On Montreux
It’s a town I love dearly, and for many reasons: it’s beautiful, welcoming, and good to work in, and in fact the action of a part of my new book takes place in this area. My wife and I love walking. The arrangement of the flowers along the path from Territet to Clarens is the work of an artist. I like thinking of all the English and Russian poets and prose writers who went walking here, leaving the imprint of their imagination on the scenery after having drawn on it themselves. But let me add that it would be very sad if this delightful area began to be spoiled. It’s perhaps useless to protest against the noise in our narrow streets, but really the trucks—immense, double, triple, sometimes transporting a whole forest or a landslide, these grotesque and dangerous monsters—there needs to be (it’s my nerves talking) a special tunnel made for them under the road or the lake. And, besides, people drive too fast through the town, far faster than through American towns, where there are more policemen, inexorable judges of speed.
Something else: I was speaking of this to Henri Jaton on Radio Romande, four years ago. It’s the question of milk. Oh, it’s not the quality that’s at issue, it’s always excellent. But why isn’t it sold anymore in bottles, but in cartons of a more or less pyramid shape? That’s perhaps very good as a masterpiece of abstract art, this sharp-pointed breast, this female pharaoh’s mammary. But, to handle this rickety contraption with a multisided surface and a secret elasticity, one should live in a world of four or five dimensions, a space on an inclined plane. I’m told that bottles are difficult to wash, but they’ve been washed for centuries, since we’ve been mammals.
On the local birdlife
I especially like the choughs which come for the winter from the high mountains. Coracia graculus in Latin, Alpine Chough in English, alpiyskaya klushitsa in Russian. With their black plumage and their pointed yellow beaks, they resemble a croaking and comical cross between a crow and a blackbird. At dawn I hear their wet whistles on the hotel’s balconies. On sunny days, they execute magnificent maneuvers, aerial acrobatics in the grand style. Then, at sunset, they pass like a whirlwind of crows to swoop down, for the night, on the poplars on the shore.
It’s in the cold season, too, that the lake tribe is very visible. My favorite creature there is the biggest of the three or four grebes, the crested grebe, khokhlataya chomga in Russian. I like to see a couple of these birds face one another like two closed parentheses, shaking their fine bronzed tufts with a jerk like a dog tormented by a freakish collar. There’s nothing more amusing in the aquatic line than the way a grebe begins to sink, affecting a certain sad dignity, before diving, suddenly, in a quick agile somersault, showing its fish-glossy belly. I also like the common coot, which Montreusiens misname the poule d’eau (moorhen), its cousin. Its head shake when it swims is as funny as the white flanks of the black duck, called tufted duck, which swims carrying under its arms one of those long flat cartons they sell ties in.
I’m fairly indifferent to our rieuses [black-headed gulls], which wear black masks for the annual ball, and whose droppings are their thanks for the alms they’re given. And I detest the yellow plush on the dirty neck of our mute and unpleasant swan, which carries one of its rubber feet across its back when it glides on the water with a perfectly classic banality.
On his Russian fiction
My Russian novels published in Berlin or Paris circulated only among émigré readers, and the success I enjoyed was international only insofar as my readers were scattered in every country of the world—including some clandestine and courageous readers in the depths of Russia, where a few copies of my books have sneaked in.
On sales
I confess I wasn’t interested in commercial success, that’s to say, I have never sought to push my books, although I am enchanted to be well paid.
On his new book
It’s almost five years that I have been working on the most arduous and audacious novel I have ever attempted: Ada or Ardor.
* “Vladimir Nabokov n’aime pas qu’on l’appelle ‘le père de Lolita’ ” (“Vladimir Nabokov Does Not Like Being Called ‘Lolita’s Father’ ”), La Tribune de Genève, suppl., Tribune Arts/Jeunes, Oct. 25, 1967, 1. Emended typescript with VN’s manuscript corrections, Sept. 23, 1967, VNA Berg.