Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in
Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of
Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of
hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem
impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their
son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items
are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita, other books,
sporting equipment, an American flag.
Thứ Ba, 10 tháng 1, 2012
Anonymous [1972]
This interview, conducted by a docile anonym, is preserved
in a fragmentary transcript dated October, 1972.
There are two Russian books on which I would like you
to comment. The first is Dr. Zhivago. I understand you
never wished to review it?
Some fifteen years ago, when the Soviets were
hypocritically denouncing Pasternak's novel (with the object of
increasing foreign sales, the results of which they would
eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad); when the
badgered and bewildered author was promoted by the American
press to the rank of an iconic figure; and when his
Zhivago vied with my Lalage for the top rungs of the
best-seller's ladder; I had the occasion to answer a request
for a review of the book from Robert Bingham of The
Reporter, New York.
in a fragmentary transcript dated October, 1972.
There are two Russian books on which I would like you
to comment. The first is Dr. Zhivago. I understand you
never wished to review it?
Some fifteen years ago, when the Soviets were
hypocritically denouncing Pasternak's novel (with the object of
increasing foreign sales, the results of which they would
eventually pocket and spend on propaganda abroad); when the
badgered and bewildered author was promoted by the American
press to the rank of an iconic figure; and when his
Zhivago vied with my Lalage for the top rungs of the
best-seller's ladder; I had the occasion to answer a request
for a review of the book from Robert Bingham of The
Reporter, New York.
Vogue [1972]
Simona Morini came to interview me on February 3, 1972, in
Montreux. Our exchange appeared in Vogue, New York,
April 15, 1972. Three passages (pp. 200-1, 201-2 and 204), are
borrowed, with modifications, from Speak, Memory, G. P.
Putnam's Sons, N. Y., 1966.
Bayerischer Rundfunk [1971-72]
In
October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux to film an interview for the Bayeriscber Rundfunk. Of its many topics and themes I have selected a few for reproduction in this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comes from a carefully executed and beautifully bound Ahnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by my German publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-RowohIt.
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the "passage of time," we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of
time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.
He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors."
Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion-- and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.
PERSONAL PAST
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best! to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.
ANCESTRAL PAST
It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing one's past. And that means probing not only one's personal past but the past of one's family in search of affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions to one's vivid and vigorous Now. This, of course, is a game for old people. Tracing an ancestor to his lair hardly differs from a boy's search for a bird's nest or for a ball lost in the grass. The Christmas tree of one's childhood is replaced by the Family Tree.
As the author of several papers on Lepidoptera, such as the "Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides," I experience a certain thrill on finding that my mother's maternal grandfather Nikolay Kozlov, who was born two centuries ago and was the first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine, wrote a paper entitled "On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane" to which my "Nearctic Members et cetera," furnishes a perfect response. And no less perfect is the connection between Nabokov's Pug, a little American moth named after me, and Nabokov's River in Nova Zembla of all places, so named after my great-grandfather, who participated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in an arctic expedition. I learned about these things quite late in life. Talks about one's ancestors were frowned upon in my family; the interdiction came from my father who had a particular loathing for the least speck or shadow of snobbishness. When imagining the information that I could now have used in my memoir, I rather regret that no such talks took place. But it simply was not done in our home, sixty
years ago, twelve hundred miles away.
FAMILY TREE
My father Vladimir Nabokov was a liberal statesman, member of the first Russian parliament, champion of justice and law in a difficult empire. He was born in 1870, went into exile in 1919, and three years later, in Berlin, was assassinated by two Fascist thugs while he was trying to shield his friend Professor Milyukov.
