d*d
2 楼
wiki? check some famous people's wiki and the reference are the sources of
information
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
information
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
z*i
3 楼
哪一类的。 people和bw都有，但风格迥异啊。
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
a*7
4 楼
南方人物周刊?
http://www.nfpeople.com/
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
http://www.nfpeople.com/
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
x*n
5 楼
中文的么？找来做啥？
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
c*b
6 楼
这个合适，多谢大家！
【在 a*********7 的大作中提到】
: 南方人物周刊?
: http://www.nfpeople.com/
【在 a*********7 的大作中提到】
: 南方人物周刊?
: http://www.nfpeople.com/
r*e
7 楼
search amazon for 50 years of playboy interview
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
r*e
8 楼
来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
真恶。
Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of
burning Humbert Humbert’s little black diary. No, I shall never regret
Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition
and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other,
depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other
works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot
grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
Playboy: Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is
tender, few would deny that it is queer—so much so that when director
Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted
as saying, “Of course they’ll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will
make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26.” Though
you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film
to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with
the final product?
Nabokov: I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors
deserver the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or
childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of
unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece,
and so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had
nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on
stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different
motels at which they stayed. All I did was write the screenplay, a
preponderating portion of which was used by Kubrick.
Playboy: Do you feel that Lolita’s twofold success has affected your life
for the better or for the worse?
Nabokov: I gave up teaching—that’s about all in the way of change. Mind
you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my
lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and
especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of
teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle
with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the
classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s
Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-
Moscow express in the early 1870s—without an understanding of which neither
Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my
most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith.
Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young
males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium
and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous
throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs
plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull
gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden
knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka,
do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first
part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the
nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustic arising simultaneously, the
majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a
cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch
eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious
meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls
chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.
Playboy: Citing in Lolita the same kind of acid-etched scene you’ve just
described, many critics have called the book a masterful satiric social
commentary on America. Are they right?
Nabokov: Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the
temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that
in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But
I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America.
Playboy: But haven’t you written yourself that there is “nothing more
exhilarating than American Philistine vulgarity”?
Nabokov: No, I did not say that. That phrase has been lifted out of context,
and like a round, deep-sea fish, has burst in the process. If you look up
my little afterpiece, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which I appended to the
novel, you will see that what I really said was that in regard to
Philistine vulgarity—which I do feel is most exhilarating—no difference
exists between American and European manners. I go on to say that a
proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
Playboy: Many readers have concluded that the Philistinism you seem to find
the most exhilarating is that of America’s sexual mores.
Nabokov: Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem,
sex as a platitude—all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let
us skip sex.
Playboy: Not to belabor the subject, some critics have felt that your barbed
comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practiced by American
analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.
Nabokov: Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and
disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has
tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one
of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I
reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the
ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
Playboy: Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita that Humbert
Humbert’s appetite for nymphets is the result of an unrequited childhood
love affair; in Invitation to a Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl
, Emmie, who is erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend
Sinister, your protagonist dreams that he is “surreptitiously enjoying
Mariette [his maid] while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the
rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.” Some
critics, in poring over your works for clues to your personality, have
pointed to this recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation
on your part with the subject of sexual attraction between pubescent girls
and middle-aged men. Do you feel that there may be some truth in this charge?
Nabokov: I think it would be more correct to say that had I not written
Lolita, readers would not have started finding nymphets in my other works
and in their own households. I find it very amusing when a friendly, polite
person says to me—probably just in order to be friendly and polite—“Mr.
Naborkov,” or “Mr. Nabahkov,” or “Mr. Nabrov” or “Mr. Nabohkov,”
depending on his linguistic abilities, “I have a little daughter who is a
regular Lolita.” People tend to underestimate the power of my imagination
and my capacity of evolving serial selves in my writings. And then, of
course, there is that special type of critic, the ferrety, human-interest
fiend, the jolly vulgarian. Someone, for instance, discovered tell-tale
affinities between Humbert’s boyhood romance on the Riviera and my own
recollections about little Colette, with whom I built sand castles in
Biarritz when I was 10. Somber Humbert was, of course, 13 and in the throes
of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas my own romance with
Colette had no trace of erotic desire and indeed was perfectly commonplace
and normal. And, of course, at 9 and 10 years of age, in that set, in those
times, we knew nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life that are
imparted nowadays to infants by progressive parents.
Playboy: Why false?
Nabokov: Because the imagination of a small child—especially a town child—
at once distorts, stylizes or otherwise alters the bizarre things he is told
about the busy bee, which neither he nor his parents can distinguish from a
bumblebee, anyway.
Playboy: What one critic has termed your “almost obsessive attention to the
phrasing, rhythm, cadence and connotation of words” is evident even in the
selection of names for your own celebrated bee and bumblebee—Lolita and
Humbert Humbert. How did they occur to you?
Nabokov: For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One
of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.” The suffix “-ita” has a
lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However,
it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-
ta, with a heavy, clammy “L” and a long “o.” No, the first syllable
should be as in “lollipop,” the “L” liquid and delicate, the “lee” not
too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the
necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the
welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears
in “Dolores.” My little girl’s heart-rending fate had to be taken into
account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her
with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which
went nicely with the surname “Haze,” where Irish mists blend with a German
bunny—I mean a small German hare.
Playboy: You’re making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German
term for rabbit—Hase. But what inspired you to dub Lolita’s aging
inamorato with such engaging redundancy?
Nabokov: That, too, was easy. The double rumble is, I think, very nasty,
very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a
kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and
Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns. And the execrable
diminutive “Hum” is on a par, socially and emotionally, with “Lo,” as
her mother calls her.
Playboy: Another critic has written of you that “the task of sifting and
selecting just the right succession of words from that multilingual memory,
and of arranging their many-mirrored nuances into the proper juxtapositions,
must be psychically exhausting work.” Which of all your books, in this
sense, would you say was the most difficult to write?
