First, sir, to spare you irritation, I wonder if you will instruct me in the pronunciation of your name.
Let me put it this way. There exists a number of deceptively simple-looking Russian names, whose spelling and pronunciation present the foreigner with strange traps. The name Suvarov took a couple of centuries to lose the preposterous middle “a”—it should be Suvorov. American autograph-seekers, while professing a knowledge of all my books—prudently not mentioning their titles—rejuggle the vowels of my name in all the ways allowed by mathematics. “Nabakav” is especially touching for the “a”s. Pronunciation problems fall into a less erratic pattern. On the playing fields of Cambridge, my football team used to hail me as “Nabkov” or, facetiously, “Macnab.” New Yorkers reveal their tendency of turning “o” into “ah” by pronouncing my name “Nabarkov.” The aberration, “Nobokov,” is a favorite one of postal officials; now the correct Russian way would take too much time to explain, and so I’ve settled for the euphonious “Nabokov,” with the middle syllable accented and rhyming with “smoke.”1 Would you like to try?
Mr. Nabokov.
That’s right.
You grant interviews on the understanding that they shall not be spontaneous. This admirable method ensures there will be no dull patches. Can you tell me why and when you decided upon it?
I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect—or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author and I speak like a child.
You’ve been a writer all your life. Can you evoke for us the earliest stirring of the impulse?
I was a boy of fifteen, the lilacs were in full bloom; I had read Pushkin and Keats; I was madly in love with a girl of my age, I had a new bicycle (an Enfield, I remember) with reversible handlebars that could turn it into a racer. My first poems were awful, but then I reversed those handlebars, and things improved. It took me, however, ten more years to realize that my true instrument was prose—poetic prose, in the special sense that it depended on comparisons and metaphors to say what it wanted to say. I spent the years 1925 to 1940 in Berlin, Paris, and the Riviera, after which I took off for America. I cannot complain of neglect on the part of any great critics, although as always and everywhere there was an odd rascal or two badgering me. What has amused me in recent years is that those old novels and stories published in English in the sixties and seventies, were appreciated much more warmly than they had been in Russian thirty years ago.
Has your satisfaction in the act of writing ever fluctuated? I mean is it keener now or less keen than once it was?
Keener.
Why?
Because the ice of experience now mingles with the fire of inspiration.
Apart from the pleasure it brings, what do you conceive your task as a writer to be?
This writer’s task is the purely subjective one of reproducing as closely as possible the image of the book he has in his mind. The reader need not know, or, indeed, cannot know, what the image is, and so cannot tell how closely the book has conformed to its image in the author’s mind. In other words, the reader has no business bothering about the author’s intentions, nor has the author any business trying to learn whether the consumer likes what he consumes.
Of course, the author works harder than the reader does; but I wonder whether it augments his—this is to say, your—pleasure that he makes the reader work hard, too.
The author is perfectly indifferent to the capacity and condition of the reader’s brain.
Could you give us some idea of the pattern of your working day?
This pattern has lately become blurry and inconstant. At the peak of the book, I worked all day, cursing the tricks that objects play upon me, the mislaid spectacles, the spilled wine. I also find talking of my working day far less entertaining than I formerly did.
The conventional view of an hotel is as of a temporary shelter—one brings one’s own luggage, after all—yet you choose to make it permanent.
I have toyed on and off with the idea of buying a villa. I can imagine the comfortable furniture, the efficient burglar alarms, but I am unable to visualize an adequate staff. Old retainers require time to get old, and I wonder how much of it there still is at my disposal.
You once entertained the possibility of returning to the United States. I wonder if you will.
I will certainly return to the United States at the first opportunity. I’m indolent, I’m sluggish, but I’m sure I’ll go back with tenderness. The thrill with which I think of certain trails in the Rockies is only matched by visions of my Russian woods, which I will never revisit.
Is Switzerland a place with positive advantages for you, or is it simply a place without positive disadvantages?
The winters can be pretty dismal here, and my old borzoi2 has developed feuds with lots of local dogs, but otherwise it’s all right.
You think and write in three languages—which would be the preferred one?
Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. The matter of preference does not really arise. Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language. During the second part of my life, it was generally English, my own brand of English—not the Cambridge variety, but still English.
At any point do you invite your wife to comment on work in progress?
When the book is quite finished, and its fair copy is still warm and wet, my wife goes carefully through it. Her comments are usually few but invariably to the point.
Do you find that you reread your own earlier work, and if you do, with what feelings?
Rereading my own works is a purely utilitarian business. I have to do it when correcting a paperback edition riddled with misprints or controlling a translation, but there are some rewards. In certain species—this is going to be a metaphor—in certain species, the wings of the pupated butterfly begin to show in exquisite miniature through the wing cases of the chrysalis a few days before emergence. It is the pathetic sight of an iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties. Suddenly, through a drab photograph, a blush of color, an outline of form, seems to be distinguishable. I’m saying this with absolute scientific modesty, not with the smugness of aging art.
Which writers are you currently reading with pleasure?
I’m rereading Rimbaud, his marvelous verse and his pathetic correspondence in the Pléiade edition. I am also dipping into a collection of unbelievably stupid Soviet jokes.
Your praise for Joyce and Wells has been high. Could you identify briefly the quality in each which sets them apart?
Joyce’s Ulysses is set apart from all modern literature, not only by the force of his genius, but also by the novelty of his form. Wells is a great writer, but there are many writers as great as he.
Your distaste for the theories of Freud has sometimes sounded to me like the agony of one betrayed, as though the old magus had once fooled you with his famous three-card trick. Were you ever a fan?
What a bizarre notion! Actually I always loathed the Viennese quack. I used to stalk him down dark alleys of thought, and now we shall never forget the sight of old, flustered Freud seeking to unlock his door with the point of his umbrella.
The world knows that you are also a lepidopterist but may not know what that involves. In the collection of butterflies, could you describe the process from pursuit to display?
Only common butterflies, showy moths from the tropics, are put on display in a dusty case between a primitive mask and a vulgar abstract picture. The rare, precious stuff is kept in the glazed drawers of museum cabinets. As for pursuit, it is, of course, ecstasy to follow an undescribed beauty, skimming over the rocks of its habitat, but it is also great fun to locate a new species among the broken insects in an old biscuit tin sent over by a sailor from some remote island.
One can always induce a mild vertigo by recalling that Joyce might not have existed as the writer but as the tenor. Have you any sense of having narrowly missed some other role? What substitute could you endure?
Oh, yes, I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grandmaster, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings—Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada—which my heirs discover and publish.
Alberto Moravia told me of his conviction that each writer writes only of one thing—has but a single obsession he continually develops. Can you agree?
I have not read Alberto Moravia but the pronouncement you quote is certainly wrong in my case. The circus tiger is not obsessed by his torturer, my characters cringe as I come near with my whip. I have seen a whole avenue of imagined trees losing their leaves at the threat of my passage. If I do have any obsessions I’m careful not to reveal them in fictional form.
Mr. Nabokov, thank you.
You’re welcome, as we say in my adopted country.
* “A Blush of Colour—Nabokov in Montreux,” The Listener, March 24, 1977, 367, 369. Television interview for the BBC-2 Book Programme. VN received questions on Feb. 3, 1977, had answers ready by Feb. 6, and was filmed in Montreux on Feb. 14. His severe ill health had made composing The Original of Laura agonizingly slow and patchy, and he wrote in his diary on Feb. 6: “answered with pleasure and entrain the 24 BBC questions.” After VN’s death, Robinson recalled the scene, describing his frailty, and reprinted the interview, in “The Last Interview,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 119–25.