The Nabokov family's estate was adjacent to that of the Rukavishnikovs in the Government of St. Petersburg. My mother Helen (1876-1939) was the daughter of Ivan Rukavishnikov, country gentleman and philanthropist. My paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1827-1904) was State Minister of Justice for eight years (1878-1885) under two tsars. My grandmother's paternal ancestors, the von Korffs, are traceable to the fourteenth century, while on their distaff side there is a long line of von Tiesenhausens, one of whose ancestors was Engelbrecht von Tiesenhausen of Liviand who took part, around 1200, in the Third and Fourth Crusades. Another direct ancestor of mine was Can Grande della Scala, Prince of Verona, w-ho sheltered the exiled Dante Alighieri, and whose blazon (two big dogs holding a ladder) adorns Boccaccio's Decameron (1353). Della Scala's granddaughter Beatrice married, in 1370, Wilhelm Count Oettingen, grandson of fat Bolko the Third, Duke of Silesia. Their daughter married a von Waldburg, and three Waldburgs, one Kittlitz, two Polenzes and ten Osten-Sackens later, Wilhelm Carl von Korff and Eleonor von der Osten-Sacken engendered my paternal grandmother's grandfather, Nicolaus, killed in battle on June 12, 1812. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother Anto inette Graun, was the granddaughter of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun (1701-1759).
BERLIN
My first Russian novel was written in Berlin in 1924-- this was Mary, in Russian Mashenka, and the first translation of any of my books was Masbenka in German under the title Sie kommt-- kommt Sie?, published by Ullstein in 1928. My next seven novels were also written in Berlin and all of them had, entirely or in part, a Berlin background. This is the German contribution to the atmosphere and production of all my eight Russian novels written in Berlin. When I moved there from England in 1921,1 had only a smattering of German picked up in Berlin during an earlier stay in the winter of 1910 when by brother and I went there with a Russian tutor to have ! our teeth fixed by an American dentist.
In the course of my Cambridge University years I kept my Russian alive by reading Russian literature, my imain subject, and by composing an appalling quantity of poems in Russian. Upon moving to Berlin I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak German fluently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made easier by the fact that I lived in a closed emigre circle of Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers, magazines, and books. My only forays into the local language were the civilities exchanged with my successive landlords or landladies and the routine necessities of shopping: Ich mochte etwas Schinken. I now regret that I did so poorly; I regret it from a ! cultural point of view. The little I ever did in that respect was to translate in my youth the Heine songs for a Russian contralto-- who, incidentally, wanted the musically significant vowels to coincide in fullness of sound, and therefore I turned Ich grolle nicbt into Net, zloby net, instead of the unsingable old v-ersion Ya ne serzhus'. Later I read Goethe and Kafka en regard's I also did Homer and Horace. And of course since my early boyhood I have been tackling a multitude of German butterfly books with the aid of a dictionary.
AMERICA
In America, where I wrote all my fiction in English, the situation was different. I had spoken English with the same ease as Russian, since my earliest infancy. I had already written one English novel in Europe besides translating in the thirties two of my Russian books. Linguistically, though perhaps not emotionally, the transition was endurable. And in reward of whatever wrench I experienced, I composed in America a few Russian poems which are incomparably better than those of my European period.
LEPIDOPTERA
My actual work on lepidoptera is comprised within the span of only seven or eight years in the nineteen forties, mainly at Harvard, where I was Research Fellow in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. This entailed some amount of curatorship but most of my work was devoted to the classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired for ever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life. Summers were spent by my wife and me in hunting butterflies, mostly in the Rocky Mountains. In the last fifteen years I have collected h! ere and there, in North America and Europe, but have not published any scientific papers on butterflies, because the writing of new novels and the translating of my old ones encroached too much on my life: the miniature hooks of a male butterfly are nothing in comparison to the eagle claws of literature which tear at me day and night. My entomological library in Montreux is smaller, in fact, than the heaps of butterfly books I had as a child.
I am the author or the reviser of a number of species and subspecies mainly in the New World. The author's name, in such cases, is appended in Roman letters to the italicized name he gives to the creature. Several butterflies and one moth have been named for me, and in such cases my name is incorporated in that of the described insect, becoming "nabokovi,"' followed by the describer's name. There is also a genus Nabokovia Hemming, in South America. All my American collections are in museums, in New York, Boston, and lthaca.
The butterflies I have been collecting during the last decade, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, are not yet spread. They are still papered, that is kept in little glazed envelopes which are stored in tin boxes. Eventually they will be relaxed in damp towels, then pinned, then spread, and dried again on setting boards, and finally, labeled and placed in the glassed drawers of a cabinet to be preserved, I hope, in the splendid entomological museum in Lausanne.