Nabokov: Oh, Lolita, naturally. I lacked the necessary information—that was
the initial difficulty. I did not know any American 12-year-old girls, and
I did not know America; I had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me
some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a
similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal. The obtaining of
such local ingredients as would allow me to inject average “reality” into
the brew of individual fancy proved, at 50, a much more difficult process
than it had been in the Europe of my youth.
Playboy: Though born in Russia, you have lived and worked for many years in
America as well as in Europe. Do you feel any strong sense of national
identity?
Nabokov: I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England
where I studied French literature, before spending 15 years in Germany. I
came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make
America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very
best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good-
natured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand
Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired
more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books—old books and new ones—
found some admirable readers. I became as stout as Cortez—mainly because I
quit smoking and started to much molasses candy instead, with the result
that my weight went up from my usual 140 to a monumental and cheerful 200.
In consequence, I am one-third American—good American flesh keeping me warm
and safe.
Playboy: You spent 20 years in America, and yet you never owned a home or
had a really settled establishment there. Your friends report that you
camped impermanently in motels, cabins, furnished apartments and the rented
homes of professors away on leave. Did you feel so restless or so alien that
the idea of settling down anywhere disturbed you?
Nabokov: The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing
short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I
would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with
hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for
instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself
out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been
rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing
thing, a “full professor,” but at heart I have always remained a lean “
visiting lecturer.” The few times I said to myself anywhere: “Now, that’s
a nice spot for a permanent home,” I would immediately hear in my mind the
thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I
would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the
earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs
and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was
taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to
material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the
Revolution abolished that wealth.
Playboy: You lived in Russia for 20 years, in West Europe for 20 years, and
in America for 20 years. But in 1960, after the success of Lolita, you moved
to France and Switzerland and have not returned to the U.S. since. Does
this mean, despite your self-identification as an American writer, that you
consider your American period over?
Nabokov: I am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons—family
reasons and certain professional ones too, such as some special research for
a special book. I hope to return very soon to America—back to its library
stacks and mountain passes. An ideal arrangement would be an absolutely
soundproofed flat in New York, on a top floor—no feet walking above, no
soft music anywhere—and a bungalow in the Southwest. Sometimes I think it
might be fun to adorn a university again, residing and writing there, not
teaching, or at least not teaching regularly.
Playboy: Meanwhile you remain secluded—and somewhat sedentary, from all
reports—in your hotel suite. How do you spend your time?
Nabokov: I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough
—big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak—which visits the balcony
and emits a most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally
revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, meditation and
bath—in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out
for a short stroll with my wife along the lake. Practically all the famous
Russian writers of the 19th century have rambled here at one time or another
. Zhukovski, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy—who courted the hotel chambermaids
to the detriment of his health—and many Russian poets. But then, as much
could be said of Nice or Rome. We lunch around one p.m., and I am back at my
desk by half-past one and work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll
to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after
dinner. And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven, and tussle with
insomnia from that time till one a.m. About twice a week I have a good, long
nightmare with unpleasant characters imported from earlier dreams,
appearing in more or less iterative surroundings—kaleidoscopic arrangements
of broken impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and irresponsible
mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian implication or
explication, but singularly akin to the procession of changing figures that
one usually sees on the inner palpebral screen when closing one’s weary
eyes.
Playboy: Is it true that you write standing up, and that you write in
longhand rather than on a typewriter?
Nabokov: Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at a lovely
old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity
nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair at an
ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine
, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study. It is a pleasant
solar routine. But when I was young, in my 20s and early 30s, I would often
stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed.
Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping
qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration.
Playboy: Can you tell us something more about the actual creative process
involved in the germination of a book—perhaps by reading a few random notes
for or excerpts from a work in progress?
Nabokov: Certainly not. No foetus should undergo an exploratory operation.
But I can do something else. This box contains index cards with some notes I
made at various times more or less recently and discarded when writing Pale
Fire. It’s a little batch of rejects. I’ll read a few [reading from cards
]:
“Selene, the moon. Selenginsk, an old town in Siberia: moon-rocket town”…
“Berry: the black knob on the bill of the mute swan”…“Dropworm: a small
caterpillar hanging on a thread”…“In The New Bon Ton Magazine, volume
five, 1820, page 312, prostitutes are termed ‘girls of the town’”…“
Youth dreams: forgot pants; old man dreams: forgot dentures”…“Student
explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages ‘so as to get
his own idea about the book and not be influenced by the author’”…“
Naprapathy: the ugliest word in the language.”
“And after rain, on beaded wires, one bird, two birds, three birds, and
none. Muddy tires, sun”…“Time without consciousness—lower animal world;
time with consciousness—man; consciousness without time—some still higher
state”…“We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce’s
mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in
that he gives too much verbal body to words”…“Parody of politeness: That
inimitable ‘Please’—‘Please send me your beautiful—’ which firms
idiotically address to themselves in printed forms meant for people ordering
their product.”
“Naive, nonstop, peep-peep twitter in dismal crates late, late at night, on
a desolate frost-bedimmed station platform”…“The tabloid headline ‘
Torso Killer May Beat Chair’ might be translated: ‘Celui qui tue un buste
peut bien battre une chaise’”…“Newspaper vendor, handing me a magazine
with my story: ‘I see you made the slicks.’”
“Snow falling, young father out with tiny child, nose like a pink cherry.
Why does a parent immediately say something to his or her child if a
stranger smiles at the latter? ‘Sure,’ said the father to the infant’s
interrogatory gurgle, which had been going on for some time, and would have
been left to go on in the quiet falling snow, had I not smiled in passing”
…“Intercolumniation: dark-blue sky between two white columns.”
“‘I,’ says Death, ‘am even in Arcadia’—legend on a shepherd’s tomb”
…“Marat collected butterflies”…“From the aesthetic point of view, the
tapeworm is certainly an undesirable boarder. The gravid segments frequently
crawl out of a person’s anal canal, sometimes in chains, and have been
reported a source of social embarrassment.”
Playboy: What inspires you to record and collect such disconnected
impressions and quotations?
