On his Russian fiction
My artificial but beautifully exact Russian world.
On his goal-keeping at Trinity College, Cambridge
I had the Mediterranean, prima-donna style, out of place in England.
On the U.S.A.
It’s such a receptive country. Lolita went to four publishers who turned it down in horror—there had been all that fuss over Edmund Wilson’s Hecate County1—then, of course, it came out in Paris in the Olympia Press edition. But it was able to be published in America finally, because critics of Trilling’s caliber have helped to create the climate of opinion over there. You feel they really have some influence.
On dialogue
I have no ear for dialogue, you know. Yes, I managed the American rhythms in the end in Lolita, but it was exacting work. I’d be at sea if I had to do, oh, Dorsetshire farmers, or Londoners even, even harder—London is very difficult. The hardest of all for me now, of course, would be two Soviet farmers. Yes, the language has changed a great deal. It is Basic Russian now; provincial.
On influences
English writers who have moved my pen to the right or left? No one, really. I don’t believe in movements. But, of course, I enormously admire Shakespeare, Keats—not Shelley, not Swinburne.
Favorite works?
The literary achievements that most satisfy me now are a paper I wrote on South American Blue Butterflies2—and Lolita.
* “Nabokov,” Spectator, Nov. 6, 1959, 619.