Switzerland?
It is the most pleasant and poetical country in Europe. Gogol, Tolstoy, Byron, Dostoevsky walked here. Gogol wrote Dead Souls here. Dostoevsky found himself penniless here. Tolstoy caught a good case of venereal disease here. As I say, it is a poetical country.
America?
In 1935, my wife and I decided to go to America and live, since the language there was the language I wished to be near. We had a little boy, too, and I wanted him there. And people began to translate my books in America. So the practical was associated with the metaphysical.
What do you think of the United States after twenty years?
America is my home now. It is my country. The intellectual life suits me better there than any other country in the world. I have more friends there, more kindred souls than anywhere. I don’t care for American food, mind you. Ice cream and milk are all right in their place. The American steak is a mistake, there’s a pun for you.
But these are material things, not important, really. No, there is something about American life and people and universities which keeps me perfectly and completely happy.
The reception of Lolita?
What bothered me most was the belief that Lolita was a criticism of America. I think that’s ridiculous. I don’t see how anybody could find it in Lolita. I don’t like people who see the book as an erotic phenomenon, either. Even more, I suppose, I don’t like people who have not read Lolita and think it obscene.
I don’t think Lolita is a religious book, but I do think it is a moral one. And I do think that Humbert Humbert in his last stage is a moral man because he realizes that he loves Lolita as any woman should be loved. But it is too late; he has destroyed her childhood. There is certainly this kind of morality in it.
Do you set out to mislead the reader?
I play with him, yes, but not as a cat with a mouse. I suppose there is a lot of shifting in my work, but that is natural to me. As one face or phase passes, another takes over. But there is no teasing. I am very honest, actually.
On Robert Frost
Not everything he wrote was good. There is lots of trash. But I believe that rather obvious little poem on the woods1 is one of the greatest ever written.
On Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway did some wonderful things. But those long novels—For Whom the Bell Tolls and the rest—I think they are abominable. He was, after all, a short-story writer.
On William Faulkner
I am completely deaf to Faulkner. I do not understand what people see in him. He has been invented. Surely, he was not a real person.
Your three languages
At this point I write English better than the other two, and prefer it. I am appalled by the provincial inclinations and philistine thought of modern Russian.
On his Eugene Onegin
You have not asked about my labor of love. It is the great work of my life.
* “On the Banks of Lake Leman—Mr. Nabokov Reflects on Lolita and Onegin,” National Observer, June 29, 1964, 17. In Montreux, a week after the publication of VN’s translation of and commentary to Eugene Onegin.