Nabokov: All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s
development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat
pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it
visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it. When I remember
afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or
the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the
information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better
term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that
, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure. After
the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of “this is what I’m going
to write”—the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely
in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at
any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase. I
feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the
details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked
closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I
prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the
task for me. There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the
entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil
or pen. Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one’s mind, can be
compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from
left to right for its proper perception, I may direct my flashlight at any
part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing. I do not
begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach
chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in
consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have
filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and
novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete.
Every card is rewritten many times. About three cards make one typewritten
page, and when finally I feel that the conceived picture has been copied by
me as faithfully as physically possible—a few vacant lots always remain,
alas—then I dictate the novel to my wife who types it out in triplicate.
Playboy: In what sense do you copy “the conceived picture” of a novel?
Nabokov: A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals,
including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of
recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this
adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given
world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of
primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in
the market place. Art is never simple. To return to my lecturing days: I
automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase “
sincere and simple”—“Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple
and sincere”—under the impression that this was the greatest compliment
payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with
such rage in my pencil that it ripped the paper, the student complained that
this was what teachers had always taught him: “Art is simple, art is
sincere.” Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A
schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art
at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Playboy: In terms of modern art, critical opinion is divided about the
sincerity or deceitfulness, simplicity or complexity of contemporary
abstract painting. What is your own opinion?
Nabokov: I do not see any essential difference between abstract and
primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not
generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts. But if
we accept for a moment the general notion of “modern art,” then we must
admit that the trouble with it is that it is so commonplace, imitative and
academic. Blurs and blotches have merely replaced the mass prettiness of a
hundred years ago, pictures of Italian girls, handsome beggars, romantic
ruins, and so forth. But just as among those corny oils there might occur
the work of a true artist with a richer play of light and shade, with some
original streak of violence or tenderness, so among the corn of primitive
and abstract art one may come across a flash of great talent. Only talent
interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual
contribution.
Playboy: A contribution to society?
Nabokov: A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only
important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to
me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so
forth. Although I do not care for the slogan “art for art’s sake”—
because unfortunately such promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and
various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists—
there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae
and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Playboy: Do you expect your own work to remain “safe from larvae and rust”?
Nabokov: Well, in this matter of accomplishment, of course, I don’t have a
35-year plan or program, but I have a fair inkling of my literary afterlife.
I have felt the breeze of certain promises. No doubt there will be ups and
downs, long periods of slump. With the Devil’s connivance, I open a
newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: “Nobody
reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today.” Awful question: Who is this unfortunate
Fulmerford?
Playboy: While we’re on the subject of self-appraisal, what do you regard
as your principal failing as a writer—apart from forgettability?
Nabokov: 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.
Playboy: You’re doing rather well at the moment, if we may say so.
Nabokov: It’s an illusion.
Playboy: Your reply might be taken as confirmation of critical comments that
you are “an incorrigible leg puller,” “a mystificator” and “a literary
agent provocateur.” How do you view yourself?
Nabokov: I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been
dismayed by a critic’s bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked
or thanked a reviewer for a review. My second favorite fact—or shall I stop
at one?
Playboy: No, please go on.
Nabokov: The fact that since my youth—I was 19 when I left Russia—my
political outlook has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock.
It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of
thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state
is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of
the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no
executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in
theaters.
Playboy: Why no music?
Nabokov: I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I
attend a concert—which happens about once in five years—I endeavor gamely
to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for
more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in
lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am
bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians. My knowledge of music
is very slight; and I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and
inability so sad, so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family—my
own son. His great gifts, the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of a
splendid career—all this affects me deeply, and I feel a fool during a
technical conversation among musicians. I am perfectly aware of the many
parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially
in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to
cooperate? But I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more
exactly, in the composing of chess problems.
Playboy: Another substitute, surely, has been your own euphonious prose and
poetry. As one of few authors who have written with eloquence in more than
one language, how would you characterize the textural differences between
Russian and English, in which you are regarded as equally facile?
Nabokov: In sheer number of words, English is far richer than Russian. This
is especially noticeable in nouns and adjectives. A very bothersome feature
that Russian presents is the dearth, vagueness and clumsiness of technical
terms. For example, the simple phrase “to park a car” comes out—if
translated back from the Russian—as “to leave an automobile standing for a
long time.” Russian, at least polite Russian, is more formal than polite
English. Thus, the Russian word for “sexual”—polovoy—is slightly
indecent and not to be bandied around. The same applies to Russian terms
rendering various anatomical and biological notions that are frequently and
familiarly expressed in English conversation. On the other hand, there are
words rendering certain nuances of motion and gesture and emotion in which
Russian excels. Thus by changing the head of a verb, for which one may have
a dozen different prefixes to choose from, one is able to make Russian
express extremely fine shades of duration and intensity. English is,
syntactically, an extremely flexible medium, but Russian can be given even
more subtle twists and turns. Translating Russian into English is a little
easier than translating English into Russian, and 10 times easier than
translating English into French.
Playboy: You have said you will never write another novel in Russian. Why?
