150 Interview with Bernard Pivot for Apostrophes (1975)*

It is 9:47 p.m. and 47 seconds. Vladimir Nabokov, what are you usually doing at this hour?

At this hour I am under my eiderdown, with three pillows under my head, in a nightcap, in my modest bedroom which also serves me as study. A very strong bedside light, the lighthouse of my insomnias, is still burning on my night table, but will be turned off in a moment. I have in my mouth a black-currant lozenge and in my hands a New York or London weekly. I put it aside. I turn out the light. I turn it on again to stuff a handkerchief in my nightshirt’s little pocket, and now starts the interior debate: to take or not to take a sleeping pill? How delicious the positive decision is.

What is your routine on an ordinary day?

Let’s choose a day in the middle of winter (in summer there’s much more variety in my life). (Remainder of answer omitted; see answers about VN’s routine elsewhere.)

When you were a little younger, did you already have this routine? Or did you have passions, fancies, impulses, that disturbed your days and nights?

Oh yes, at twenty-five, at thirty, energy, caprice, inspiration, all that kept me writing until 4:00 a.m. I would rarely get up before midday and wrote all day long, stretched out on a divan. The pen and the horizontal position have given way now to pencil and austere verticality. No more fits and starts, that’s over. But how I would adore the birds’ wake-up, the fluted and sonorous song of the blackbirds, who seemed to applaud the last sentences of the chapter I’d just finished composing.

So has writing always been the great love of your life? Can you imagine another life in which you didn’t write?

Yes, I can very easily picture another life: a life in which I wouldn’t be a novelist, the happy renter of an ivory Tower of Babel, but someone just as happy, in another fashion—which, by the way, I’ve tried—an obscure entomologist who spends the summer hunting butterflies in fabulous regions and the winter classifying his discoveries in a museum lab.

Do you feel more Russian, American, or, since you live in Switzerland, Swiss?

Here are a few details about the cosmopolitan aspect of my life. I was born in an old Russian family in St. Petersburg. My paternal grandmother was German in origin, but I never learned this language well enough to be able to read it without a dictionary. I spent my first eighteen summers in the country, on our estate not far from Petersburg. In autumn we went to the south, to Nice, Pau, Biarritz, Abbazia. In winter it was always Petersburg, which is now Leningrad, but our fine home of pink granite still exists in good condition, on the outside at least: tyrannies like the architecture of the past. Our estate was in the northern forest plain; it is rather close in its flora to the northwestern corner of America: forests of bright aspens and dark pines, lots of birches, and splendid bogs with a multitude of flowers and more or less arctic butterflies. This totally happy phase lasted until the Bolshevik coup: the manor was nationalized. In April 1919 three Nabokov families, that of my father and those of his two brothers, were forced to leave Russia via Sebastopol, an old fortress of misfortune. The Red Army coming from the north was already invading the Crimea, where my father had been minister of justice in the provincial government during the brief liberal period before the Bolshevik terror. The same year, in October ’nineteen, I began my studies at Cambridge.

What’s your preferred language: Russian, English, or French?

The language of my ancestors is still the one in which I feel perfectly at home, but I will never regret my American metamorphosis. French—or, rather, my French—doesn’t align so well with the anguish of my imagination;1 its syntax forbids me certain liberties that I take perfectly naturally with the other two languages. It goes without saying that I adore Russian, but English surpasses it as a work tool, it surpasses it in richness of nuance, in frenzied prose, in poetic precision.

…At three I spoke English better than Russian, and I read and wrote it before Russian; on the other hand, there was a whole period in my personal Russia, between ten and twenty, during which, while reading a prodigious crowd of English authors—Wells, Kipling, the magazine The Boy’s Own Paper, to cite only a few summits—I spoke English only rarely, all the more so since at school there were no English classes (but we did have French—we took a whole winter to study Mérimée’s tedious Colomba). I had learned French at six: my governess Mademoiselle Cécile Miauton stayed in our family until 1915! We began with Le Cid and Les Misérables. But the real treasures awaited me in my father’s library.2 At twelve I knew all the blessed poets of France.3 “Souvenir, souvenir, que me veux-tu? L’automne faisait voler la grive à travers l’air atone et le bois où la bise détone….”4 It’s curious that at this tender age I already understood that Verlaine should not have been able to use such an incestuous rhyme: atone, détone. So there’s the calendar of my three languages. Now a few details. Like most of the Nabokovs, and like many Russians (Lenin, for example), I spoke my native tongue with a little burr, which hardly hindered me in French (although it was far from the adorable rolled “r” of Parisian cabaret chanteuses) but which I hurried to get rid of in English—rather late, in America, after having heard my voice on radio for the first time. I said, horribly, “I am Russian” as if I came from Roussillon. I got rid of this flaw by disguising the dangerous letter with a little neutral vibration: “I am Wussian.”

