Have you thought about a vocation as a writer since childhood, or did it happen by chance?
No, I think I was born like that, a precocious genius, a wunderkind. Besides, all children have genius, but circumstances often stifle them, and sometimes encourage them. I’ve been at work in literature since I was very small. I remember vividly that at age five in St. Petersburg, where I was born, I would tell myself stories in bed or while playing, all sorts of stories, mainly heroic adventures. There’d be a whole procession of images traipsing around me and through me. And then, at ten, I started writing poetry in English, in Russian, in French. I belong to the breed of prose writers who debut as poets, and who pass a long period of apprenticeship in writing poems before writing prose, a prose not poetic, but based on poetic disciplines, having so to speak the woof of poetry.
You learned French as a child?
Yes, at six, I think. I had a French governess who lived in our family from 1905 to World War I. She was a Swiss woman, from Vevey, Cécile Miauton.
Whom do you write for?
I must say, I have never been interested in commercial success; in other words, I’ve never sought to push my books. I’ve never written except for a single reader, Mr. Nabokov, for him alone. I have a vague impression that my first English books, written and published in the United States—books like The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or the story of Professor Pnin—found readers here and there, for intellectual life in America has an incomparable intensity and variety, but I didn’t pay much attention to this little plashing of gray glory. Then, when I published my Lolita (almost ten years ago), I was at first surprised by its success. To tell the truth, I sometimes think that people buy this book for reasons not artistic, but, how shall I put it, erotic, but all this doesn’t concern me, although I’m very comfortable that this lovely child is made so much of.
What are you working on now?
My workshop is one for my translations and proofs—dismal games, to tell the truth. Writers of the past didn’t know the miseries of the translation supervised by the author. People started translating me from Russian into German and French almost forty years ago, but now, over the last few years, the Tower of Babel babbles and burbles louder and louder.
And finally, as an extra treat, it’s almost a year now that I’ve been working on the most difficult novel I have ever tried to write. I don’t want to say more for the moment.
* Radio interview for Radio Suisse Romande, Lausanne, taped on Oct. 5, 1963. Emended typescript with VN manuscript revisions and additions, in French, VNA Berg.