Nabokov: During the great, and still unsung, era of Russian intellectual
expatriation—roughly between 1920 and 1940—books written in Russian by é
migré Russians and published by émigré firms abroad were eagerly bought
or borrowed by émigré readers but were absolutely banned in Soviet Russia
—as they still are, except in the case of a few dead authors such as Kuprin
and Bunin, whose heavily censored works have been recently reprinted there
—no matter the theme of the story or poem. An émigré novel, published,
say, in Paris and sold over all free Europe, might have, in those years, a
total sale of 1,000 or 2,000 copies—that would be a best-seller—but every
copy would also pass from hand to hand and be read by at least 20 persons,
and at least 50 annually if stocked by Russian lending libraries, of which
there were hundreds in West Europe alone. The era of expatriation can be
said to have ended during World War II. Old writers died, Russian publishers
also vanished, and worst of all, the general atmosphere of exile culture,
with its splendor, and vigor, and purity, and reverberative force, dwindled
to a sprinkle of Russian-language periodicals, anemic in talent and
provincial in tone. Now to take my own case: It was not the financial side
that really mattered; I don’t think my Russian writings ever brought me
more than a few hundred dollars per year, and I am all for the ivory tower,
and for writing to please one reader alone—one’s own self. But one also
needs some reverberation, if not response, and a moderate multiplication of
one’s self throughout a country or countries; and if there be nothing but a
void around one’s desk, one would expect it to be at least a sonorous void
, and not circumscribed by the walls of a padded cell. With the passing of
years I grew less and less interested in Russia and more and more
indifferent to the once-harrowing thought that my books would remain banned
there as long as my contempt for the police state and political oppression
prevented me from entertaining the vaguest thought of return. No, I will not
write another novel in Russian, though I do allow myself a very few short
poems now and then. I wrote my last Russian novel a quarter of a century ago
. But today, in compensation, in a spirit of justice to my little American
muse, I am doing something else. But perhaps I should not talk about it at
this early stage.
Playboy: Please do.
Nabokov: Well, it occurred to me one day—while I was glancing at the
varicolored spines of Lolita translations into languages I do not read, such
as Japanese, Finnish or Arabic—that the list of unavoidable blunders in
these 15 or 20 versions would probably make, if collected, a fatter volume
than any of them. I had checked the French translation, which was basically
very good, but would have bristled with unavoidable errors had I not
corrected them. But what could I do with Portuguese or Hebrew or Danish?
Then I imagined something else. I imagined that in some distant future
somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner
telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that
every paragraph could lend itself to a hideous mistranslation, being pock-
marked with pitfalls. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version
of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or
blunders. So I decided to translate it myself. Up to now I have about 60
pages ready.
Playboy: Are you presently at work on any new writing project?
Nabokov: Good question, as they say on the lesser screen. I have just
finished correcting the last proofs of my work on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin—
four fat little volumes which are to appear this year in the Bollingen
Series; the actual translation of the poem occupies a small section of
volume one. The rest of the volume and volumes two, three and four contain
copious notes on the subject. This opus owes its birth to a casual remark my
wife made in 1950—in response to my disgust with rhymed paraphrases of
Eugene Onegin, every line of which I had to revise for my students—“Why
don’t you translate it yourself?” This is the result. It has taken some 10
years of labor. The index alone runs 5,000 cards in three long shoe boxes;
you see them over there on that shelf. My translation is, of course, a
literal one, a crib, a pony. And to the fidelity of transposal I have
sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage,
and even grammar.
Playboy: In view of these admitted flaws, are you looking forward to reading
the reviews of the book?
Nabokov: I really don’t read reviews about myself with any special
eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen—which
does happen now and then. And I never reread them, though my wife collects
the stuff, and though maybe I shall use a spatter of the more hilarious
Lolita items to write someday a brief history of the nymphet’s tribulations
. I remember, however, quite vividly, certain attacks by Russian émigré
critics who wrote about my first novels 30 years ago; not that I was more
vulnerable then, but my memory was certainly more retentive and enterprising
, and I was a reviewer myself. In the 1920s I was clawed at by a certain
Mochulski who could never stomach my utter indifference to organized
mysticism, to religion, to the church—any church. There were other critics
who could not forgive me for keeping aloof from literary “movements,” for
not airing the “angoisse” that they wanted poets to feel, and for not
belonging to any of those groups of poets that held sessions of common
inspiration in the back rooms of Parisian cafés. There was also the amusing
case of Georgy Ivanov, a good poet but a scurrilous critic. I never met him
or his literary wife Irina Odoevtsev; but one day in the late 1920s or
early 1930s, at a time when I regularly reviewed books for an émigré
newspaper in Berlin, she sent me from Paris a copy of a novel of hers with
the wily inscription “Thanks for King, Queen, Jack”—which I was free to
understand as “thanks for writing that book,” but which might also provide
her with the alibi: “Thanks for sending me your book,” though I never
sent her anything. Her book proved to be pitifully trivial, and I said so in
a brief and nasty review. Ivanov retaliated with a grossly personal article
about me and my stuff. The possibility of venting or distilling friendly or
unfriendly feelings through the medium of literary criticism is what makes
that art such a skewy one.
Playboy: What is your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by one critic in
a review which characterized you as having a fine and original mind, but “
not much trace of a generalizing intellect,” and as “the typical artist
who distrusts ideas”?
Nabokov: In much the same solemn spirit, certain crusty lepidopterists have
criticized my works on the classification of butterflies, accusing me of
being more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus
and the family. This kind of attitude is a matter of mental temperament, I
suppose. The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the
furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas. Oh, I
know the type, the dreary type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social
comment; he likes to recognize his own thoughts and throes in those of the
author; he wants at least one of the characters to be the author’s stooge.
If American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is acutely
and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it so much easier to write about
ideas than about words; he does not realize that perhaps the reason he does
not find general ideas in a particular writer is that the particular ideas
of that writer have not yet become general.
Playboy: Dostoievsky, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as
universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world’s
great authors. Yet you have described him as “a cheap sensationalist,
clumsy and vulgar.” Why?
Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all
Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those
Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a
prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of
his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily
amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be
endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.
Playboy: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad “writers of
books for boys”?
Nabokov: That’s exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of
the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that
delightful, highly artistic short story, The Killers. And the description of
the fish in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad’s
souvenir-shop style, and bottled ships, and shell necklaces of romanticist
clichés. In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would
care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly
juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved writers, the pets
of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such
as—but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the
dead ones are not yet buried.
Playboy: What did you read when you were a boy?
Nabokov: Between the ages of 10 and 15 in St. Petersburg, I must have read
more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five
-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe,
Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlanie, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander
Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg
and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual
child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge,
England, between the ages of 20 and 23, my favorites were Housman, Rupert
Brooke, Joyce, Proust and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe,
Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle and Rupert Brooke—have
faded away, have lost the glamor and trill they held for me. The others
remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned
. I was never exposed in the 20s and 30s, as so many of my coevals have been
, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I read them late in the season, around
1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only
remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why
anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some
sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than
I did.
