I, the man, am a deeply moral, exquisitely kind, old-fashioned and rather stupid person. I, the writer, am different in every respect. It is the writer who answers your last and best question.
(Interview with Helga Chudacoff, 1974)
Nabokov famously, and infamously, began Strong Opinions, his 1973 selection of his “public prose”: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”1 Think, Write, Speak echoes that pronouncement and that volume, offering a comprehensive selection from his remaining interviews, essays, letters to the editor, and reviews.
Soon after preparing Strong Opinions, Nabokov selected the tales that would go into his fourth English-language volume of stories, by then all being translated from his early Russian fiction, and joked: “There remain two or three broken crackers and some mouseturdies at the bottom of the barrel; otherwise, c’est tout.”2 But what remained of his “public prose” after his selection for Strong Opinions, on the other hand, is not the bottom but the bulk of the barrel.
Much loved by Nabokov’s readers though it is, Strong Opinions was a rushed compromise. Nabokov had recently signed an initially generous-seeming but soon rather onerous eleven-book deal with his new publisher, McGraw-Hill. When the time quickly came to supply yet another volume, he scurried to assemble Strong Opinions from material that was in most cases recent, topical, and ready to hand. The interviews run from 1962 to 1972, the essays and reviews almost all from 1963 to 1972.
Think, Write, Speak selects from all the remainder of Nabokov’s public prose, essays from 1921, letters to the editor from 1926, reviews from 1927, and interviews from 1932. The more than 150 items here do not cover all Nabokov’s uncollected output in these modes. Because his critiques of young and mostly forgotten Russian poets for faults in their versification and imagery mean little to readers without Russian, only one such example has been included, the review of the first volume of poems by Boris Poplavsky—“a far violin among near balalaikas,” as Nabokov would describe him two decades later in Speak, Memory, before admitting that he would never forgive himself for “the ill-tempered review in which I attacked him for trivial faults in his unfledged verse.”3
But almost everything else is here, except for reporters’ scene-setting, which Nabokov excluded from Strong Opinions, for long-winded interview questions, which Nabokov retained there, and for repeated answers to repeated questions, which Nabokov also retained. Not that the same questions do not recur here, too (why Lolita? why Switzerland? why a hotel? how do you write? what’s your daily routine? what language do you think in?), although Nabokov’s answers sometimes offer enough novelty to warrant reproducing, despite partial overlaps. Understandably, his own exasperation at repeated questions became more intense after Strong Opinions, as is explicit in a note to one interviewer (“I thank you for sending me the list of your questions for an interview in the Welt des Buches. You say that ‘in some instances’ similar questions had been set before. That is an understatement”), and as is implicit in his grumpily curt answers to her questions, except for the last one, cited in the epigraph above.
With Strong Opinions as the model, I had expected to order the material generically—interviews, letters to the editor, essays, and reviews—and then chronologically within each genre. But soon a single chronological order came to seem far preferable, allowing the century as well as the person to take a clearer shape. Nearly three items a year over the more than half-century of Nabokov’s adult writing life constitute almost a biography of his career, the rolling shadow of the train of his fiction. They mark the changes in him—a fledgling prosaist, an acclaimed émigré, a dislocated and relocating writer, a reviewer and teacher by necessity, a sudden international success, a recognized master—and the changes in his world, from émigré Berlin at its initial peak to émigré Paris crushed by the German occupation, from reorientation to triumph in America, from a Europe distanced for him, after twenty years, to his own settled perch atop the Montreux Palace Hotel. All the way, indeed, from V. Nabokoff—a Cambridge undergraduate signing himself “Vl. Sirin,” introducing the university, the town, and his own pangs of exile there to an émigré Russian audience recently landed in Western Europe—to “VN,” the world-famous author, but with less than six months to live, gamely trying to look forward to the completion of another novel he probably already suspected he would never finish.
In Nabokov’s public prose, context tends to count much more than it does in the invented worlds of his fiction. Often, the material reflects the stage of his life (his first reading tour to Paris, his arrival in New York, his teaching Russian language at Wellesley or European or Russian literature at Cornell, the publication of Lolita or later books) or the phase of his writing career (his first hostile review, his needing to display his skills to a new French or a new American reading or academic audience, his recently established or now long-assured fame) or the time when the piece was written (the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik coup, the centenary of Pushkin’s death or the recent deaths of friends closer to home, the desperation of Russian émigrés in occupied France, a defense of democracy under assault from dictatorships, Nabokov’s virulent dislike for Germany at war, the social changes of the 1960s). In this public prose, chronology often matters much more than genre, even when Nabokov asserts his independence of his era and his concern for the timeless in human lives.
Not only something of a biography, Think, Write, Speak also offers a new showcase of Nabokov’s variety.
A first essay, signed “Vl. Sirin,” a pseudonym just ten months old but already in print more than thirty times, shows Nabokov, still a student, straddling from the outset the Russian and the Anglophone worlds in his art as in his life. For the Russian émigré audience clustering in Berlin, he evokes Cambridge and the impressions it makes on a fellow exile: its exoticism, even in its homeliness; the reverse exoticism émigrés had for native-born students; the nostalgia he feels there, especially for the Russian soulfulness that he misses in English acquaintances.
In his second essay, he straddles the Russian and English worlds in a different way, while simultaneously straddling both this world and the next. He introduces for a Russian audience what has excited him most in recent English literature, the poetry of Rupert Brooke. He admires his recent Cambridge predecessor most of all for celebrating the everyday from the perspective of an imagined afterlife. Literary scholars tend to think of 1922 in terms of the retrospectively fixed milestones of literary history: in poetry, therefore, The Waste Land. History in the making does not arrive with its later labels, as Nabokov often stresses, in this volume as elsewhere. He would not refer to T. S. Eliot until 1946, and then in a spirit of challenge. He discovered contemporary literature at his own pace and with his own strong dispositions.
