119 Interview with Pierre Dommergues for Les Langues Modernes (1967–68)*

On Nabokov’s image, in his autobiography, of his life as a colored three-stage spiral: the thesis, his Russian years; the antithesis, his émigré years; the synthesis, his American years

First of all, forgive me if I express myself slowly in French. I know three languages fairly well—English, Russian, and French—but I speak them all with difficulty and cautiously. François Condorcet, who shouldn’t be confused with Charles, said, “An honest man should know only one language, his own.” That poor man knew thirty-four! But never mind. You ask about my multicolored spiral. This description of my personal triad is a stylistic effect, a paragraph composed with care but with little meaning outside the book into which I put it and where it has to remain to live.

What was the place of French literature in your adolescence?

Several Russian authors of the nineteenth century belonging to the privileged class, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, underwent the profound influence of French literature and culture, which their French tutors crammed them with. Others, like Gogol and Chekhov, never learned French, but nevertheless you find in them secondary currents transmitted by imitations and translations from French to Russian. On the other hand, English was less in fashion than French: neither Pushkin nor Tolstoy knew it well. All of Shakespeare, all of Walter Scott, all of Byron, all of Richardson was read in flat French paraphrases. I’m more fortunate, since from my tender infancy I had not only a French governess but also several English governesses. At twelve, I had read Shakespeare’s tragedies in the original, as I had the prose of Flaubert and the poetry of Rimbaud. No surprise that some of my Russian readers accuse me, not without indignation or even disgust, of being too Western in my writing. These same imbeciles think that I devote myself to butterflies, to entomology, out of snobbery. I am a tricolor Russian, an American brought up in England, a St. Petersburger with a Parisian burr in Russian but who, in French, rolls my “R”s in the Russian manner.

In your Lolita afterword, you write that it took you forty years to invent Russian and Western Europe and that now you had to invent America. What was the process of this invention, what were the American ingredients?

This has nothing to do with what is called “realism.” What is called “realism” seems to me to be a certain average of impressions perceived by an average brain, an apparatus which by the way doesn’t exist outside statistics. There’s nothing more abstract and fuzzy than so-called realism….The word “reality” is the most dangerous there is….The reality of art? It’s an artificial reality, a created reality, which remains reality only in the novel. I don’t believe that there’s an objective reality. But the combinations that the artist invents give or should give the reader the feeling not of average reality, but of a new reality distinctive to the work. The world of its invention remains the secret of its creator. The inscription over the door of my workshop said “No entry” when I was working on Lolita. Today this door is wide open, but the workshop is dismantled, the workers are gone, the tools vanished, a little golden dust floats in a slanting ray of light, that’s all.

You have been an American citizen since 1945. What is your connection with America?

Yes, I admit it, I adore America. It’s the only country I have been in where I’m perfectly happy, where I’m right at home….I don’t know why. But I’ve met people there, I’ve lived in an atmosphere which corresponded perfectly to what I consider the benign, the happy life for a writer. But it’s not only the intellectuals, but the man who takes my suitcase—in fact everybody, people of all classes, of all races….I feel a sensation of warmth and pride when I show my green American passport at the borders of Europe. The gross criticism of America shocks me deeply. I am for an antisegregationist policy. In foreign policy, I am firmly on the government’s side. And when I’m unsure, I choose the method of choosing the political line least favorable to the Reds and the Russells.1

How does your stay in Montreux fit into this colored spiral of three times?

For several years now, we have been living in Montreux. My life there is very regular, but full of action. I can give you an idea of my day. I get up early, about 7:00 a.m., swallow a glass of fruit juice, put on my monastic bathrobe, and go to the lectern to write. Victor Hugo and Flaubert also wrote standing up, believing—wrongly, it seems—that the thunderbolt of a stroke hits the vertical writer more rarely than in any other position. After an hour or two of work, I eat a very modest breakfast, a bowl of cornflakes, a cup of coffee without sugar, and my wife reads me my mail, often amusing, always voluminous—after which I get back to my desk. About eleven, I shave and have my bath. We often lunch in town. At two, work resumes, but generally I leave the lectern in the afternoon to settle down with my index cards in an armchair. We have dinner at seven. I go to bed at nine and fall asleep at once, like a child. At midnight, I wake up in a state of infernal twitchiness in a desert of insomnia, and then the dramatic dilemma starts: to take or not to take a sleeping pill. As you see, it’s a very agitated life.