Playboy: What are you reading habits today?
Nabokov: Usually I read several books at a time—old books, new books,
fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything—and when the bedside heap of a dozen
volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the
end of one week, I accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of
fiction that I never touch—mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor,
and historical novels. I also detest the so-called “powerful” novel—full
of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog—in fact, when I receive a
new novel from a hopeful publisher—“hoping that I like the book as much
as he does”—I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks
too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from
my bed.
Playboy: Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy reading?
Nabokov: I do have a few favorites—for example, Robbe-Grillet and Borges.
How freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths! I love
their lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.
Playboy: Many critics feel that this description applies no less aptly to
your own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose and poetry intermingle
as art forms?
Nabokov: Poetry, of course, includes all creative writing; I have never been
able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a
matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a
concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm
and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by
bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also
certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of
thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation. As in
today’s scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our
concept of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the
metaphor.
Playboy: You have also written that poetry represents “the mysteries of the
irrational perceived through rational words.” But many feel that the “
irrational” has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science
has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?
Nabokov: This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion.
In point of fact, the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of
mystery. Moreover, I don’t believe that any science today has pierced any
mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call “science” the
cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrist’s mumbo jumbo. This, at best
, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is
that yesterday’s neutron or today’s truth dies tomorrow. But even in a
better sense of “science”—as the study of visible and palpable nature, or
the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy—the situation remains
as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning
of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the
nature of thought.
Playboy: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept
of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
Nabokov: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I
never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know
more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not
have been expressed, had I not known more.
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
真恶。
Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
was a moment, in 1950, and again in 1951, when I was on the point of
burning Humbert Humbert’s little black diary. No, I shall never regret
Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition
and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other,
depending on the way you look. Of course she completely eclipsed my other
works—at least those I wrote in English: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,
Bend Sinister, my short stories, my book of recollections; but I cannot
grudge her this. There is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.
Playboy: Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is
tender, few would deny that it is queer—so much so that when director
Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted
as saying, “Of course they’ll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will
make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26.” Though
you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film
to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with
the final product?
Nabokov: I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors
deserver the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or
childishly pulling on her sweater in the car—these are moments of
unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece,
and so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had
nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on
stressing certain things that were not stressed—for example, the different
motels at which they stayed. All I did was write the screenplay, a
preponderating portion of which was used by Kubrick.
Playboy: Do you feel that Lolita’s twofold success has affected your life
for the better or for the worse?
Nabokov: I gave up teaching—that’s about all in the way of change. Mind
you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my
lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and
especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of
teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle
with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the
classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce’s
Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-
Moscow express in the early 1870s—without an understanding of which neither
Ulysses nor Anna Karenina, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my
most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith.
Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students—unwashed, unshaven young
males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium
and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous
throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs
plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull
gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden
knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: “Professor Kafka,
do you want us to say that…? Or do you want us to answer only the first
part of the question?” The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the
nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustic arising simultaneously, the
majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a
cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch
eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious
meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls
chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time’s up.
Playboy: Citing in Lolita the same kind of acid-etched scene you’ve just
described, many critics have called the book a masterful satiric social
commentary on America. Are they right?
Nabokov: Well, I can only repeat that I have neither the intent nor the
temperament of a moral or social satirist. Whether or not critics think that
in Lolita I am ridiculing human folly leaves me supremely indifferent. But
I am annoyed when the glad news is spread that I am ridiculing America.
Playboy: But haven’t you written yourself that there is “nothing more
exhilarating than American Philistine vulgarity”?
Nabokov: No, I did not say that. That phrase has been lifted out of context,
and like a round, deep-sea fish, has burst in the process. If you look up
my little afterpiece, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” which I appended to the
novel, you will see that what I really said was that in regard to
Philistine vulgarity—which I do feel is most exhilarating—no difference
exists between American and European manners. I go on to say that a
proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.
Playboy: Many readers have concluded that the Philistinism you seem to find
the most exhilarating is that of America’s sexual mores.
Nabokov: Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem,
sex as a platitude—all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let
us skip sex.
Playboy: Not to belabor the subject, some critics have felt that your barbed
comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practiced by American
analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.
Nabokov: Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and
disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has
tainted with its grotesque implications and methods, appear to me to be one
of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I
reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the
ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick.
Playboy: Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita that Humbert
Humbert’s appetite for nymphets is the result of an unrequited childhood
love affair; in Invitation to a Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl
, Emmie, who is erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend
Sinister, your protagonist dreams that he is “surreptitiously enjoying
Mariette [his maid] while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the
rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter.” Some
critics, in poring over your works for clues to your personality, have
pointed to this recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation
on your part with the subject of sexual attraction between pubescent girls
and middle-aged men. Do you feel that there may be some truth in this charge?
Nabokov: I think it would be more correct to say that had I not written
Lolita, readers would not have started finding nymphets in my other works
and in their own households. I find it very amusing when a friendly, polite
person says to me—probably just in order to be friendly and polite—“Mr.
Naborkov,” or “Mr. Nabahkov,” or “Mr. Nabrov” or “Mr. Nabohkov,”
depending on his linguistic abilities, “I have a little daughter who is a
regular Lolita.” People tend to underestimate the power of my imagination
and my capacity of evolving serial selves in my writings. And then, of
course, there is that special type of critic, the ferrety, human-interest
fiend, the jolly vulgarian. Someone, for instance, discovered tell-tale
affinities between Humbert’s boyhood romance on the Riviera and my own
recollections about little Colette, with whom I built sand castles in
Biarritz when I was 10. Somber Humbert was, of course, 13 and in the throes
of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas my own romance with
Colette had no trace of erotic desire and indeed was perfectly commonplace
and normal. And, of course, at 9 and 10 years of age, in that set, in those
times, we knew nothing whatsoever about the false facts of life that are
imparted nowadays to infants by progressive parents.
Playboy: Why false?