Essays three (by “Vladimir V. Nabokoff”) and four (by “V. Cantaboff”) change again, not least in being in English about Russian subject matter. Nabokov wrote them after his father’s assassination in March 1922, and after he had left Cambridge in June and rejoined the remainder of his family in Berlin, by now still more emphatically the center of the burgeoning Russian emigration. There the Russian cabaret Karussel (a pun on “Russian,” “rousse,” “russisch” and German “Karussell”) had presumably approached him to contribute to their magazine: his English, his cosmopolitanism, the intense longing for Russia in his prolific verse made him a perfect person to turn to as a bridge between the Russian cabaret and the Western audience it sought. (Later in the year, Nabokov would start writing sketches for the earliest, most successful and long-lasting of Berlin’s Russian cabarets, Sinyaya Ptitsa, the Bluebird.) These commissioned pieces display his eagerness for art and tap aspects of his youthful memories of Russian life and folkloric traditions that he would never return to in his later work with such boyish enthusiasm.
From 1922, Nabokov wrote occasional reviews of the work of young émigré poets, now forgotten even without his rating them forgettable. Most of these reviews have not been included here, both because the poets have left few traces and because Sirin’s criticisms of technicalities of Russian language and versification mean little to an audience without Russian. But the fifth entry here offers an excerpt from a review—not only not commissioned, but apparently never published—of volumes of poetry by Dmitri Shakhovskoy, Ilya Britan, and Lev Gordon, because, in critiquing Gordon, Nabokov introduces Osip Mandelshtam as a foil. Nabokov wrote almost nothing about Mandelshtam even privately, and nothing in public until the late 1960s, when he deplored Robert Lowell’s blurrily distorted “imitations” of Mandelshtam. His vivid and original 1924 comments about Mandelshtam are the first signs of his response to a major near-contemporary, and the most detailed comments he made on the poet until near the end of his own career.
By the time of the sixth essay—a year later, in late 1925—Sirin had already written his first novel, Mashen’ka (Mary). Again he surprises. Mary had been set in the Berlin emigration but was fired by, and lingered over, memories of first love in Russia. But this essay, also written in Russian, entitled “Play” in Nabokov’s manuscript but “Breitensträter–Paolino” in its published version, although it begins with a uniquely Nabokovian delight in play as a cosmic principle, soon turns specifically to boxing, and then to a particular heavyweight bout in Berlin between the German champion and the Basque giant who would drub his valiant opponent. Nabokov—who had been taught boxing at home as a child and was ready to use it at school to defend victims from bullies, and was an occasional boxing coach in the mid-1920s—here exults in boxing, its traditions, its champions, its artistry, its courage. He exults even in the pleasure of being knocked out. Most surprisingly of all, this non-crowd-lover, this resolute individualist, exalts the crowds who come to watch boxing in a spirit very much like his.
Item number seven, a letter to an editor that may never have been sent, shows a young writer’s irritation, a few months later, at receiving a hostile and sloppily or maliciously misquoting review of his first novel.
Over the next few years, Nabokov would compose several talks for the small émigré literary circle organized in Berlin by his friends Raisa and Vladimir Tatarinov and the critic Yuli Aykhenvald. He spoke on a wide array of themes, whether requested by them or proposed by him. The first, long in tiresome preparation but hastily drafted, is an exasperatedly indignant denunciation of the wretchedness of Soviet literature, with astonishing examples of incoherent bombast that were a nightmare to translate (Nabokov would return to the topic and the strategy of damning citation in 1930 and in 1941). It contains in passing an unexpected demotion of Chateaubriand (whom in a 1969 interview featured here Nabokov ranks as among the greatest authors of all time) and an unexpected promotion of Conrad (whom he will soon start to dismiss). The next talk critically resists generalizations, especially about times and places, about periods and countries—a theme that will recur throughout his work, including later pieces here. As in later reviews and interviews, his precise knowledge of distant historical detail allows him to challenge the supposedly unprecedented new features of a particular epoch, especially the present day. A third talk on man and “things”—by which he means human artifacts—has something of the scattershot whimsy and penetration of early essayists like Montaigne and Bacon. Written just before he announced to his mother that he was working on his second novel, King, Queen, Knave, it offers insights into Nabokov’s preoccupation in the novel with invented automatons and humans turning themselves into automatons or things, and his awareness of the deep origins of automation stretching back millennia, into “gray-haired antiquity.”4
One could anticipate, from Nabokov’s known attitudes, that in 1927 he might denounce the Soviet regime’s celebrations of its tenth anniversary, but instead he publicly celebrates the tenth anniversary of the unprecedented cultural freedom of the emigration. Far less expected, indeed quite astonishing, is Nabokov’s response to an invitation the next year to speak, before an émigré musical evening devoted to “Spring and Music,” on the sounds of Russian spring—so apt a topic, it would seem, for someone whose early work had been as nostalgic as it was alert to sonic detail and pattern. At the last minute, he delivered a talk, instead, on opera.5 That someone later famous for his amusia—in his autobiography, he would write, “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds”6—should talk on and in defense of the naturalness of opera seems astonishing in itself. All the more so when someone who would also write “Vive le pédant,”7 and act according to that motto, should on this occasion speak so loosely of music (“a Beethoven sonata directly imitates either nature or human life”) yet at the same time show a discriminating taste (“only when this harmony is observed is opera beautiful. It is in this sense that Pelléas and Mélisande, Boris Godunov, and, in part, Carmen, are beautiful”).8
Although Nabokov’s reviews of other émigré writers in the mid-1920s are sporadic and mostly negative, in the late 1920s he began to review frequently and mostly enthusiastically. He reported with glee on another sport or game with which we associate him much more than we do boxing, in his review of a chess book on Alekhine and Capablanca. Two weeks before Alekhine became world champion, Sirin recommended this “thrilling” book as “a most entertaining novel, or rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only now really clashed.”9 He particularly relished the characterization of the contrasting styles of the two grandmasters. About fifteen months later, he would conceive of and rapidly compose his own chess novel, The Luzhin Defense, named perhaps with a nod to the famously bold Alekhine Defense, just as the beginning and end of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin’s name, if not his chess style, also seem a nod to Alekhine. Like the nonfiction chess reporting that Nabokov extols as a “novel,” his own novel would reach a high point in the description of the final tussle between the styles of a Russian master and his Latin opponent (the fictional Turati replacing the real-life Capablanca).