The French alphabet offers quite a different danger for a Russian, even if this Russian speaks French with a certain ease. The danger resides in the consonant “t” before an “i” or a “u.” You always recognize a Russian of the ancien régime by his manner of pronouncing this softish “t” deriving from the Russian alphabet. He will say “petz’it-à-petz’it” [petit-à-petit, “little by little”] or “c’est un tz’ype sympathz’ique” [c’est un type sympathique, “he’s a likable sort”]. Young Russians educated in France certainly don’t have this habit, but their old parents don’t even notice that neither habit nor study have firmed up for them this intimate softness. You could say that the Slavic consonant greets with a discreet smile the Gallic “i,” melting with tenderness before it.

Isn’t exile, however distressing, a stimulating thing for creators, a possibility of enrichment for the spirit and the sensibility?

[On his years in the Berlin and Paris emigration and the irritation of Nansen passports for the officially stateless.] But not all among us agreed to be bastards or phantoms. You could pass from Menton to San Remo very calmly by little mountain paths well known to butterfly hunters or absentminded poets.

The story of my life resembles less a biography than a bibliography. [In moving to America] I discovered a total incapacity to speak in public. So I decided to write in advance my hundred lectures a year on Russian literature. That makes two thousand typed pages of which, three times a week, I would recite twenty, having arranged them in a position not too obvious on my desk before the amphitheater of my students. Thanks to this procedure I never got muddled and the auditorium received the pure product of my knowledge. I repeated the same course each year, introducing new notes, new details.

Why do you live in Switzerland? And why in a hotel?

Why a Swiss hotel? Switzerland is charming and a hotel life simplifies a heap of things. I miss America greatly and hope to return there for another twenty-year stay. A quiet life in an American university town would present no essential difference from Montreux, where, besides, the streets are noisier than in provincial America. On the other hand, since I am not rich enough—since no one is rich enough—to replay my whole childhood, it’s not worth the trouble of settling anywhere. I mean, it’s impossible to find the taste of Swiss milk chocolate from 1910 anymore. So I’d have to construct a whole factory. My wife and I have thought of a villa in France or Italy, but then the specter of postal strikes appeared in all its horror. People of settled professions, calm oysters firmly attached to their native mother-of-pearl, don’t realize, perhaps, how regular and reliable mail, as in Switzerland, assuages the life of an author, even if this offering on an ordinary morning consists only of a few vague business letters and two or three autograph requests (warning to the audience). And the view from the balcony to the lake—this lake which is worth all the liquid silver it resembles.

Apart from exile and displacement, what are the main themes of your books?

Apart from displacement? But I am displaced everywhere and always. I’m at home in my very personal memories which have no connection with a Russia geographical, national, or physical. Émigré critics in Paris and my schoolteachers in Petersburg were right for once to complain that I wasn’t Russian enough.

As for the principal themes of my books, well, there’s a bit of everything.

But isn’t a good novel above all an excellent story?

An excellent story, I perfectly agree. I would add, all the same, that my best novels don’t have one, but several stories which interlace in a certain way. My Pale Fire has this counterpoint, and Ada, too. I like not only to see the main theme radiate through the whole novel but also to develop little secondary themes. Sometimes it’s a digression that turns into a drama in a corner of the narrative, or the metaphors of an extended essay that join up to form a new story.

Do you think that stories invented by novelists—and I am thinking especially of a novelist called Vladimir Nabokov—are more interesting than life’s true stories?

Let’s be clear: the true story of a life has also been told by someone, and if it is an autobiography set down by the prudish pen of a person without talent, it could well be that this life seems very insipid beside a marvelous invention like Joyce’s Ulysses.

Nabokov is Lolita: aren’t you ultimately annoyed by the success of Lolita—which has been so emphatic that people have the impression that you are the father of this unique, slightly perverse daughter?

Lolita isn’t a perverse young girl. She’s a poor child who has been debauched and whose senses never stir under the caresses of the foul Humbert Humbert, whom she asks once, “how long did [he] think we were going to live in stuffy cabins, doing filthy things together…?” But to reply to your question: no, its success doesn’t annoy me, I am not like Conan Doyle, who out of snobbery or simple stupidity preferred to be known as the author of The Great Boer War, which he thought superior to his Sherlock Holmes.

It is equally interesting to dwell, as journalists say, on the problem of the inept degradation that the character of the nymphet Lolita, whom I invented in 1955, has undergone in the mind of the broad public. Not only has the perversity of this poor child been grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications. Girls of eighteen or more, sidewalk kittens, cheap models, or simple long-legged criminals, are baptized “nymphets” or “Lolitas” in news stories in magazines in Italy, France, Germany, etc.; and the covers of translations, Turkish or Arab, reach the height of ineptitude when they feature a young woman with opulent contours and a blond mane imagined by boobies who have never read my book.