Nabokov: Because the imagination of a small child—especially a town child—
at once distorts, stylizes or otherwise alters the bizarre things he is told
about the busy bee, which neither he nor his parents can distinguish from a
bumblebee, anyway.
Playboy: What one critic has termed your “almost obsessive attention to the
phrasing, rhythm, cadence and connotation of words” is evident even in the
selection of names for your own celebrated bee and bumblebee—Lolita and
Humbert Humbert. How did they occur to you?
Nabokov: For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One
of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.” The suffix “-ita” has a
lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However,
it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-
ta, with a heavy, clammy “L” and a long “o.” No, the first syllable
should be as in “lollipop,” the “L” liquid and delicate, the “lee” not
too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the
necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the
welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears
in “Dolores.” My little girl’s heart-rending fate had to be taken into
account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her
with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which
went nicely with the surname “Haze,” where Irish mists blend with a German
bunny—I mean a small German hare.
Playboy: You’re making a word-playful reference, of course, to the German
term for rabbit—Hase. But what inspired you to dub Lolita’s aging
inamorato with such engaging redundancy?
Nabokov: That, too, was easy. The double rumble is, I think, very nasty,
very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a
kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and
Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns. And the execrable
diminutive “Hum” is on a par, socially and emotionally, with “Lo,” as
her mother calls her.
Playboy: Another critic has written of you that “the task of sifting and
selecting just the right succession of words from that multilingual memory,
and of arranging their many-mirrored nuances into the proper juxtapositions,
must be psychically exhausting work.” Which of all your books, in this
sense, would you say was the most difficult to write?
Nabokov: Oh, Lolita, naturally. I lacked the necessary information—that was
the initial difficulty. I did not know any American 12-year-old girls, and
I did not know America; I had to invent America and Lolita. It had taken me
some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I was faced by a
similar task, with a lesser amount of time at my disposal. The obtaining of
such local ingredients as would allow me to inject average “reality” into
the brew of individual fancy proved, at 50, a much more difficult process
than it had been in the Europe of my youth.
Playboy: Though born in Russia, you have lived and worked for many years in
America as well as in Europe. Do you feel any strong sense of national
identity?
Nabokov: I am an American writer, born in Russia and educated in England
where I studied French literature, before spending 15 years in Germany. I
came to America in 1940 and decided to become an American citizen, and make
America my home. It so happened that I was immediately exposed to the very
best in America, to its rich intellectual life and to its easygoing, good-
natured atmosphere. I immersed myself in its great libraries and its Grand
Canyon. I worked in the laboratories of its zoological museums. I acquired
more friends than I ever had in Europe. My books—old books and new ones—
found some admirable readers. I became as stout as Cortez—mainly because I
quit smoking and started to much molasses candy instead, with the result
that my weight went up from my usual 140 to a monumental and cheerful 200.
In consequence, I am one-third American—good American flesh keeping me warm
and safe.
Playboy: You spent 20 years in America, and yet you never owned a home or
had a really settled establishment there. Your friends report that you
camped impermanently in motels, cabins, furnished apartments and the rented
homes of professors away on leave. Did you feel so restless or so alien that
the idea of settling down anywhere disturbed you?
Nabokov: The main reason, the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing
short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me. I
would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with
hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for
instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself
out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been
rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing
thing, a “full professor,” but at heart I have always remained a lean “
visiting lecturer.” The few times I said to myself anywhere: “Now, that’s
a nice spot for a permanent home,” I would immediately hear in my mind the
thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I
would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the
earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs
and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was
taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to
material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the
Revolution abolished that wealth.
Playboy: You lived in Russia for 20 years, in West Europe for 20 years, and
in America for 20 years. But in 1960, after the success of Lolita, you moved
to France and Switzerland and have not returned to the U.S. since. Does
this mean, despite your self-identification as an American writer, that you
consider your American period over?
Nabokov: I am living in Switzerland for purely private reasons—family
reasons and certain professional ones too, such as some special research for
a special book. I hope to return very soon to America—back to its library
stacks and mountain passes. An ideal arrangement would be an absolutely
soundproofed flat in New York, on a top floor—no feet walking above, no
soft music anywhere—and a bungalow in the Southwest. Sometimes I think it
might be fun to adorn a university again, residing and writing there, not
teaching, or at least not teaching regularly.
Playboy: Meanwhile you remain secluded—and somewhat sedentary, from all
reports—in your hotel suite. How do you spend your time?
Nabokov: I awake around seven in winter: my alarm clock is an Alpine chough
—big, glossy, black thing with big yellow beak—which visits the balcony
and emits a most melodious chuckle. For a while I lie in bed mentally
revising and planning things. Around eight: shave, breakfast, meditation and
bath—in that order. Then I work till lunch in my study, taking time out
for a short stroll with my wife along the lake. Practically all the famous
Russian writers of the 19th century have rambled here at one time or another
. Zhukovski, Gogol, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy—who courted the hotel chambermaids
to the detriment of his health—and many Russian poets. But then, as much
could be said of Nice or Rome. We lunch around one p.m., and I am back at my
desk by half-past one and work steadily till half-past six. Then a stroll
to a newsstand for the English papers, and dinner at seven. No work after
dinner. And bed around nine. I read till half-past eleven, and tussle with
insomnia from that time till one a.m. About twice a week I have a good, long
nightmare with unpleasant characters imported from earlier dreams,
appearing in more or less iterative surroundings—kaleidoscopic arrangements
of broken impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and irresponsible
mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian implication or
explication, but singularly akin to the procession of changing figures that
one usually sees on the inner palpebral screen when closing one’s weary
eyes.
Playboy: Is it true that you write standing up, and that you write in
longhand rather than on a typewriter?
Nabokov: Yes. I never learned to type. I generally start the day at a lovely
old-fashioned lectern I have in my study. Later on, when I feel gravity
nibbling at my calves, I settle down in a comfortable armchair at an
ordinary writing desk; and finally, when gravity begins climbing up my spine
, I lie down on a couch in a corner of my small study. It is a pleasant
solar routine. But when I was young, in my 20s and early 30s, I would often
stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed.
Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping
qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration.
Playboy: Can you tell us something more about the actual creative process
involved in the germination of a book—perhaps by reading a few random notes
for or excerpts from a work in progress?
Nabokov: Certainly not. No foetus should undergo an exploratory operation.
But I can do something else. This box contains index cards with some notes I
made at various times more or less recently and discarded when writing Pale
Fire. It’s a little batch of rejects. I’ll read a few [reading from cards
]:
“Selene, the moon. Selenginsk, an old town in Siberia: moon-rocket town”…
“Berry: the black knob on the bill of the mute swan”…“Dropworm: a small
caterpillar hanging on a thread”…“In The New Bon Ton Magazine, volume
five, 1820, page 312, prostitutes are termed ‘girls of the town’”…“
Youth dreams: forgot pants; old man dreams: forgot dentures”…“Student
explains that when reading a novel he likes to skip passages ‘so as to get
his own idea about the book and not be influenced by the author’”…“
Naprapathy: the ugliest word in the language.”
“And after rain, on beaded wires, one bird, two birds, three birds, and
none. Muddy tires, sun”…“Time without consciousness—lower animal world;
time with consciousness—man; consciousness without time—some still higher
state”…“We think not in words but in shadows of words. James Joyce’s
mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in
that he gives too much verbal body to words”…“Parody of politeness: That
inimitable ‘Please’—‘Please send me your beautiful—’ which firms
idiotically address to themselves in printed forms meant for people ordering
their product.”
“Naive, nonstop, peep-peep twitter in dismal crates late, late at night, on
a desolate frost-bedimmed station platform”…“The tabloid headline ‘
Torso Killer May Beat Chair’ might be translated: ‘Celui qui tue un buste
peut bien battre une chaise’”…“Newspaper vendor, handing me a magazine
with my story: ‘I see you made the slicks.’”
“Snow falling, young father out with tiny child, nose like a pink cherry.
Why does a parent immediately say something to his or her child if a
stranger smiles at the latter? ‘Sure,’ said the father to the infant’s
interrogatory gurgle, which had been going on for some time, and would have
been left to go on in the quiet falling snow, had I not smiled in passing”
…“Intercolumniation: dark-blue sky between two white columns.”
“‘I,’ says Death, ‘am even in Arcadia’—legend on a shepherd’s tomb”
…“Marat collected butterflies”…“From the aesthetic point of view, the
tapeworm is certainly an undesirable boarder. The gravid segments frequently
crawl out of a person’s anal canal, sometimes in chains, and have been
reported a source of social embarrassment.”
Playboy: What inspires you to record and collect such disconnected
impressions and quotations?
Nabokov: All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s
development I get this urge to collect bits of straw and fluff, and to eat
pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, or if it
visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it. When I remember
afterwards the force that made me jot down the correct names of things, or
the inches and tints of things, even before I actually needed the
information, I am inclined to assume that what I call, for want of a better
term, inspiration, had been already at work, mutely pointing at this or that
, having me accumulate the known materials for an unknown structure. After
the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of “this is what I’m going
to write”—the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely
in the mind, not on paper; and to be aware of the stage it has reached at
any given moment, I do not have to be conscious of every exact phrase. I
feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the
details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked
closer, if I stopped the machine and opened its inner compartment; but I
prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the
task for me. There comes a moment when I am informed from within that the
entire structure is finished. All I have to do now is take it down in pencil
or pen. Since this entire structure, dimly illumined in one’s mind, can be
compared to a painting, and since you do not have to work gradually from
left to right for its proper perception, I may direct my flashlight at any
part or particle of the picture when setting it down in writing. I do not
begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach
chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in
consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have
filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and
novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete.
Every card is rewritten many times. About three cards make one typewritten
page, and when finally I feel that the conceived picture has been copied by
me as faithfully as physically possible—a few vacant lots always remain,
alas—then I dictate the novel to my wife who types it out in triplicate.
Playboy: In what sense do you copy “the conceived picture” of a novel?
Nabokov: A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals,
including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of
recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this
adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given
world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of
primitive art, the child’s scrawl on the fence, and the crank’s message in
the market place. Art is never simple. To return to my lecturing days: I
automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase “
sincere and simple”—“Flaubert writes with a style which is always simple
and sincere”—under the impression that this was the greatest compliment
payable to prose or poetry. When I struck the phrase out, which I did with
such rage in my pencil that it ripped the paper, the student complained that
this was what teachers had always taught him: “Art is simple, art is
sincere.” Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A
schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York? Because, of course, art
at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Playboy: In terms of modern art, critical opinion is divided about the
sincerity or deceitfulness, simplicity or complexity of contemporary
abstract painting. What is your own opinion?
Nabokov: I do not see any essential difference between abstract and
primitive art. Both are simple and sincere. Naturally, we should not
generalize in these matters: It is the individual artist that counts. But if
we accept for a moment the general notion of “modern art,” then we must
admit that the trouble with it is that it is so commonplace, imitative and
academic. Blurs and blotches have merely replaced the mass prettiness of a
hundred years ago, pictures of Italian girls, handsome beggars, romantic
ruins, and so forth. But just as among those corny oils there might occur
the work of a true artist with a richer play of light and shade, with some
original streak of violence or tenderness, so among the corn of primitive
and abstract art one may come across a flash of great talent. Only talent
interests me in paintings and books. Not general ideas, but the individual
contribution.
Playboy: A contribution to society?
Nabokov: A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only
important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to
me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so
forth. Although I do not care for the slogan “art for art’s sake”—
because unfortunately such promoters of it as, for instance, Oscar Wilde and
various dainty poets, were in reality rank moralists and didacticists—
there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae
and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.
Playboy: Do you expect your own work to remain “safe from larvae and rust”?
Nabokov: Well, in this matter of accomplishment, of course, I don’t have a
35-year plan or program, but I have a fair inkling of my literary afterlife.