Next month, Sirin wrote an admiring review of the collected poems of Vladislav Khodasevich, and a year and half later, an even more admiring review of the selected poems of Ivan Bunin. Nabokov would soon become a literary ally and, after he began traveling to Paris, also a friend of Khodasevich, whom he admired despite his acidity, and he would become an acquaintance of Bunin, whom he came to find increasingly coarse and unkind.10 Although he would continue to prefer Bunin’s poetry to his more celebrated prose, he would also come to rate Khodasevich’s verse, not Bunin’s, the finest Russian verse of the early decades of the twentieth century.
In 1928, Nabokov wrote a scathing review of the medievalizing fabulist Aleksey Remizov, and a fascinated appreciation of a translation of the eleventh-century but decidedly unmedieval Persian mathematician, astronomer, and poet, Omar Khayyám. Already a translator himself, in his early twenties, of not only much of Rupert Brooke but all of Romain Rolland’s Colas Breugnon and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Nabokov for the first time here discusses translation, as he would do frequently after his move to America, where he would become the most renowned translator of Russian verse into English. Here he shows his thorough knowledge of other versions of Omar Khayyám in addition to Edward FitzGerald’s translation. He also shows he can separate the poetry of FitzGerald and Tkhorzhevsky, both of which he admires, from their scholarship and translation, which he critiques.
Also in 1928, he wrote the first of four obituaries. His friend Yuli Aykhenvald, killed by a tram on his way back from a rare party at the Nabokovs’, had been recognized as a critic of rare subtlety in Russia before the Revolution, and in the emigration had been the first renowned critic to recognize Sirin as a major talent. By the time he did so, in 1925—after Berlin became expensive again, once the restabilization of the mark had punctured the hyperinflation of 1923—the center of the emigration had moved to Paris. Nabokov’s obituary of his friend, at the very end of 1928, marks the last of his work collected here that assumes a Berlin focus.
Nabokov would remain in Germany until the beginning of 1937, partly, still, to protect his Russian undiluted, by living in a country whose language he barely knew; partly because Véra could easily find work here, until Hitler’s policies affected her employers and then her; partly because, from 1932, they could share affordable quiet accommodation with Véra’s cousin Anna Feigin; and partly because, despite their growing wish to move elsewhere—to France, England, or, as war loomed, even farther afield—Véra was reluctant to leave until her husband could establish a financially secure base in a less unwelcoming country. Germany was deeply affected by the Depression, and the Berlin Russian daily, Rul’ (The Rudder), in which Nabokov had published hundreds of poems, stories, plays, reviews, and essays, would fold in 1931. But in 1929, his novel The Defense began publication in Sovremennye zapiski (Contemporary Annals), the “thick journal” that was the best-paying, most prestigious, and most eagerly read in the emigration. Readers in émigré Paris, by now well established as the émigré hub, had had no reason to buy the high-priced Rul’ but now realized, in the pages of Sovremennye zapiski, that a writer of genius had emerged in the emigration. Ilya Fondaminsky, one of the journal’s editors and its main financial prop, came from Paris to visit Nabokov in Berlin in early 1930 and was ready to commit to publishing serially his future novels.
Sirin’s suddenly risen reputation in Paris began to spread beyond the emigration. In 1930, he was approached by two Paris journals, one resolutely émigré, the other French but international in scope, to contribute to surveys on modern literature: on Proust, for the émigré journal Chisla (Numbers); on literary populism, for La Grande Revue. The voice and ideas of the mature Nabokov sound here in both responses, in his sense of the utter and proper individuality of writers, readers, and characters. His last two extended Russian essays appeared in 1930 and 1931: one in Rul’; the other, even before the final issue of Rul’, in the new Paris journal Novaya gazeta (The New Newspaper). The first was a satirically incompetent sales pitch for Freudianism; the second, a critique of Soviet literature for returning to medieval, black-and-white standards of vice and virtue. Both anticipate bêtes noires in Nabokov’s later fiction and his own increasing predilection for testing readers’ moral and psychological judgment. A 1931 French essay, “Les Écrivains et l’époque,” for the journal Le Mois—solicited by the journal, and with a three-page profile on “perhaps the only great writer that the Russian emigration has so far produced”11—shows Nabokov in top form, imagining the present from the vantage of the future, a theme that he had broached in his 1925 story “A Guide to Berlin” and that had also motivated him to write his newest novel, Glory, which had just begun to appear serially in Sovremennye zapiski, after briefer excerpts in émigré Paris dailies.
