On his butterfly passion
There’s a butterfly in each one of my novels, you know. Someday I’d like to have a special institute for breeding a certain genus of butterflies. They’re a North American kind, though, that live on special breeds of violets. I’d like to see them through their lives from the time they’re caterpillars.
“And every now and then he wants to write a book about butterflies,” Mrs. Nabokov interjected.
Among reasons for living in Switzerland
…for Pale Fire, I needed a little France and a little Switzerland. It’s a book with a kind of European streak or strain in it.
It’s a rather complicated book, and it’s very difficult to say anything about it in a few words, but it’s a combination of scholarly work, a poem, and a mystery thriller. The novel itself is the commentary to a poem of about 1,000 lines written by an Atlantic Seaboard poet; and the commentator is his colleague in an American university. There is also an imaginary kingdom called Zembla involved in the book, and that, of course, I had to create. That was the reason it was useful being in Europe. I had to create Zembla out of the rejects of other countries—small countries, large countries—mostly northern countries.
I have a lot of index cards and files and I gradually collected certain details pertaining to various countries which hung together, zoological, geographical details. I’ve been doing that for two years.
Explaining his Eugene Onegin project
It’s the most famous Russian novel. But it’s never been adequately translated into English. It was written in the early 19th century. It all started because I wanted my students to have an adequate translation of it in class, and then my wife said, “Why don’t you translate it?” and the Guggenheim people liked it. It’s to be published by the Bollingen Press in four volumes. When did they say it would come out, darling?
“They promised it in 1963,” Mrs. Nabokov said.
How do I write? I write whenever I feel like it. I write in longhand, on index cards—sometimes I do my writing on a bench in the garden; in the park; in a car. I always write in pencil with an eraser. When the whole thing is one gray smudge I tear it up and make a fair copy. All the cards go to the Library of Congress, and they cannot be consulted for 50 years.
For whom do I write? I write for the good reader. And you know, I have had some wonderful readers. Some of my readers have read my books better than I have written them. They’re wonderful people. And it hasn’t been just Lolita they’ve written about. Even more wrote about Invitation to a Beheading.
“My favorite letter,” Mrs. Nabokov interjected, “was from a boy of 13 or 14 who gave a list of his questions.”
And you saw he was a real reader. To be a real reader, you have to reread a book. The first time, a book is new. It may be strange. Actually, it is only the second reading that matters.
On languages and literatures
…The trouble with French literature has been that in the 18th century, for example, poetry was a beautiful dead fish. The general was substituted for the specific. It’s a good point in logic to take the general and not the specific, but for the writer, it meant you couldn’t use the word “beetle,” you had to say “insect.”
It has always puzzled me, too, why Italy has not produced more first rate writing. I don’t know why English has been so successful. Perhaps it’s a luckier language. There are more words in it. The flexibility of the vocabulary is great.
* “Vladimir Nabokov Likes to Hunt Butterflies in Switzerland’s Valais,” in unidentified English newspaper, May 1962[?]. The reporter sets the scene: “Vladimir Nabokov is getting impatient these days for summer to begin in earnest so that he can be off to hunt butterflies in the Valais”; Pale Fire seems not to have been published yet, and VN would be in New York on June 5, just after Pale Fire’s publication, for the launch of Kubrick’s film of Lolita. From a clipping in the files of VN’s younger friend and Harvard lepidopterological colleague, Charles Remington, without date, author, or source of publication. Some of the answers overlap with those Meras cites in the preceding interview, suggesting she conducted this interview, too. Remington had suggested the newspaper was perhaps the Christian Science Monitor, but the spellings and the language (“then went to the United States”) indicate a British source.