Could you tell us what you know about a new book before you start writing?
They used to say of a bad writer, of a smearer of paper, that he put “white on black.” But in a subtler sense that’s just what I do, when a book of which I still have only an abstract sense (although I know it exists already as an unexplored mountain or an undescribed flower exists somewhere) appears to me like a dark space that I lighten up here and there to reveal the design that’s there.
Do you create first your heroes, who then live in a certain context, or do you work on a whole that then gives rise to the characters?
In the totalitarian state of art as I conceive it, all my heroes are perfectly equal among themselves, and besides they have no more artistic importance than the objects and the animals surrounding them. The nuance of a wave interests me as much as the girl drowning in it.
Do you do research for your books? What sort of documentation do you use?
That depends on the book. Lolita, for example, required a lot of research—from books, of course—on the physical and psychological development of American schoolgirls. I like precise detail and rare information. For Pale Fire, I drew a few handfuls of old jewels from Scandinavian folklore. For Ada, I studied orchids. It’s always exact knowledge that attracts me, and not the general idea or philosophism in fashion.
Can you tell us what the finished book represents for you in relation to the initial project?
I ask myself first of all if the reflection remains faithful to the ray; if I have indeed followed the contour of the initial vision. The correspondence seems very indifferent in my first works; but in my last three or four novels I keep closer to the ideal, and in opening Pale Fire or Ada I feel a shiver of tenderness one would have to be very foolish or very honest to admit.
How does a day of work unfold for Monsieur Nabokov when he works on a new novel?
I swallow a fruit juice at 6:00 a.m., shave, and, standing at my old lectern, write until 10:30. Then I take my bath. Over lunch, my wife and I watch our favorite program on television (Jacques Martin and his little Danièle1). Then I return to the lectern or have a little siesta. It can be that I work until dinner, but never later than 7:00 p.m.
Do readers, the audience of your books, have a face for you? Is this audience present in some sense for you as you write?
The face is only mine. In other words, the circle of my good readers is very small. Their attention touches me. Flat and peevish criticism leaves me indifferent.
Why do you live in Switzerland?
I love mountains. I love the butterflies of the Valais and the Grisons. I love the Swiss air, as many Russian writers, by the way, have loved it: Karamzin, who got down from his Berlin coach to kiss “the soil of freedom”; Zhukovsky, who translated into fine Russian verse an English tourist’s rather mediocre “Prisoner of Chillon”; Gogol, who at Clarens only detested the poor little lizards he would thwack with his walking stick; Tolstoy, finally, who courted the hotel maids, as he reports, with certain regrets, in his private journal.
Do you take part in social and political life? From what point of view? How do you keep yourself informed?
I do not. I have never in my life signed a declaration or belonged to an organization. I think I am the least “engagé” man in “our time.” I’m not even sure that “our time” means something.
What do you think of the young who almost everywhere are breaking freer and freer from traditional and institutional life and trying hard to find new or “different” ways of life?
I think that the young who almost everywhere imitate American youth are everywhere what they have always been. Far from breaking free of traditional life, the young you mention show a comic conformism in forming groups, essentially petit-bourgeois in their hatred of real freedom of spirit—which in fact is nourished by concrete and hard-won knowledge and not by Chinese commonplaces.2
What do you think of efforts to enlarge the field of our sensibility and experience? What do you think of drugs?
Drugs are as degrading as drunkenness. The hallucinations that they arouse ruin health while remaining at the level of the hypnagogic kaleidoscope too well known to the healthy but overworked brain, or of these insipid mirages of mystical neurosis that go back to the Middle Ages. One must be very stupid to follow a fashion which only those whose task is to destroy the mental resistance of still-free nations could approve.
Could you tell us what in your opinion is the meaning of an artist’s work for himself and for his public?
For me? Pleasure. For my best readers? Pleasure, again. For the average reader? A painful suspicion that perhaps literature isn’t what he thought it was.
* For “Swiss newspapers,” but no publication details known. Typescript questions and answers, in French, VNA Berg, and Diary, VNA Berg. VN dated his answers to Riklin’s questions Jan. 5, 1970, and met Riklin for the interview on Jan. 25.