What do you consider your top three stories?
The leading troika is represented by “Ozero, oblako, bashnya” (“Cloud, Castle, Lake”), “The Vane Sisters” and “Vesna v Fialte” (“Spring in Fialta”). They express exactly what I intended and do so with the greatest prismatic glamour my art is capable of.
In your lectures at Cornell you spoke of the novelist as being part entertainer, teacher and enchanter.
I spoke of a Generalized Novelist. My own novels and stories lack the didactic element and do not aim particularly at entertaining the reader; and some of my plots and worlds are held together by magic alone.
Should we see the short story as a genre distinct from the novel?
Many widespread species of Lepidoptera produce small, but not necessarily stunted, races above timberline. In relation to the typical novel the short story represents a small Alpine, or Polar, form. It looks different but is conspecific with the novel and is linked to it by intermediate clines.
What to you is an exemplary story? In our conversation, for example, you praised Zamiatin’s “Peshchera” (“The Cave”) and Olesha’s “Vishnevaia kostochka” (“The Cherry Pit”).
An “exemplary” short story (such as “Dama s sobachkoy” [“The Lady with the Little Dog”], “Metamorphosis” [“Die Verwandlung”], “Vesna v Fialte” [“Spring in Fialta”] and those you mention) is physically a slim book and biologically a diminutive novel.
Is your process of composing stories different from that of composing novels?
My short stories are produced in exactly the same way as my novels. The latter take a longer time, that’s all. On the average a story of ten pages takes me a fortnight to compose, a novel of 200 pages about one year.
What do you think of the modern experimental story?
I have never quite understood the term “experimental.” The other day I bought a collection of modern “experimental” stories: and all of them—though written in staccato rhythms, with dirty words and fine ideas—were utterly banal and stale.
Although critics seem to agree parody is important in your work, there seems little parody in your Russian short stories, with some notable exceptions, perhaps because parody may be more effective and better sustained in longer prose writings than in a short story.
Yes, that’s right. But, then, I’m not sure that “parody” is such a central character in all my novels. For instance Pale Fire is a very direct, realistic tale.
Have you stopped writing stories?
I am often tempted to compose a short story. Now and then a very complete image of one flashes before me, quivers for a moment, and is firmly dismissed. I wish to conserve my energy for ampler tasks; old age is cautious and thrifty.
Are the challenges and pleasures of short-story writing different?
No, the same pangs, the same pleasures.
Field states (Nabokov: His Life in Art, p.115) that “Pis’mo v Rossia” (“A Letter That Never Reached Russia”) “was announced as a chapter from a novel with the rather unNabokovian title Happiness.” Would you care to verify this?
Quite right. I planned an epistolary novel. I don’t recall what happened in it or to it.
Would you care to comment on any or all of these writers you referred to, and mention any stories by them which you admire?
1 Pushkin 2 Gogol 3 Leskov 4 Chekhov 5 Ilf & Petrov 6 Zoshchenko 7 Zamiatin 8 Bunin 9 Andreev 10 Poe 11 Hawthorne 12 Hemingway 13 Salinger.
1. “Pistol Shot.” 2. “The Carrick” (“Shinel’ ”). 3. ? 4. “Dama s sobachkoy” (“The Lady with the Little Dog”). 5 & 6. No special favorites. 7. “Peshchera” (“The Cave”). 8. “Lyogkovoe dïkhanie” (“Light Breathing”). 9. The one about the happy jailbird.1 10. A pleasant blur. 11. Same 12. “The Killers.” 13. Etc. no comment re the quick.
What are your current literary plans?
The correcting of the French translation of Ada has confused my schedule. I hope to finish the new novel sometime next year. My collection of nonfiction will include mainly interviews, reviews, rejoinders, letters and various odds and ends. I have not yet reread my old lectures but I know that I will not reprint my Bleak House, Ulysses and Mansfield Park lectures.
* “Vladimir Nabokov and the Short Story,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1991), 68–72. Typescript and manuscript, VNA Berg. Parker, a former student of VN’s at Cornell, by then an academic Slavist, and one of the first to write a Ph.D. thesis on VN, was working on a project on VN as short-story writer. He stayed with VN from April 19 to 21, 1971, then sent questions by mail. VN sent his answers on Oct. 22, 1971.