Nabokov followed up his damning and later-regretted review of the first book by the Paris-based poet Boris Poplavsky with a review of a novel by Nina Berberova, also based in Paris. He begins in a way that almost leads us to expect another dismissal, even when he quotes as “convincing” the thematically central song, “Long not for darling Russia, Cossack…Come to the country of the French,” only to make explicit, at the last moment, a ringing endorsement of a vision of the emigration quite unlike his own, and yet a view of the emigration as if seen in epic retrospective that curiously chimes with his essay “Les Écrivains et l’époque” a month earlier.
A memorial tribute for the poet Sasha Chorny shows Nabokov belatedly and publicly voicing the gratitude he regrets not having expressed to Chorny in his lifetime, for helping him publish and improve his youthful poems: “I don’t hide from myself that of course he did not value them as highly as I then thought (A.M. had excellent taste), but he was doing a kind deed and he did it thoroughly.”
Chorny, already well known as a poet, had mentored the fledgling Sirin in Berlin but, like so many other émigrés, writers or not, had then moved to France. Now, in October 1932, Sirin himself traveled to Paris, for his first triumphal reading tour, and to meet people he had only written about, like Khodasevich and Berberova (recently but amicably separated), Bunin, and Kuprin. On this occasion, he faced his first press interview. His account of his working methods as a writer both connects and contrasts with his later descriptions of his working habits, in content (later in life, he would not work with such abandon) as well as in expression: he shows an unguardedness here despite Andrey Sedykh’s comment that Sirin “speaks quickly and with passion. But a kind of prudence prevents him from speaking of himself.”12 Contrast his descriptions of his working methods here, for instance, with the clarity and amplitude of his remarks to Dieter Zimmer in 1966, by which time he was a seasoned reporter on himself.
An obituary of Amalia Fondaminsky, who died in 1935 and whom Nabokov had known for only the month of his 1932 reading trip to Paris, has to skirt his shallow knowledge of her to soothe her devoted husband, Ilya, a fervent supporter of Sovremennye zapiski and of Sirin. In 1936, with three of his novels already published in French translation, Nabokov again traveled to France in the hope of finding a literary home there, but to no avail. At the beginning of 1937, Véra promptly sent her husband to France and away from the Germany where one of the right-wing assassins of his father had just been appointed second-in-command of the Nazi government’s office for Russian émigré affairs. In this centenary year of Pushkin’s death, Nabokov wrote a long essay in French in honor of Pushkin, addressing the subject of biography and of readers’ relations to the authors they construct in their imaginations. This major essay echoed Nabokov’s multiple explorations of biography and Pushkin in The Gift, which he had been working on for four years, and anticipated his future work on biography in both fiction (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, Pale Fire, Look at the Harlequins!) and fact (his scholarly work on Chernyshevsky in the 1930s and on Pushkin in the 1950s) and his imminent work as a translator on arriving, after more vicissitudes and historical convulsions, in the United States rather than France. Written with much more care than many of his earlier occasional essays, with the flair and the imagination open on all sides so evident in his fiction, the essay was a pitch for Nabokov to be taken seriously as a writer in French and to be recognized as a bridge between Russian and French literary culture.
An author questionnaire later in 1937 for Bobbs-Merrill, the publisher of “Vladimir Nabokoff” ’s first novel to appear in the States, Laughter in the Dark, marks another shift in Nabokov’s focus, although as yet he could see no way of reaching even England (where translations of Camera Obscura and Despair had already been published), let alone America. But when his friend the historical novelist Mark Aldanov was offered a position teaching creative writing at Stanford, declined because he lacked confidence in his English, and passed the invitation along to Nabokov, a new world opened up—once he could obtain an exit visa from France, an American visa, and the cost of the passage, at almost the last possible moment to escape from the advancing German army, late in May 1940. An interview from New York’s Russian émigré daily, Novoe russkoe slovo (New Russian Word), a series of short paragraphs looking back on the European emigration and out on his new American location, and an appeal on behalf of Russians still stranded in now occupied Paris mark Nabokov’s first few months in New York.
He needed to switch as a writer, he knew, from Russian to English. As he wrote for Novoe russkoe slovo, the Russian emigration as he and others had known it in Europe would never be the same after the German invasion of France. He had been trying for some time to recast himself as a writer in English—when he revamped the translation of Despair in 1935, reworked Camera Obscura into Laughter in the Dark in 1937, and wrote The Real Life of Sebastian Knight directly in English in 1938–39. But he still had no publisher for that first English-language novel, and he needed to make himself known. Luckily for him, his cousin the composer Nicolas Nabokov knew the renowned critic Edmund Wilson. Wilson—at this time eagerly reading Russian, especially Pushkin—invited Nabokov to contribute to The New Republic, where he was acting editor. Nabokov wrote twelve reviews over the next four years, mainly in 1941, first for The New Republic—Wilson was most impressed by their quality—and soon also for The New York Sun and The New York Times. Whereas his Russian reviews had been of other émigré writers, mostly poets, his splendid American reviews covered all sorts of topics, starting with Russian matters (dancer Serge Lifar’s biography of Diaghilev; a history of the Dukhobor sect); historical fiction (Masefield); literary criticism (three books on Shakespeare); philosophy; biography and art (a life of the painter Charles Conder); essays (Belloc); history (England); politics (Soviet repression); and translations of Georgian and Russian literature. They offer a confident cascade of ideas, information, and images that show sides of Nabokov we might not otherwise have glimpsed. On the British poet laureate John Masefield as novelist, in Basilissa, a Tale of the Empress Theodora: “This book is a splendid example of false romance and false history; it belongs to a widespread genus of false books, and, to the investigator, its shortcomings are as fascinating as the qualities of real achievement.”13 On philosopher Frederick Woodbridge: “the old pitfall of that dualism which separates the ego from the non-ego, a split which, strangely enough, is intensified the stronger the reality of the world is stressed…The human mind is a box with no tangible lid, sides or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time.”14 On Hilaire Belloc: “he attempts to be trivial and remote simultaneously, making as it were a slide-preparation of the obvious and then peering at it through a telescope.”15
In 1941, the writer Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann and exiled by Hitler, set up a new magazine, Decision, to champion free European culture and encourage U.S. involvement in the war. He marshaled a stellar editorial board and contributors. For some reason, Nabokov was already well enough known to Mann to be asked to write an essay on recent Soviet literature. For the third time in his life, Nabokov forced himself to read Soviet work, in this case material from 1940, for an essay that ended by pointing out, wryly, the decline of German villains in the fiction of the year following the Molotov-Ribbentrop (or Hitler-Stalin) Pact. Although Nabokov’s essay was set in type, Hitler’s invasion of Russia reshaped the context in which it was written, as Pearl Harbor then undermined the rationale for Decision, which itself began to founder. Despite existing in corrected proofs for eighty years, the essay has never before been published. By the time Mann’s journal failed, Nabokov had begun his own war effort, the novel Bend Sinister, which interlards “bits of Lenin’s speeches, and a chunk of the Soviet constitution, and gobs of Nazist pseudo-efficiency,”16 just as his essay for Decision had opened with official remarks on the position of the artist in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia that eerily echoed each other.