FAMILY
I have always been an omnivorous consumer of books, and now, as in my boyhood, a vision of the night's lamplight on a bedside tome is a promised treat and a guiding star throughout the day. Other keen pleasures are soccer matches on the TV, an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer, sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems. Less ordinary, perhaps, is the unruffled flow of a family life which during its long course-- almost half a century-- has made absolute fools of the bogeys of environment and the bores of circumstance at all stages of our expatriation. Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflec! ted color in the inner mirrors of my books.
It was in Berlin that we married, in April, 1925, in the midst of my writing my first Russian novel. We were ridiculously poor, her father was ruined, my widowed mother subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms of German military families; I taught tennis and English, and nine years later, in 1934, at the dawn of a new era, our only son was born. In the late thirties we migrated to France. My stuff was beginning to be translated, my readings in Paris and elsewhere were well attended; but then came the end of my European stage: in May, 1940, we moved to America.
FAME
Soviet politicians have a rather comic provincial way of applauding the audience that applauds them. I hope I won't be accused of facetious sufficiency if I say in response to your compliments that I have the greatest readers any author has ever had. I see myself as an American writer raised in Russia, educated in England, imbued with the culture of Western Europe; I am aware of the blend, but even the most lucid plum pudding cannot sort out its own ingredients, especially whilst the pale fire still flickers around it. Field, Appel, Proffer, and many others in the USA, Zimmer in Germany, Vivian Darkbioom (a shy violet in Cambridge), have all added their erudition to my inspiration, with brilliant results. I would like to say a tot about my heroic readers in Russia but am prevented from doing so-- by many emotions besides a sense of responsibility with which I still cannot cope in any rational way.
SWITZERLAND
Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets-- just west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson sun! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in charming surroundings.
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
ALL IS VANITY
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
Theo kulichki
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the "passage of time," we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of
time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.
He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors."
Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion-- and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.
PERSONAL PAST
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best! to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.
ANCESTRAL PAST
It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of reconstructing one's past. And that means probing not only one's personal past but the past of one's family in search of affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions to one's vivid and vigorous Now. This, of course, is a game for old people. Tracing an ancestor to his lair hardly differs from a boy's search for a bird's nest or for a ball lost in the grass. The Christmas tree of one's childhood is replaced by the Family Tree.
As the author of several papers on Lepidoptera, such as the "Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides," I experience a certain thrill on finding that my mother's maternal grandfather Nikolay Kozlov, who was born two centuries ago and was the first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine, wrote a paper entitled "On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane" to which my "Nearctic Members et cetera," furnishes a perfect response. And no less perfect is the connection between Nabokov's Pug, a little American moth named after me, and Nabokov's River in Nova Zembla of all places, so named after my great-grandfather, who participated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in an arctic expedition. I learned about these things quite late in life. Talks about one's ancestors were frowned upon in my family; the interdiction came from my father who had a particular loathing for the least speck or shadow of snobbishness. When imagining the information that I could now have used in my memoir, I rather regret that no such talks took place. But it simply was not done in our home, sixty
years ago, twelve hundred miles away.
FAMILY TREE
My father Vladimir Nabokov was a liberal statesman, member of the first Russian parliament, champion of justice and law in a difficult empire. He was born in 1870, went into exile in 1919, and three years later, in Berlin, was assassinated by two Fascist thugs while he was trying to shield his friend Professor Milyukov.
The Nabokov family's estate was adjacent to that of the Rukavishnikovs in the Government of St. Petersburg. My mother Helen (1876-1939) was the daughter of Ivan Rukavishnikov, country gentleman and philanthropist. My paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1827-1904) was State Minister of Justice for eight years (1878-1885) under two tsars. My grandmother's paternal ancestors, the von Korffs, are traceable to the fourteenth century, while on their distaff side there is a long line of von Tiesenhausens, one of whose ancestors was Engelbrecht von Tiesenhausen of Liviand who took part, around 1200, in the Third and Fourth Crusades. Another direct ancestor of mine was Can Grande della Scala, Prince of Verona, w-ho sheltered the exiled Dante Alighieri, and whose blazon (two big dogs holding a ladder) adorns Boccaccio's Decameron (1353). Della Scala's granddaughter Beatrice married, in 1370, Wilhelm Count Oettingen, grandson of fat Bolko the Third, Duke of Silesia. Their daughter married a von Waldburg, and three Waldburgs, one Kittlitz, two Polenzes and ten Osten-Sackens later, Wilhelm Carl von Korff and Eleonor von der Osten-Sacken engendered my paternal grandmother's grandfather, Nicolaus, killed in battle on June 12, 1812. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother Anto inette Graun, was the granddaughter of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun (1701-1759).