In reality Lolita is a little girl of twelve, whereas Humbert Humbert is a mature man, and it’s the abyss between his age and that of the little girl that produces the vacuum, the vertigo, the seduction of mortal danger. Secondly, it’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Here’s an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.

Is Ada a cousin of Lolita?

Ada and Lolita are in no way cousins. In the world of my imagination—for Lolita’s America is ultimately as imaginary as the one in which Ada lives—in these invented worlds the two young girls belong to different classes and different intellectual levels. I have spoken of the first of the two, the softer, the frailer, the nicer (Ada isn’t nice at all).

I spoke of the abyss of time that separates Humbert from Lolita. On the other hand, the good reader of Ada will find nothing particularly morbid or rare in the case of a boy of fourteen who falls in love with a young girl he plays with. They go too far, certainly, these two adolescents, and the fact that they are brother and sister is going to create in time difficulties that the moralist foresees. What isn’t foreseen is that Ada and her lover after much disaster and distress are tranquilly reunited in the radiance of an ideal old age.

A touch of parody appears here and there in the course of the novel, as a circus always has its stumbling clown between the acrobat’s show and the illusionist’s. I don’t know why I have such a taste for mirrors and mirages, but I know that at the age of ten or eleven I developed a passion for conjuring, homely magic, whose various instruments—the top hat with the double bottom, the wand starred with gold, the card game that would turn into pigs’ heads in your palm—all this would arrive for you in a big box from the shop Peto on Caravan Street near the Ciniselli circus in St. Petersburg. Included was a magic manual showing how to make coins disappear or change denomination between your fingers. I tried to reproduce these tricks, keeping myself in front of a mirror, as the manual advised. My pale, serious little face reflected in the mirror annoyed me, and I’d rig myself up in a loup, a black mask which improved my looks. Alas, I didn’t manage to match the skill of the famous conjuror Mr. Merlin, who would be invited to children’s balls. I tried in vain to imitate his frivolous and deceptive patter that my manual wanted me to spin out so as to obscure what I was up to with my hands. “Frivolous and deceptive patter”: there’s a deceptive and frivolous definition of my literary works. Anyway, my conjuring studies didn’t last long. “Tragic” is a very strong term, and yet there was a little tragic side to the incident which helped me renounce my passion and relegate my box to the lumber room, among defunct toys and broken jumping jacks. So here’s the incident. One Easter evening, at the last children’s party of the year, I couldn’t stop myself from looking through a crack in the door—one of the live gills of world literature—to see how the preparations that Mr. Merlin was making for his opening routine in the grand salon were advancing. I saw him half-open a writing desk to slide in there calmly, coolly, a paper flower. The coolness, the familiarity, of his gesture was in atrocious contrast with the enchantments of his art.

And yet I knew all about, I knew so much about, what a magician’s frock coat concealed and what it was capable of in the way of magic! This professional link, the link of bad faith, made me warn one of my little girl cousins in what hiding place the rose that Merlin would conjure with in one of his tricks would be found. At the critical moment the little traitress pointed with her finger to the desk, shouting out, “My cousin saw where you put it.” I was still very young, but I remember very clearly noticing—or at least thinking I noticed—the atrocious expression which convulsed the features of the poor magician. I tell this incident to satisfy those of my shrewd critics who declare that in my novels dramas and mirrors are never far from one another. I must add, however, that when the drawer that the children indicated with derision was opened, the flower wasn’t there: it was languishing under my little neighbor’s chair!

When you come down to it, isn’t there a good deal of eroticism in your work?

You can find a good deal of eroticism in the work of any novelist you can talk about without laughing. What is called eroticism is only one of the arabesques of the art of the novel.

What’s striking—especially in Ada—is your concern for detail, for the object in its place, for the exact reference. And in Ada one finds your fascination for butterflies.

With the exception of a few Swiss butterflies, I have invented the species but not the genera featured in Ada. And I maintain that it’s the first time that anyone has invented in a novel butterflies that are scientifically possible. You could reply: Very well, but in satisfying the expert, you’re profiting a little from the reader’s ignorance of butterflies, because if you had invented a new type of dog or cat for the manor folk, the trickery would only have irritated the reader, who would have to imagine a little mythological quadruped each time Ada takes the animal in her arms. It’s a pity I didn’t try to invent quadrupeds—I didn’t think of it—but I invented a new tree in the manor’s orchard, that’s already something!

Are you in favor of protecting nature?

