You have defined yourself as a very moral writer. Your literary fame, however, has been established by what has been regarded as a highly immoral novel—about an elderly gentleman loving a girl named Lolita. In Ada, incest is added to child-love. I believe you will want to do away with this apparent contradiction?
If an author’s moralistic intent can be seen as his personal shadow passing through his fiction, mixing with the flora and fauna of the book, then my books are shadowless. I do not preach, and I do not take part in the pastimes of my characters. The morality of my works lies in the art of my works. If their art is good, so are their morals. I realize, of course, that when a novel contains criminal scenes some readers experience an intolerable itch of trying to puzzle out if the author commits similar acts in his spare time. Curiosity is one of the most banal human traits but not everybody is as fortunate as Bluebeard’s last wife. In this connection I can recall a Dutch critic’s conjecturing a few years ago that I castigate Freud out of fear that Freudians might find in my fiction “symbols” divulging secrets of my private life. An interesting idea.
Why is Ada set on a slanted reflection of earth called Antiterra, not on earth itself?
The timetable of Terra differs from that of Antiterra. Some events come earlier, others later, others again do not come at all; and what’s more the fate of this or that Empire on the other planet does not conform to our schedule. What is there so strange after all for a novelist to set up a world unlike the so-called “real” one? The Venice and Denmark of Shakespeare are fantastic realms made to fit his fantastic heroes and their even more fantastic attendants.
Why did you make the beginning so difficult for the reader—with all those ghostlike appearances and disappearances of ancestors?
Genealogical matters occupy less than two pages in the beginning of the book and are preceded by a perfectly clear family tree. I know exactly what scares and irritates the reader: it is the fact that the exotic Russian names in those first pages are impossible for him to pronounce and since so many unfortunate people move their lips when reading, they cannot help stumbling over “Prince Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or,” etc.
Ada abounds in puns, in allusions, in wordplay of all sorts, forcing the reader to suspect anagrams or the like in every line….Would you care to say whether this is just exuberant verbal imagination, or whether your way of treating language has another meaning.
This is greatly exaggerated. If you count the pages with no wordplay, with not a single anagram or pun, you will see that the number of such pages is vastly superior to the number of those where a firework of words celebrates an especially important scene.
In your works there is a definite clair-obscur: there are characters you are fond of, others which you loathe as morons or rogues. Your strong opinions on what you detest in life and in literature have earned you the reputation of being harsh and cold. Would you admit there is such a dualism? How do you explain it? Wouldn’t you say that dismissing most of mankind as innately vulgar, stupid and cruel means condemning everything to stay as it is?
Your words reflect a grave misconception. How can an artist be said to “dismiss most of mankind as vulgar, stupid and cruel”? When mankind does not inhabit his novels, which are populated by purely imaginary, invented beings whose fate is quite unconnected with that of “humanity” in the ordinary sense of the word? I also object to your accusation of my making my characters either completely good or completely bad. Lolita is a pathetic child and not only a depraved nymphet. Ada herself is a combination of a marvelous mind, tender emotions, animality and heartlessness.
Do you see yourself as old-fashioned or a modern writer?
An “old-fashioned” author may mean an author who uses stock situations, ready-made types and verbal clichés. It can also mean a writer who is above fashions and is, in fact, a jolly good writer, like, say, Sterne, or Flaubert, or Kafka. I dislike those vague schoolman terms and thus could not say, without a lot of marginal remarks, if anyone in his right mind is able to define me as either “old-fashioned” or “modern.” The term “modern,” which I suppose shades into “modernistic” and “avant-garde” in all arts, is the last refuge of ambitious mediocrity. In a similar sense the sheep of our cities, illiterate young people drifting through life, tend to join the most “extreme” political groups and hasten to take part in protest marches. No, let us leave “modernism” out of real literature.
* “Titel, Thesen, Temperamente” (“Titles, Theses, Temperaments”), Hessischer Rundfunk (Frankfurt), television broadcast, Oct. 3, 1974. Manuscript index cards, emended typescript with VN’s manuscript corrections, in English, VNA Berg. For the German publication of Ada. Questions sent Sept. 9, 1974, answers ready for day of filming in Montreux, Sept. 29, 1974. VN also read a paragraph from the end of pt. 2, chap. 8 of Ada, p. 409 in the first edition.