BERLIN
My first Russian novel was written in Berlin in 1924-- this was Mary, in Russian Mashenka, and the first translation of any of my books was Masbenka in German under the title Sie kommt-- kommt Sie?, published by Ullstein in 1928. My next seven novels were also written in Berlin and all of them had, entirely or in part, a Berlin background. This is the German contribution to the atmosphere and production of all my eight Russian novels written in Berlin. When I moved there from England in 1921,1 had only a smattering of German picked up in Berlin during an earlier stay in the winter of 1910 when by brother and I went there with a Russian tutor to have ! our teeth fixed by an American dentist.
In the course of my Cambridge University years I kept my Russian alive by reading Russian literature, my imain subject, and by composing an appalling quantity of poems in Russian. Upon moving to Berlin I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak German fluently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made easier by the fact that I lived in a closed emigre circle of Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers, magazines, and books. My only forays into the local language were the civilities exchanged with my successive landlords or landladies and the routine necessities of shopping: Ich mochte etwas Schinken. I now regret that I did so poorly; I regret it from a ! cultural point of view. The little I ever did in that respect was to translate in my youth the Heine songs for a Russian contralto-- who, incidentally, wanted the musically significant vowels to coincide in fullness of sound, and therefore I turned Ich grolle nicbt into Net, zloby net, instead of the unsingable old v-ersion Ya ne serzhus'. Later I read Goethe and Kafka en regard's I also did Homer and Horace. And of course since my early boyhood I have been tackling a multitude of German butterfly books with the aid of a dictionary.
AMERICA
In America, where I wrote all my fiction in English, the situation was different. I had spoken English with the same ease as Russian, since my earliest infancy. I had already written one English novel in Europe besides translating in the thirties two of my Russian books. Linguistically, though perhaps not emotionally, the transition was endurable. And in reward of whatever wrench I experienced, I composed in America a few Russian poems which are incomparably better than those of my European period.
LEPIDOPTERA
My actual work on lepidoptera is comprised within the span of only seven or eight years in the nineteen forties, mainly at Harvard, where I was Research Fellow in Entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. This entailed some amount of curatorship but most of my work was devoted to the classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired for ever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life. Summers were spent by my wife and me in hunting butterflies, mostly in the Rocky Mountains. In the last fifteen years I have collected h! ere and there, in North America and Europe, but have not published any scientific papers on butterflies, because the writing of new novels and the translating of my old ones encroached too much on my life: the miniature hooks of a male butterfly are nothing in comparison to the eagle claws of literature which tear at me day and night. My entomological library in Montreux is smaller, in fact, than the heaps of butterfly books I had as a child.
I am the author or the reviser of a number of species and subspecies mainly in the New World. The author's name, in such cases, is appended in Roman letters to the italicized name he gives to the creature. Several butterflies and one moth have been named for me, and in such cases my name is incorporated in that of the described insect, becoming "nabokovi,"' followed by the describer's name. There is also a genus Nabokovia Hemming, in South America. All my American collections are in museums, in New York, Boston, and lthaca.
The butterflies I have been collecting during the last decade, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, are not yet spread. They are still papered, that is kept in little glazed envelopes which are stored in tin boxes. Eventually they will be relaxed in damp towels, then pinned, then spread, and dried again on setting boards, and finally, labeled and placed in the glassed drawers of a cabinet to be preserved, I hope, in the splendid entomological museum in Lausanne.
FAMILY
I have always been an omnivorous consumer of books, and now, as in my boyhood, a vision of the night's lamplight on a bedside tome is a promised treat and a guiding star throughout the day. Other keen pleasures are soccer matches on the TV, an occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer, sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems. Less ordinary, perhaps, is the unruffled flow of a family life which during its long course-- almost half a century-- has made absolute fools of the bogeys of environment and the bores of circumstance at all stages of our expatriation. Most of my works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflec! ted color in the inner mirrors of my books.