The protection of certain rare animals is an excellent thing; it becomes absurd when ignorance or pedantry joins in. It’s perfectly right to report a curio seller who collects for sale to amateurs a remarkable moth, the French race of a Spanish species, one of whose colonies risks extinction in the valley of the Durance, where these merchants go to harvest this beautiful creature’s caterpillars on a common conifer. But it is absurd when a gamekeeper forbids an old naturalist to move about with his old net in a restricted area where a certain butterfly flies, whose sole food plant is the bladder senna—which means nothing to the gamekeeper—a bush with yellow flowers and large pods, which often grows around vineyards. Wherever the bush is, the butterfly can also be found, and it’s the bush that should be protected, since a million collectors could not destroy this sky-blue insect if only the vineyardists stopped destroying, for some mysterious reason, the bladder sennas in their vineyards all along the Rhone.

In other cases the rarity of species varies with the seasons or else depends on a more or less sustained series of migrations. Farmers with their infernal pesticides, the cretins who burn tires and mattresses on no man’s land—these are the real culprits, and not the scientist, without whom a policeman could not tell a butterfly from an angel or a bat.

Do you like football?

Yes, I’ve always adored the sport. I was goalie at school in Russia, at university in England, and in a team of White Russians in Berlin in the thirties. We played against very shady German workers, whom my Trinity College sweater annoyed. My last memory is from 1936. After a collision in the mud, I woke up on a pavilion cot. I had held the ball, I’d held it well, I still held it against my chest while impatient hands were trying to tear it from me.

You wrote this marvelous novel The Luzhin Defense: are you a very good chess player? And what do you think of Fischer’s attitude?

Forty years ago I was a good enough player of chess, not a grandmaster, as the Germans say, but a club player sometimes able to set a trap for a heedless champion. What has always drawn me in chess is the trick move, the hidden combination, and that’s why I gave up live play to devote myself to composing chess problems.

I don’t doubt that there exists an intimate link between certain mirages of my prose and the texture, at once brilliant and obscure, of enigmagic chess problems of which each one is the fruit of a thousand and one nights of insomnia. I especially like so-called suicide problems, where White forces Black to win.

Yes, Fischer is a strange being, but there’s nothing abnormal in the fact of a chess player’s not being normal. There was the case of the great player Rubinstein, at the start of the century: an ambulance would drive him each day from the insane asylum, his home, to the café room where the tournament was taking place, and then drive him back to his dark cell after the game. He didn’t like to see his opponent, but an empty chair across the chessboard also irritated him, so they put a mirror there, and he saw his own reflection.

You don’t seem to appreciate Freud?

That’s not completely right. I appreciate Freud greatly as a comic author. The explanations he offers of the emotions and the dreams of his patients are incredible burlesque. I don’t know how one could take them seriously. Enough about him, please.

Political writers aren’t your bedside reading?

I am often asked whom I like and whom I hate among the politically committed or politically detached writers of my marvelous century. Well, first of all, I don’t care at all for the writer who does not see the wonders of this century, little things—the free-and-easiness of male attire, the bathroom that has replaced the foul lavabo—and great things like the sublime liberty of thought in our double West, and the moon, the moon. I remember with what a shiver of delight, envy, and anguish I watched on the television screen man’s first floating steps on the talcum powder of our satellite and how I despised all those who maintained it wasn’t worth the expense of billions of dollars to walk in the dust of a dead world. So I detest, therefore, engagé scandalmongers, writers without mystery, the unfortunates who feed on the Viennese charlatan’s elixirs. Those I love, on the other hand, are those who know, as I know, that words alone are the real value of a masterpiece, a principle as old as it is true. I don’t need to name anyone. One can be recognized by a language of signs through signs of language; or else, on the other hand, everything irritates us in the style of a contemptible contemporary, even his ellipses.

I am told you don’t like Faulkner. I find that hard to believe.

I don’t support regional literature, artificial folklore.

You play a lot with words? You make lots of puns?

One must draw everything one can from words, because it’s the one real treasure a true writer has. Big general ideas are in yesterday’s newspaper. If I like to take a word and turn it over to see its underside, shiny or dull or adorned with motley hues absent on its upperside, it’s not at all out of idle curiosity, one finds all sorts of curious things by studying the underside of a word—unexpected shadows of other words, harmonies between them, hidden beauties that suddenly reveal something beyond the word. Serious wordplay, as I have in mind, is neither a game of chance nor a mere embellishment of style. It’s a new verbal species that the marveling author offers to the poor reader, who doesn’t want to look; to the good reader, who suddenly sees a completely new facet of an iridescent sentence.

Can I say of Vladimir Nabokov the novelist that he has the erudition of a scientist and the irony of a painter?

The “erudition of a scientist,” OK. There’s a little corner of entomological taxonomy where I used to know everything, where I was a complete master, in the forties at the Harvard Museum. But “the irony of a painter”? Irony is the method of discussion that Socrates used to confound invented sophists—and I can’t take Socrates seriously. By extension, irony is a bitter laugh. But, really, my laughter is a good-natured fizz that’s as much of the belly as the brain.