What does Lolita mean to you?
The book means to me just what I put into it. It has no special purpose; it has no special message.
If you had been able to foresee Lolita’s reception, would you have still written it?
I don’t think I ever thought what would happen to the book. I dimly surmised that there might be some trouble eventually in finding a publisher, but I also was quite prepared to its not being published at all. I thought that perhaps it might be published with a limited number of readers. But that’s about all.
This wouldn’t have made any difference to your going on with it?
No. I would have gone on; the book had to be written and I would have completed it. It really doesn’t matter one way or another.
Did you intend it as a savage observation of American adolescence?
It was not my intention; it was not my purpose. The book contains, as far as I can see, no deliberate message, and it has no practical purpose, no aims, besides the delights of art. But [readers] of course are welcome to any interpretation they desire.
You weren’t commenting on American society?
No, not at all. And of course there were those statistics, for instance, which this fictional character mentions in his foreword. I really haven’t the vaguest idea if they mean anything in reality; that whole passage is invention—and the whole book is an invention, and in fact America is my invention.
The America in your book seems a very realistic place; one recognizes it.
Well, you recognize it after reading it, you see, after the book—I think that any serious work of fiction, work of art, if you put it this way, does after all perhaps influence people in seeing things a little differently, in seeing colors that they missed before—landscapes that they never really noticed—but I really leave all that to my readers.
When did you start learning English?
English was the fashionable language in the kind of Russian family to which I happen to belong. We had English nurses, English governesses, English tutors; and my first books—the books that were read to me—were English books. In the morning Miss Sheldon would read to me Little Lord Fauntleroy; in the afternoon Mademoiselle Miauton, [my French] governess would read to me Les Misérables. And of course I remember all the pictures in Chums or in the Boys’ Own Paper, and later on there was my father’s library, which was full of English and French books; and I just read and read and read.
English and Russian?
I think that in the long run the English and Russian languages would seem to me the richest languages on earth. Perhaps Russian somewhere, somewhere in me, provokes certain new English forms, and vice versa. My knowledge of English has been seen to influence my Russian even in the old days. This was continuously brought up, that I went to school in England, and that has somehow influenced my Russian style. So it is a kind of intertwining, interlinking influence between the two languages, between these two treasure houses….I speak Russian at home, I speak Russian with my wife, I speak Russian with my son; and all the simple things of life are much easier said in Russian, at least I feel that, than in English. But otherwise I really couldn’t say what I think in English or in Russian, because I generally think in images anyway.
But you’ll go on using English for writing?
Oh yes, I will use it for writing, and I may write something in Russian if I feel that way.
* BBC Radio Newsreel, “Interview with David Holmes,” Nov. 5, 1959, on the eve of the first British publication of Lolita, Nov. 6, 1959. Typescript transcription of telephone interview to VN at Stafford Hotel, London, VNA Berg.