One short letter in response to someone’s pointing out an error in his essay “The Art of Translation” (the essay itself appears in Verses and Versions)17 links back to his 1937 French essay on Pushkin and his current work on translating Russian poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet, and Khodasevich) as another way of putting his talents to work and earning an income and attention. But Nabokov was also trying to establish himself in other ways. A first interview by a student at Wellesley College in early 1941, when he was just a visiting lecturer there, prefigures more student interviews and profiles after he secured an insecure but annually renewed position there, first in comparative literature and then teaching the Russian language. The essay “The Creative Writer,” perhaps first prepared for his teaching as a creative writer at Stanford in the summer of 1941, was shaped for delivery at a New England Modern Languages Association meeting late in the year. Again attempting to get himself noticed by a new audience, Nabokov, in this flamboyant, freewheeling, high-energy essay (republished in Lectures on Literature but with two pages missing, now reinstated),18 speaks for the irrationality of the creative imagination and against the rational calculation of the market-oriented writer—partly a reaction to his disgust with the market-oriented advice to American writers he had read in preparation for his Stanford teaching. Markedly different in style is the lecture fragment on style, written for his Stanford creative writing class: much plainer than “The Creative Writer,” but playful as well as lucid and accessible, with the individuality that he singled out as the true core of style.
While he held a precarious position at Wellesley from 1941 to 1948, Nabokov was also writing other essays as a result of another precarious but annually renewed position as the de facto curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. These scientific papers, reprinted in Nabokov’s Butterflies,19 do not feature here, but his work as a lepidopterist would become a subject of fascination for interviewers in the years of his post-Lolita fame.
Nabokov earned his position at the MCZ on the strength of his earlier scientific publications, and kept earning its renewal by the quality of his new work, but perhaps also because younger scientists were otherwise deployed for the war effort. The war also had an impact on Wellesley College. Wellesley’s president, Mildred McAfee, would be summoned to Washington as head of the Women’s Naval Reserve, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), and Wellesley’s students, too, were ready to throw what weight they could into the war. In a panel discussion at Wellesley in April 1942, Nabokov himself spoke directly, lucidly, and eloquently on democracy (“Ethically, the members of a democracy are equals; spiritually, each has the right to be as different from his neighbors as he pleases…the subtle balance between the boundless privileges of every individual and the strictly equal rights of all men”),20 as he had done more obliquely, ungently, and pungently in his recent anti-Soviet and even more strongly anti-German comments, in his essay on Soviet literature, in “The Creative Writer,” and in the book on Nikolay Gogol that he was beginning to write.
In 1943, Nabokov wrote a last obituary, on Iosif Hessen. Hessen had edited Rul’ in the Berlin of the 1920s, when Sirin was contributing poems, stories, plays, essays, reviews, and even crossword puzzles to the newspaper: “The blue hues of Berlin’s twilights, the tent made by the corner chestnut tree, faint light-headedness, poverty, being in love, the mandarin tinge of a prematurely lit neon sign, and the animal yearning for a still fresh Russia—all this was dragged in iambic form to the editorial office, where I.V. would bring the page up close to his face, as though he was latching on to what was written from its hem, from the bottom up, with a parabolic movement of his eye, after which he would look at me with a half-sarcastic benevolence, lightly shaking the page, but he would say only: ‘Hmm, hmm.’ ”21 Nabokov, who had helped extricate Hessen and his son George, the closest friend of his adult life, from occupied France, recorded his regret that he never had the chance to see Hessen in America before his death soon after reaching New York and safety.
As the war’s outcome became clear, Wellesley relaxed its war alertness, and Nabokov’s Russian course was allowed to become a regular part of the schedule. His short 1945 essay “On Learning Russian” offers delightfully presented tips that many Anglophones who have learned the language for a year or two might wish they had been taught from the start. His 1948 essay “The Place of Russian Studies in the Curriculum” responds to a particular moment in his life (his imminent departure for Cornell, knowing that a replacement for his own position would soon arrive at Wellesley) and a particular phase in the century’s history (the approach of the Cold War). It both tolerates the practical pressures of the moment and makes an eloquent pitch for the disinterested humanities and the timeless value of the best of Russian literary culture: new vistas for the student’s imagination, exposure to “a certain unique quality about Russian literature, a quality of truth not rubbed in, of imagination controlled by dignified truthfulness, which has had an ennobling influence on the world literatures.”22
The next piece marks another new phase in Nabokov’s life: his move to Cornell, and a permanent academic position, at first in Russian literature but soon needing to be augmented by the larger classes he could command in teaching Masterpieces of European Fiction. At least in his first year of this course, 1950–51, he seems to have taught Kafka’s unsettling Metamorphosis, which he would continue to teach happily for the rest of the decade, with the help of a contrast with the false coziness of Thomas Mann’s story “The Railway Accident.” As an essay this feels slight, but as a lecture it must have been hilarious and damning.
