How can you reconcile the sense of perfect harmony that you experience when you are alone in a forest among the trees, in contact with nature, with the “micro-aggression” and the scientific pedantry of the entomologist who doesn’t limit himself to looking at the butterflies, but kills, collects, and classifies them?
First of all, let me say to you that to enjoy a thing you have to see and know the thing. A man who walks alone, as you say, “in a forest among the trees” will not see a single butterfly (there is too much shade) if I, who do know them, do not point out to him the moth whose wing pattern blends with the arabesques of the bark to which it clings. I do not know how one can call the knowledge of natural objects or the vocabulary of nature “pedantry.” Is it the relative smallness of an insect that makes entomology seem comic to the layman? For, on the other hand, everyone can distinguish a cat from a lion or a leopard, and no one finds catalogues of rare books ridiculous. Not only do we collect butterflies, but we also examine under the microscope their minuscule organs, whose form serves to classify the animal more surely than the colors of its wings. And, believe me, the emotion of recognizing in an alpine meadow the butterfly which one knows to be different from another and whose special behavior one observes—this emotion is a feeling whose science side and art side join in an apex of sharp pleasure unknown to the man who goes for a walk under trees he cannot even name.
Can you tell me why, speaking of Vyra,1 you give a sense of languishing for a paradise lost, and at the same time you have chosen to live in some hotel? And why have you chosen to spend most of your life in Switzerland?
I don’t doubt that the visa application I made on Monday would produce a veritable sensation among the Soviets and that on Wednesday I would have been received with open arms in Moscow. The first little chill would come when I replied I don’t care a fig for Moscow (where I have never been) any more than for Peking or Liverpool. And why? Old churches and palaces bore me, and I would not recognize the sites of my youth near Leningrad. My memory is the best guardian of my past. I would have refused, with my usual arrogance, to visit museums and factories, and two days later the U.S. ambassador would be making unheard-of and perhaps vain efforts to extricate me from the Soviet dungeons.
If, hypothetically, you hadn’t emigrated and had stayed in Russia, surviving the country’s upheavals, do you think you would also have written something? (I don’t say published, just written.) And would your eventual works have had some analogy with those of today?
The answer is simple: I left Russia in 1919 because otherwise my whole family, including me, would have faced the firing squad of the Bolsheviks who had just invaded Crimea, where my father was minister of justice, member of a regional Cabinet, the last refuge of Russian liberalism. Your hypothesis contains far too many secondary suppositions for me to be able to imagine surviving in the situation of an Olesha or a Bulgakov.2
* “Signor Nabokov, un’altra Lolita?” (“Mr. Nabokov, Another Lolita?”), La stampa, Oct. 30, 1969, 3. Typescript, questions in Italian and French, with typescript of VN’s answers, in French, VNA Berg. VN’s Italian publisher, Mondadori, had repeatedly importuned him to come to Milan for the publication of the Italian translation of Ada. An alternative was set up: a number of journalists and the academic Marina Bulgherini visited him in Montreux on Oct. 30, 1969. He had sent the answers to their written questions by Oct. 24.