It was in Berlin that we married, in April, 1925, in the midst of my writing my first Russian novel. We were ridiculously poor, her father was ruined, my widowed mother subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms of German military families; I taught tennis and English, and nine years later, in 1934, at the dawn of a new era, our only son was born. In the late thirties we migrated to France. My stuff was beginning to be translated, my readings in Paris and elsewhere were well attended; but then came the end of my European stage: in May, 1940, we moved to America.
FAME
Soviet politicians have a rather comic provincial way of applauding the audience that applauds them. I hope I won't be accused of facetious sufficiency if I say in response to your compliments that I have the greatest readers any author has ever had. I see myself as an American writer raised in Russia, educated in England, imbued with the culture of Western Europe; I am aware of the blend, but even the most lucid plum pudding cannot sort out its own ingredients, especially whilst the pale fire still flickers around it. Field, Appel, Proffer, and many others in the USA, Zimmer in Germany, Vivian Darkbioom (a shy violet in Cambridge), have all added their erudition to my inspiration, with brilliant results. I would like to say a tot about my heroic readers in Russia but am prevented from doing so-- by many emotions besides a sense of responsibility with which I still cannot cope in any rational way.
SWITZERLAND
Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets-- just west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson sun! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in charming surroundings.
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
ALL IS VANITY
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
Theo kulichki
Swiss Broadcast [1972?]
On September 8, 1971, Paul Sufrin came here to conduct a
radio interview for Swiss Broadcast, European &
Overseas Service. I do not know when, or if, our rather odd
colloquy was used. Here are a few samples.
You've been quoted as saying that in a first-rate work
of fiction, the real clash isn't between the characters, but
between the author and the world. Would you explain this?
I believe I said "between the author and the reader," not
"the world," which would be a meaningless formula, since a
creative artist makes his own world or worlds. He clashes with
readerdom because he is his own ideal reader and those other
readers are so very often mere lip-moving ghosts and amnesiacs.
On the other hand, a good reader is bound to make fierce
efforts when wrestling wdth a difficult author, but those
efforts can be most rewarding after the bright dust has
settled.
What is your particular clash?
Well, that's the clash I am generally faced with.
In many of your writings, you have conceived what
{consider to be an Alice-in-Wonderland world of unreality and
illusion. What is the connection with your real struggle with
the world?
Alice in Wonderland is a specific book by a definite
author with its own quaintness, its own quirks, its own
quiddity. If read very carefully, it will be seen to imply, by
humorous juxtaposition, the presence of a quite solid, and
rather sentimental, world, behind the semi-detached dream.
Moreover, Lewis Carroll liked little girls. I don't.
The mixture of unreality and illusion may have led some
people to consider you mystifying and your writing full of
puzzles. What is your answer to people who say you are just
plain obscure?
To stick to the crossword puzzle in their Sunday paper.
Do you make a point of puzzling people and playing
games with readers?
What a bore that would be!
The past figures prominently in some of your writing.
What concern do you have for the present and the future?
My conception of the texture of time somewhat resembles
its image in Part Four of Ada. The present is only the
top of the past, and the future does not exist.
What have you found to be the disadvantages of being
able to write in so many languages?
The inability to keep up with their ever-changing slang.
What are the advantages?
The ability to render an exact nuance by shifting from the
language I am now using to a brief burst of French or to a soft
rustle of Russian.
What do you think of critic George Steiner's linking
you with Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as the three
figures of probable genius in contemporary fiction?
That playwright and that essayist are regarded nowadays
with such religious fervor that in the triptych you mention, I
would feel like a robber between two Christs. Quite a cheerful
robber, though.
Theo kulichki
The New York Times [1971]
A second exchange with Alden Whitman took place in
mid-April, 1971, and was reproduced, with misprints and other
flaws, in The New York Times, April 23.
You, sir, will be seventy-two in a few days, having
exceeded the Biblical three score and ten. How does this feat,
if it is a feat, impress you?