Nabokov had been lured to Cornell by Morris Bishop, a light-verse contributor to The New Yorker, where Nabokov’s own poems had started appearing in 1942, his short stories in 1945, and his memoirs, in a rapid flow, from the start of 1948. His demonstration of his exceptional mastery in English, even when seen in the company of other contributors to the English-speaking world’s best-paying magazine, had persuaded Bishop to seek him out for Cornell as a Russian teacher. Nabokov’s exposure in The New Yorker also led to his being interviewed in 1951 in The New York Times, on the publication of Conclusive Evidence, the first name for the memoir that, as Speak, Memory, would earn him acclaim as one of the greatest of autobiographers.
His interviewer of course did not know, and Nabokov had no inclination whatever to tell, about Lolita, the work that was preoccupying his imagination even as he began teaching his course in European fiction and researching his provocative translation of and massive commentary to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. The atmospheric disturbance that would generate Hurricane Lolita on its August 1958 American publication started in 1955, with the novel’s publication in English in Paris. Lolita’s endorsement by Graham Greene as a book of the year, its denunciation by a British defender of moral standards, its banning and unbanning and rebanning by the French government, and the campaign on its behalf by the New York publishing-and-literary establishment from 1956, ensured, along with its originality of subject matter, character, and style, that the novel would cause literary havoc in the season when it was launched.
Lolita was, among much else, Nabokov’s proof that he was a decidedly American author. Ironically, the first of the Lolita interviews, even before its American publication, was for a Russian audience—American, European, and Soviet—in the Voice of America’s Russian program, a radio interview by his longtime friend, the ex-wife of his cousin Nicolas, Natalia Nabokov (née Shakhovskaya), with whom he and his family had briefly stayed when they first arrived in America. Unlike his other interviewers over the next few years, she also knew about the other work that had been haunting his decade, his Eugene Onegin opus. Other interviews soon flooded in from New York, from Life, from local newspapers in upstate New York in and near Ithaca—where Nabokov, financially secure at last, could denounce what he thought was the betrayal of Russian language teaching by linguists at Cornell who knew how to analyze Russian into morphemes and phonemes but not how to teach the language that his prospective advanced literature students would have needed.
Interviewers obscure and famous (the latter including Lionel Trilling, John Wain, Alain Robbe-Grillet) tracked Nabokov’s progress from upstate New York. He left there on a sabbatical from Cornell in February 1959 that soon turned into permanent retirement, headed for the American West, then to Paris and London for the launch of the French and British editions of Lolita at the end of 1959. Nabokov managed to lie low in the French Midi and then while working in Hollywood on the screenplay for Lolita in 1960. When he returned to Europe after finishing the screenplay, and was working on Pale Fire, he was exuberant and relaxed in interviews in Nice. But his recoil from seeing his casual conversation in print, his rising status—as the author not only of Lolita but also of the utterly different Pale Fire and the rich pickings from the start of his Russian backlist, Invitation to a Beheading (1959), The Gift (1963), The Defense (1964)—and therefore his increasing need to protect his privacy and his time, soon led him to bec0me more guarded, more controlling, and more purposefully aloof in his interviews.
He began to demand written questions sent well in advance, and to prepare written answers before his interviewers came. He even insisted he be allowed to see and correct drafts of interview write-ups that were more than verbatim question and answer, and often sought to eliminate the reporting of some of the casual chitchat he could easily slip into when he met an interviewer he found engaging or simply when his mood was especially exuberant. Despite such impediments, the Swiss media switched on to his presence in Montreux, and interviewed him again and again between 1963 and 1967. American, German, Italian, and French interviewers increasingly sought him out—five Italian interviewers in one day in late 1969, as the rush job of the Italian translation of Nabokov’s longest and most complex novel, Ada, was about to appear. The price of fame rose: an interview with his first biographer, Andrew Field, when they were still on speaking terms; interviews with other academics, including his former Cornell students, and now Nabokov scholars, Alfred Appel, Jr. (see Strong Opinions), and Stephen Jan Parker; and interviews with other major media from the North American and European television, radio, newspaper, and magazine press.
The first few decades of the pieces in Think, Write, Speak tend to reflect the circumstances Nabokov found himself in—emigration in Berlin, partial reorientation to the new émigré center, Paris, a sudden desperate lurch aside to New York, war, teaching at Wellesley and Cornell—before inspiration and luck combined to make him famous enough for his own circumstances and imagination to become the target of endless interviewers’ questions. The voice throughout is almost unmistakably Nabokov’s, but the focus of the last, post-Lolita bulk of the book shifts from others’ or his own prompts in multiple directions to interviewers’ prompting him to talk almost exclusively about himself, now that he had become news.
Two-thirds of the items in this collection are interviews, all except a handful from the last third of Nabokov’s adult writing life, from his post-Lolita years of world fame. The collection’s title foregrounds the seeming arrogance of Nabokov’s opening remark in Strong Opinions, “I think like a genius,” and therefore also foregrounds the question of his personality.
