109 Interview with M.V. for Journal de Montreux (1964)*

Of all your books, which do you love most?

It’s usually the latest. Therefore: Pale Fire. But it’s also the one that took the most work, the one that let me approach closest to the first idea of its creation. Lolita is a child who has given me a lot of trouble. I don’t love her any the less for that.

I invented her. She existed somewhere in the world, perhaps, but not in literature. Ever since my novel first appeared, she has started to live and be seen—for example, if you open the columns of American and Italian dictionaries, where she designates what she is: a girl prematurely depraved.

Do you think the film brought something to the written work?

Absolutely not. Film adaptation has necessarily simplified the vision and the idea of my book.

But I loved the film, which I’ve seen three or four times. James Mason and Sue Lyon play their roles well.

Montreux?

We enjoy Montreux very much, and we like its situation, the play of colors in every season, the houses stepping in tiers down to the lake. And then so many writers lived here, Byron, Rousseau, not to mention Casanova….

From here I can have close contact with my publishers about translations that I have to supervise. Just one complaint: the dangerous and intolerable traffic on the cantonal highway.

What are your favorite occupations outside your work as a writer?

Entomology first of all. I hunt butterflies in summer, I classify them in my collections in winter. But also reading my favorite authors, as dear to my heart when they’re French or English as when they’re Russian: Flaubert, Ronsard, La Fontaine, Senancour (an author too little known who wrote, around 1830, in the Journal of his life, splendid descriptions of the Alps); among the moderns, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Joyce, without forgetting the finest poets in the world, the English, starting with Shakespeare. And of course Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Pushkin, whose life has been the focus of a large work of mine I’ve been preparing for years.