In summer it’s quieter. My wife and I travel in search of butterflies. I love mountains, in Switzerland, in Italy, and in the south of France. I like to stay a thousand meters up and climb to two thousand meters to hunt alpine butterflies. I know few things more delightful than to go out early in the morning with my hunting net and to climb in the chairlift toward a cloudless sky, all the while watching under me, off to the side, the shadow of the aerial chair with my seated silhouette, the shadow of my net in my fist, gliding along the slope, undulating under the alders, still climbing, slender, supple, rejuvenated and stylized by the effect of the projection, climbing gracefully in an almost mythological ascension. The return isn’t so pretty, because the sun has changed position, and you can see the shade stunted, you can see two big knees, everything is changed. The perspective of the net is changed, so I don’t look any longer.

Your aversion to “ideologies” and “-isms” is well known. But isn’t there a difference between “idea” and ideology? Isn’t there a recognition, even if ironic, of the idea in your sarcasm?

Let’s take specific examples. What can be more lugubrious than the political novel, the sociological novel—for example, by people like Émile Zola. It’s unreadable, the propaganda novel. Most American writers today are of great interest to the historian, but hardly from the literary point of view. Most of them are of stupefying mediocrity. I don’t want to malign my contemporaries; I’m saying this under the mask of anonymity. Current events, fashion, grand feelings don’t make great books. Nevertheless, I maintain that the percentage of, say, a dozen good writers among these forty mortals2 surpasses the lamentably low level one finds today in England or in France.

What part does perception play in your work? And could you say more about what you mean by “colored hearing”?

Children very often have this capacity to see and hear letters as shades of color. Sometimes infinitely subtle shades. But when a child says this at school or at home, he’s given a smack or told he’s stupid. That a “B” can be red, or a “C” black, means nothing, so don’t think about it anymore—and the sensation vanishes and it’s gone forever. When I spoke of these things to my mother, she told me: “I have that, too.” “So tell me, what’s your A like?” “It’s black, or blackish, it’s a little like ebony.” “Mine is reddish….” The “N” is a neutral color, a whitish color, with a little gray perhaps. If I had a brush, I could do this in colors. That would be interesting, a painting of my auditory colors.3

Your novels are peopled by spies and the spied-on; most of your characters in fact are one or the other or both. Do you see a link between the artist and the voyeur, the artist and the spy?

I don’t like this term “voyeur,” which has too much sexual resonance, even if it’s the ample and profound title of one of the finest novels of our time.4 As for my spying characters, yes, they spy. What can I do about it? They’re made like that, I made them like that. The only link between the artist and the spy, it seems to me, is that both observe things and people and know the importance of detail: detail, that’s everything.

What’s the link between memory and imagination?

I think memory and imagination belong to the same rather mysterious world of human thought. It seems to me that someone without much imagination also has a poor memory. The child who imagines nothing while playing in the corridors of a castle will remember the castle only very vaguely. There is something in the imagination that connects to memory, and vice versa. Memory could be said to be a sort of imagination concentrated on a certain point….When you remember a thing, you never remember the thing itself, you remember the relation, the association of the thing with something else. And it’s the imagination that makes this link between things.

What connection do you see between chess and the work of art?

There’s no connection between literature and the game of chess. But there’s certainly a connection between the art of literature and the art of chess problems. Problems and games are two different things. It’s not easy to speak of these two things, because not everybody, not even all chess players, can appreciate the difference between the game of chess, which is journalism, and the chess problem, which is poetry.

The link between the composition of a chess problem and that of a novel lies in the originality of the combinations and the economy of their realization.

It’s a magnificent, complex, and sterile art, akin to the ordinary form of the game only to the extent, for example, that a juggler, in inventing the interlacings of a new sleight-of-hand trick, draws on something in the properties of a sphere. In fact, most chess players, masters and amateurs, take only a moderate interest in these refined enigmas, purely invented and requiring great specialization, and although they appreciate a problem with a trap inside, they would be absolutely disconcerted if they were asked to compose one.

In common there are themes, stratagems, ambushes, sacrifices, pinning and unpinning, and all sorts of maneuvers, but combined in a certain way. Because it’s the combination of the different themes that makes a problem. Deceit pushed to the point of diabolism. In this sense, I think one can find a certain parallelism between the chess problem and the problem of literary compositions.

And on the level of characters’ strategies?

No, that’s something else. This is becoming allegory. One thinks of those chess figurines.

Is your treatment of time and space linked to the handling of pawns on the chessboard?

