Why the extraordinary success of Lolita, when you had been publishing novels since 1926?
I don’t know if you have noticed, but there are in Lolita several passages that suggest—how shall I put it?—a love affair between an adult and a child. Well, sometimes I wonder if those passages do not lure a certain type of reader, who is morbidly attracted by what he thinks are erotic images, into reading at least half of the novel. I realize the idea is rather extravagant; yet maybe something of the kind happened to my poor, innocent little book—which is still banned in some countries!
What are the best and most successful works in literature?
Homer, Horace, the New Testament, Dante, Shakespeare, Chateaubriand, Pushkin, Flaubert, Joyce, one or two others.
Do you care for literary critics?
On the whole I am indifferent to what critics think of my books—perhaps because nobody can think so tenderly of them as I do.
What do you think about the so-called crisis of the novel? Is it, in your opinion, a real crisis?
Frankly, I don’t know what “the novel” means. A few books that I like, generally classified as “novels,” including my own, do not seem to undergo any crisis. I think that “crisis” is something invented by third-rate novelists who cannot keep up with second-rate ones.
You were born in St. Petersburg. What do you think about the literary and political situation of the USSR today?
I do not believe that basically very much has changed in the course of the last fifty years. Same misery, drabness, deceit, torture, captivity.
You lived for many years in the United States. Do you think that all creative and imaginative work is destined to disappear or to survive in America’s technological society?
The American way of life is not more technological than that of any Western European country. In fact, I have heard and denounced more transistors (instruments of infernal torture!) in a small Italian resort than in New York or Los Angeles. On the other hand, the amelioration of living conditions owing to various gadgets has certainly given American writers more time than formerly to write in comfort.
Which are the writers you have been influenced or inspired by?
I cannot think of any writer who has influenced me. This solitude does not irk me, but it irritates a certain type of critic who likes to link up writers in chains of parallel passages and literary schools.
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 jе 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”;1 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. I 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.
What do you think about the great theoreticians and writers of eroticism, starting with Bataille? Do you think there is a philosophy of eroticism?
I know nothing about those theories. All I can say is that since art appeals to the senses, an erotic strain in it presents nothing unusual. And another thing of which I am sure is that it is absurd to look for erotic symbols everywhere, in all kinds of objects, leathern helmets, galoshes, umbrellas, etc.
* “Per Nabokov non esiste crisi del romanzo” (“For Nabokov, There Is No Crisis of the Novel”), Il messagero, Nov. 2, 1969, 3. Typescript questions and answers, in English, VNA Berg. On same occasion as the two preceding interviews.