"Three score and ten" sounded, no doubt, very venerable in
the days when life expectancy hardly reached one half of that
length. Anyway, Petersburgan pediatricians never thought I
might perform the feat you mention: a feat of lucky endurance,
of paradoxically detached will power, of good work and good
wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or a rhythmic
phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help is the
fact that I am subject to the embarrassing qualms of
superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect roe
obsessively-- though not in the sense of absurd fears but
as fabulous (and on the whole rather bracing) scientific
enigmas incapable of being stated, let alone solved.
Has your life thus far come up to expectations you bad
for yourself as a young man?
My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of
boyhood and youth. In the first decade of our dwindling
century, during trips with my family to Western Europe, I
imagined, in bedtime reveries, what it would be like to become
an exile who longed for a remote, sad, and (right epithet
coming) unquenchable Russia, under the eucalipti of exotic
resorts. Lenin and his police nicely arranged the realization
of that fantasy. At the age of twelve my fondest dream
was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies.
Twenty-five years later I successfully sent myself, in the part
of my hero's father (see my novel The Gift) to explore,
net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At fifteen I
visualized myself as a world-famous author of seventy with a
mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald.
If birthday wishes were horses, what would yours be for
yourself?
Pegasus, only Pegasus.
You are, I am told, at work on a new novel. Do you have
a working title? And could you give me a precis of what it is
all about?
The working title of the novel I am composing now is
Transparent Things, but a precis would be an opaque
shadow. The façade of our hotel in Montreux is being
repainted, and I have reached the ultimate south of Portugal in
an effort to find a quiet spot (pace the booming surf
and rattling wind) where to write. This I do on scrambled index
cards (my text existing already there in invisible lead) which
I gradually fill in and sort out, using up in the process more
pencil sharpeners than pencils; but I have spoken of this in
several earlier questionnaires-- a word whose spelling I have
to look up every time; my traveling companion, Webster's
Collegiate Dictionary, 1970, defines, by the way, "Quassia" as
derived from "Quassi," a Surinam Negro slave of the 18th centu!
ry, who discovered a remedy for worms in white children. On the
other hand, none of my own coinages or reapplications appears
in this lexicon-- neither "iridule" (a mother-of-pearl cloudlet
in Pale Fire), nor "racemosa" (a kind of bird cherry),
nor several prosodie terms such as "scud" and "tilt" (see my
Commentary to Eugene Onegin).
There has been a variety of critical reaction to Ada.
Which critics, in your views, have been especially
perceptive, and why?
Except for a number of helpless little hacks who were
unable to jog beyond the first chapters, American reviewers
have been remarkably perceptive in regard to my most
cosmopolitan and poetic novel. As to the British press, the
observations of a few discerning critics were also most
welcome; the buffoons turned out to be less clever than usual,
whilst my regular spiritual guide, Mr. Philip Toyn-bee, seemed
even more distressed by Ada than he had been by Pale
Fire. I am bad at remembering reviews in detail, and for
the moment several mountain chains separate me from my files,
but generally speaking my wife and I have long stopped stuffing
clippings into forgettable boxes, instead of which an efficient
secretary pastes them in huge comfortable albums, with the
result that I am informed better than before of current gloss
and ! gossip. In direct answer to your question I would say
that the main favor I ask of the serious critic is sufficient
perceptiveness to understand that whatever term or trope I use,
my purpose is not to be facetiously flashy or grotesquely
obscure but to express what I feel and think with the utmost
truthfulness and perception.
Your novel Mary is having a success in the
United States. What have been your feelings about seeing in
print a novel of so long ago in an English version?
In my preface to the English translation of my first
Russian novel, written forty-eight years ago, I point out the
nature of the similarities between the author's first love
affair in 1915 and that of Ganin who recalls it as his own in
the stylized world of my Mashenka. Owing perhaps to my
having gone back to that young romance in my autobiography
begun in the nineteen forties (that is, at the centerpoint of
the span separating Mashenka from Mary), the
strangeness of the present resurrection cannot help losing
something of its thrill. Yet I do feel another, more abstract
though no! less grateful, tingle when I tell myself that
destiny not only preserved a fragile find from decay and
oblivion, but allowed me to last long enough to supervise the
unwrapping of the mummy.
If you were writing the "book" for Lolita as a
musical comedy, what would you select as the main comic point?
The main comic point would have been my trying to do
it myself.
Theo kulichki
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