Nabokov’s control of his interviews was partly a consequence of his modesty. He really thought very little of himself as a speaker of sustained speech: “I am a shy, retiring person, I feel stupidly confused to have my book provoke such attention and ask so much of my readers”;23 “I admire people who can speak and it all comes out in well-ordered, beautifully rounded sentences. I cannot do that. I can’t speak that way. I am an idiot in conversation”;24 “I’m not a dull speaker, I’m a bad speaker, I’m a wretched speaker”—and here comes the decidedly written continuation—“The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect.”25
For good reason, Nabokov has often been considered the finest prose stylist in English. He knew that if he worked at what he wrote he could make it sing, sometimes with the complex amplitude of choral polyphony. But in sustained speech, he often spoke like almost any of us, with the hesitations, redirections, and incompletions of ordinary speech that discourse analysts have discovered with their tape recorders, giving the lie to the considered, emphatically written, dialogue that novelists of earlier centuries so often imagined for their characters. “Examples,” Nabokov has written, “are the stained-glass windows of knowledge.”26 Here’s a glimpse of his spontaneous speech, from a transcript of his first live television interview: “Well, it seems to me that all worthwhile novelists after all are concerned with passion and love and apart from Humbert and nymphets there does exist, always has existed, in novels as well as in life—if you take a novel, take Anna Karenin, you know, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenin with Kitty and Levin—which have a relationship you see, we all see, how in ordinary life in Europe and in America, which may be termed passionate love, amorous love within the terms of a normal marriage. So we have that too.”27
Speaking in a sustained way was all the more difficult for someone who saw so many possibilities in words and their ordering, and who stressed the power of revision in writing and the fact that he wore out his erasers faster than his pencil lead. Nabokov was also simply not enough of an egotist—he excoriated the egotism of a Hermann, a Humbert, a Kinbote, a Van Veen—to think that his life mattered because it was his. He wrote an autobiography only when he could see how to make an account of his life into a work of art in terms of its structures, its strategies, its sentences. Despite the worldwide interest in him in his years of fame, he could never see a sufficiently artistic form for shaping a continuation of his life beyond the point in May 1940 where Speak, Memory so elegantly suspends itself, and therefore could not bring himself to write a continuation just because it was his life and because it would sell well.
Yet Véra Nabokov treasured her husband’s originality in everything he said as well as in all he wrote. Alfred Appel, Jr., himself an irrepressible wit, thought Nabokov “the most fun to be with of any person I have ever known.”28 And in interviewers’ reports we can often hear Nabokov injecting a twist of surprise wherever he could into his spontaneous remarks, as long as he did not have to speak in oral paragraphs. His brief bursts of patter, of twisting words, of imagery, humor, or ironic self-consciousness, animate his casual speech and disclose not another Nabokov but a less guarded, a more spontaneous one. Once, when he was asked what he thought was his principal failing as a writer, he answered, “Lack of spontaneity; the nuisance of parallel thoughts, second thoughts, third thoughts; inability to express myself properly in any language unless I compose every damned sentence in my bath, in my mind, at my desk.” To which the interviewer responded: “You’re doing rather well at the moment, if we may say so.” Nabokov shot back, or seemed to: “It’s an illusion.”29 Indeed, introducing this interview in Strong Opinions, he had already disclosed, “Great trouble was taken on both sides to achieve the illusion of a spontaneous conversation.”30
In one interview below, Nabokov declares, apropos of Pale Fire, “The clearest revelation of personality is to be found in the creative work in which a given individual indulges”:31 he has in mind Shade’s verse and Kinbote’s commentary. His dictum has its value: in a creative work, we can see depths and sides of personality that we can discover in no other way. But there are many sides to personality, and personality as the controlled projection of carefully considered words discloses only some.
In his written answers to written interview questions, Nabokov wishes his portrait for the photo gallery of history to be taken from a certain fixed angle. But other angles and other environments allow new features to show. For that reason, my selection is not what Nabokov’s would have been: I include not only the prepared responses but also selections from vivid casual remarks, “spontaneous rot,” as Nabokov described it to one of the interviewers in Strong Opinions.32 Personality is a characteristic individual range of responses to circumstance, and the changing circumstances of different interviews, of encounters with different individuals, on different occasions, in different moods, with different degrees of spontaneity, allow us a Nabokov in the round.
Exasperated with Helga Chudacoff’s asking him so many questions already asked in Strong Opinions, Nabokov directed her to his answers there, and responded with irritated curtness, sometimes almost stonewalling, to whatever questions she offered that had not been asked before. But when she reached him she found him different: “Now in Zermatt he looks me over critically and remarks dryly: ‘You don’t look like a hiker.’ And I cannot help but notice that he underestimates his gift for conversation. He talks openly and unhesitatingly in American with a slight Russian accent and not without charm.”33 He quickly picks up on the alertness and openness of Robert Boyle or the erudite intelligence of Penelope Gilliatt. In his breaks from the creative concentration of composing Pale Fire in early 1961, Nabokov freewheels with Anne Guérin, relaxes playfully with Janine Colombo, almost chatters away to Rosalie Macrae. He pulls the legs of an interviewer who doesn’t get him: James Salter unwittingly reports that he likes “bright people, ‘people who understand jokes.’ Véra doesn’t laugh, he says resignedly. ‘She is married to one of the great clowns of all time, but she never laughs.’ ”34 (In serious mode, he would say, “She has the best sense of humor of any woman I have ever known.”35) To Gaetano Tumiati’s aggressive first question he responds even more aggressively. Despite their deep shared interest in art and science, he bristles at what he seems to see as Jacob Bronowski’s attempt to put words or opinions in his mouth. Yet with another highly opinionated writer, Alberto Ongaro, also attempting to push him into agreement, Nabokov takes the time to answer fully and thoughtfully, to engage in a rare two-way debate over ideas: ideas about love and sex in the modern world, not framed as he would ever have framed them, but nevertheless ideas preoccupying him in his own way as he wrote Ada, yet never expressed in this manner, with this directness, or with this wealth of examples, anywhere else in all his voluminous work.