There is no time on the chessboard. Time replaced by a bottomless space…

The knight jumps a square. But if, for example, it is at one side of the chessboard, then one wonders why it can’t jump from the other side, in the space beyond the chessboard. I have myself thought up problems which incorporate the possibility of a knight who flies off and then who comes back from that space.

Is chess strategy visual?

When a chess problem comes into my mind I don’t see the chessboard, I don’t see squares as they are, I see perhaps little abysses, not holes, but different tensions, positive, negative. It’s not a question of form. It seems to me that in literary art there’s no privileged form, at the compositional level. One could speak of a spiral, of a certain structure, but these are metaphors.

In terms of form, it would be, rather, “anything goes,” everything works, doesn’t it, all is allowed. I always have an interesting combination, complicated and with a certain form, but not each part of the combination.

Don’t you find that the English title of your memoirs (Speak, Memory) is more revealing than the French?

Autres rivages (Other Shores) is also the Russian form of the title—because I’ve also done the book in Russian—and it’s a phrase of Pushkin that talks of other shades, other waves.

But I think that Autres rivages works quite well. There was a third title, Conclusive Evidence, which I like because there are two “V”s, my “V” and that of my wife, Véra, juxtaposed there, but no one understood that.

What is the link between the work and the reader?

I see it every morning when I shave. The only true reader, the best reader, the model reader, is the author of the book. It is true that sometimes the author knows people, friends who—he knows—are going to understand his book, people for whom it’s worth the trouble of writing. I know perhaps a dozen, thirteen people who read my books almost as well as I do. But note that if these charming readers didn’t exist, I would still write all the same in full confidence, with utter good cheer, because I can always easily invent as many readers as I want.

French readers are fascinated by the use of language in your work. Is a preoccupation with language essential to you?

I let words play. I allow them to gambol with each other. Some of my characters have fun catching a phrase unawares, because one could define a pun as two words caught in flagrante. The inversion of syllables charms and excites my characters more than me. The English are more devoted to puns than Americans. I often see in the literary supplements of London newspapers punning titles that an American publisher would find disgustingly vulgar.

Doesn’t the fact of moving from one language to another predispose a writer to linguistic exploration? I’m thinking of Conrad and Beckett in particular.

I don’t accept this comparison that you have introduced. I haven’t read the plays of Samuel Beckett—I think he has written plays, hasn’t he?—but I’ve been shown recently two or three little poems he has written in French—and it’s bad Verlaine, completely banal and false. The case of Conrad is perhaps more interesting. He worked hard on a language he didn’t know. I think he spoke French better than English when he started writing. But I detest his books, his books say nothing to me. When I was a child I would read them, because they are books for children, they swarm with clichés, it’s unendingly romantic, the style, the structure in French is that of Pierre Loti.

Isn’t there a comic “character” in your work? I think of Charlie Chaplin, and the scene in Pnin where the old émigré, unable to get used to the modern world, suddenly falls in love with a washing machine. He puts a tennis shoe in the machine, from which it comes out as if this had happened in a Charlie Chaplin film.

Pnin has absolutely nothing Chaplinesque. A movie agent must have invented this. Chaplin is as good as Laurel and Hardy or Buster Keaton. But in terms of ideas, his genre has absolutely nothing to do with the comic art of literature, which is infinitely more complex than the art of the most refined clown.

Perhaps it’s right to say that I am very aware of the comic side of politics. Dictators are the buffoons of history. Mao, Nasser, Hitler, the bearded Cuban whose name escapes me, the melancholic Kosygin, the formulaic style of Lenin’s writings, all that is as grotesque as those staged triumphs and those fools paid to applaud. Politics perhaps isn’t my forte, but I am practiced in the science of destiny. I can therefore predict that one fine day Russia and China, united in evil, will try to invade the West, and that once again America will save Europe by freeing France, and in that sense one could really cry out: Long live free France!

Monsieur Nabokov, you are becoming a propagandist. Can you say, to conclude, why you write?

It’s a hard question to reply to. But I think I write to amuse myself. Pushkin liked to say, “One writes for oneself and publishes to earn a living.” That’s my situation. The aesthetic bliss I speak of in Lolita I could have found elsewhere. I see myself, for example, as a painter. I see myself very clearly inventing landscapes, combining mirages and mirrors. On the other hand, I think sometimes how sweet it would be to be an entomologist, an obscure museum conservator somewhere in America, five or six hundred dollars a month, impassioned discoveries, scientific quarrels, the radiant silence at the bottom of the microscope.