if you say symbolists or classicists. It doesn’t mean anything and that’s what I teach my classes. I teach them books, not authors. Not groups or labels.
“Exist—exist—existen—” Nabokov’s lips pucker humorously as he made an amusing pretense at being unable to pronounce “existentialism.”
“I’m bored by the word itself! I read something Sartre wrote. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
…
“Freudian voodoo!” Nabokov replied vehemently. “That’s my bête 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…
“No interest whatsoever in politics or people with a capital P. I make my own people, my own politics, and my own gods—if any.”…
[On Lolita] “The book has no message. I’m no messenger boy. A book has to stand on its own two feet or fly on its own two wings, or four.”
* “The Author of Lolita—An Unhurried View,” New York Post Weekend Magazine, Aug. 17, 1958, M10. Published on the eve of the first American publication of Lolita, Aug. 18, 1958, a day on which many American newspapers reviewed the novel.