In 1976, when I settled on my doctoral topic, I began to send out for interlibrary loans of Nabokov’s uncollected reviews, essays, and interviews. I was repeatedly dazzled by what turned up: the grainy photocopies allowed me to see writer and man from new angles and with a new clarity. I have been puzzled, ever since, that other Nabokov scholars, so appreciative of Strong Opinions, have so rarely sought out these revelations and illuminations. And ever since, too, and with even more eagerness after I began to catalogue Nabokov’s archives for his widow in 1979 and discovered still more, I have wanted to compile a volume like this.
The material here would make it even harder for some prominent Nabokov scholars to maintain some of their positions. Alexander Dolinin, in an essay on “Nabokov as a Russian Writer,” tried to insist, in 2005 and later, that Nabokov, in the years after Lolita, engaged in a consistent process of “tricky mythmaking,” downplaying his Russianness and his Russian works to “present himself as a born cosmopolitan genius who has never been attached to anything and anybody”;36 he “sends all [his] Russian writings downhill, relegating them to a secondary role of immature, imperfect antecedents,” “downgrading them to the rank of apprenticeship.”37 Although there has always been ample evidence against Dolinin’s claims,38 Think, Write, Speak presents much more: “As a child, I was Russian, my first muse was Russian. We speak only Russian in my family today”;39 “The language of my ancestors is still the one where I feel perfectly at home….It goes without saying that I adore Russian”;40 “my knowledge of Russian is infinitely greater than my knowledge of English.”41 Asked what language he would have preferred to have been born with, he answered in one word: “Russian.”42 In 1959, asked which of his books he liked most, he said there were three on the same level, naming Lolita, The Gift, and Invitation to a Beheading.43 In 1962, he told Newsweek: “As a writer, I am better in Russian.”44 A few years before his death, he declared to another interviewer, “I have written in Russian the kind of books I wanted to write.”45
Maurice Couturier, the leading French Nabokovian, in a book entitled Nabokov, ou la tyrannie de l’auteur, writes, in keeping with his title, that Nabokov “has done all he could to put the reader in an uncomfortable position, indeed to tame him”; or: “Nabokov perfectly mastered his text and imposed his lasting law (and his ideal self) on his reader. Proof too that a good reading of his novels is a pre-empted one, for the spaces of interpretation they leave are extremely restricted. Interpretation, like translation, is already treason!”46 Nabokov’s own comments could not be further from these assertions: readers “of course are welcome to any interpretation they desire”;47 “the reader has no business bothering about the author’s intentions, nor has the author any business trying to learn whether the consumer likes what he consumes”;48 “For whom do I write? I write for the good reader. And you know, I have had some wonderful readers. Some of my readers have read my books better than I have written them.”49 In one interview, he puts the case with sublime simplicity: “I write what I like and some like what I write—that about sums it up.”50 Not much sign of tyranny here from this lifelong champion of individual freedoms.
What I have valued most in compiling these essays, reviews, and interviews, which may not be what others appreciate most, has been discovering aspects of Nabokov’s mind and thought I have never quite seen before, especially his sense that the aim of art is to capture what is eternally true in human experience, “the everlasting reality of human passions”:51 “Every country lives in its own way, and every person in his own way. But there’s something eternal. Only the portrayal of this eternal element is of value. Proust’s characters have lived everywhere and always.”52 Nabokov rejects the communist sense of distinct bourgeois and proletarian consciousnesses, ironically agreeing to the conclusion that “a self-restrained communist and born member of the proletariat, and an unrestrained landowner and born nobleman, respond to the simplest things in life in different ways: the pleasure from a sip of cold water on a hot day, the pain from a hard thump on the head, the discomfort caused by ill-fitting footwear, and many other human experiences which are equally familiar to all mortals. It would be pointless for me to claim that a Soviet executive sneezes and yawns in the same way as an irresponsible bourgeois.”53 No, he says, this time without irony, “love has always been the same. Love now is no different from in Catullus’s day….If by this question you want to know if I believe people still fall in love and in the same way as before, I will answer yes. You see, I have taught for a long time in universities. I know young people well, I have seen couples who loved each other, couples who break up painfully, others who break up painlessly, as always, as always. The young people I’ve known were no different in love from the way I was nor from how young people are today or will be like tomorrow. Love and sex, I repeat, are always the same.”54
Yet Nabokov also has a sense of the precious uniqueness of any era’s particulars, of the combinations that the inhabitants of any time take for granted, not realizing how exotic they will look in retrospect. Having singled out such a cluster of present details that he does not expect still to coexist decades hence, he adds, in “Writers and the Era”: but “then one tells oneself that after all, among the things that seem to us to group together in a unique order, forming present reality, there are some that will exist for a long time—the jerky twittering of sparrows, the green of the lilacs falling over the railings, the white breastpiece and the gray rump of a cloud gliding proud through the damp blue of a June sky.”55 But along with Nabokov’s sense of the constants of nature, including human nature, he also has a sharper and fuller sense than I had realized of history’s particulars not only in his own age but across hundreds and thousands of years.
One final comment. As I have noted, almost two-thirds of the items selected for Think, Write, Speak are Nabokov interviews after Lolita. Nabokov had strong opinions, often consistent over sixty years or more, but he could also contradict himself. One of the pleasures of Think, Write, Speak is to notice how thoroughly and how fascinatingly he contradicted himself on the subject of his most famous novel. Enjoy discovering and making sense of these contradictions yourself—and much, much more.