I have felt the breeze of certain promises. No doubt there will be ups and
downs, long periods of slump. With the Devil’s connivance, I open a
newspaper of 2063 and in some article on the books page I find: “Nobody
reads Nabokov or Fulmerford today.” Awful question: Who is this unfortunate
Fulmerford?
Playboy: While we’re on the subject of self-appraisal, what do you regard
as your principal failing as a writer—apart from forgettability?
Nabokov: 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.
Playboy: You’re doing rather well at the moment, if we may say so.
Nabokov: It’s an illusion.
Playboy: Your reply might be taken as confirmation of critical comments that
you are “an incorrigible leg puller,” “a mystificator” and “a literary
agent provocateur.” How do you view yourself?
Nabokov: I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been
dismayed by a critic’s bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked
or thanked a reviewer for a review. My second favorite fact—or shall I stop
at one?
Playboy: No, please go on.
Nabokov: The fact that since my youth—I was 19 when I left Russia—my
political outlook has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock.
It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of
thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state
is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of
the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no
executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in
theaters.
Playboy: Why no music?
Nabokov: I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I deplore bitterly. When I
attend a concert—which happens about once in five years—I endeavor gamely
to follow the sequence and relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up for
more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, reflections of hands in
lacquered wood, a diligent bald spot over a fiddle, take over, and soon I am
bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians. My knowledge of music
is very slight; and I have a special reason for finding my ignorance and
inability so sad, so unjust: There is a wonderful singer in my family—my
own son. His great gifts, the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of a
splendid career—all this affects me deeply, and I feel a fool during a
technical conversation among musicians. I am perfectly aware of the many
parallels between the art forms of music and those of literature, especially
in matters of structure, but what can I do if ear and brain refuse to
cooperate? But I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more
exactly, in the composing of chess problems.
Playboy: Another substitute, surely, has been your own euphonious prose and
poetry. As one of few authors who have written with eloquence in more than
one language, how would you characterize the textural differences between
Russian and English, in which you are regarded as equally facile?
Nabokov: In sheer number of words, English is far richer than Russian. This
is especially noticeable in nouns and adjectives. A very bothersome feature
that Russian presents is the dearth, vagueness and clumsiness of technical
terms. For example, the simple phrase “to park a car” comes out—if
translated back from the Russian—as “to leave an automobile standing for a
long time.” Russian, at least polite Russian, is more formal than polite
English. Thus, the Russian word for “sexual”—polovoy—is slightly
indecent and not to be bandied around. The same applies to Russian terms
rendering various anatomical and biological notions that are frequently and
familiarly expressed in English conversation. On the other hand, there are
words rendering certain nuances of motion and gesture and emotion in which
Russian excels. Thus by changing the head of a verb, for which one may have
a dozen different prefixes to choose from, one is able to make Russian
express extremely fine shades of duration and intensity. English is,
syntactically, an extremely flexible medium, but Russian can be given even
more subtle twists and turns. Translating Russian into English is a little
easier than translating English into Russian, and 10 times easier than
translating English into French.
Playboy: You have said you will never write another novel in Russian. Why?
Nabokov: During the great, and still unsung, era of Russian intellectual
expatriation—roughly between 1920 and 1940—books written in Russian by é
migré Russians and published by émigré firms abroad were eagerly bought
or borrowed by émigré readers but were absolutely banned in Soviet Russia
—as they still are, except in the case of a few dead authors such as Kuprin
and Bunin, whose heavily censored works have been recently reprinted there
—no matter the theme of the story or poem. An émigré novel, published,
say, in Paris and sold over all free Europe, might have, in those years, a
total sale of 1,000 or 2,000 copies—that would be a best-seller—but every
copy would also pass from hand to hand and be read by at least 20 persons,
and at least 50 annually if stocked by Russian lending libraries, of which
there were hundreds in West Europe alone. The era of expatriation can be
said to have ended during World War II. Old writers died, Russian publishers
also vanished, and worst of all, the general atmosphere of exile culture,
with its splendor, and vigor, and purity, and reverberative force, dwindled
to a sprinkle of Russian-language periodicals, anemic in talent and
provincial in tone. Now to take my own case: It was not the financial side
that really mattered; I don’t think my Russian writings ever brought me
more than a few hundred dollars per year, and I am all for the ivory tower,
and for writing to please one reader alone—one’s own self. But one also
needs some reverberation, if not response, and a moderate multiplication of
one’s self throughout a country or countries; and if there be nothing but a
void around one’s desk, one would expect it to be at least a sonorous void
, and not circumscribed by the walls of a padded cell. With the passing of
years I grew less and less interested in Russia and more and more
indifferent to the once-harrowing thought that my books would remain banned
there as long as my contempt for the police state and political oppression
prevented me from entertaining the vaguest thought of return. No, I will not
write another novel in Russian, though I do allow myself a very few short
poems now and then. I wrote my last Russian novel a quarter of a century ago
. But today, in compensation, in a spirit of justice to my little American
muse, I am doing something else. But perhaps I should not talk about it at
this early stage.
Playboy: Please do.
Nabokov: Well, it occurred to me one day—while I was glancing at the
varicolored spines of Lolita translations into languages I do not read, such
as Japanese, Finnish or Arabic—that the list of unavoidable blunders in
these 15 or 20 versions would probably make, if collected, a fatter volume
than any of them. I had checked the French translation, which was basically
very good, but would have bristled with unavoidable errors had I not
corrected them. But what could I do with Portuguese or Hebrew or Danish?
Then I imagined something else. I imagined that in some distant future
somebody might produce a Russian version of Lolita. I trained my inner
telescope upon that particular point in the distant future and I saw that
every paragraph could lend itself to a hideous mistranslation, being pock-
marked with pitfalls. In the hands of a harmful drudge, the Russian version
of Lolita would be entirely degraded and botched by vulgar paraphrases or
blunders. So I decided to translate it myself. Up to now I have about 60
pages ready.
Playboy: Are you presently at work on any new writing project?
Nabokov: Good question, as they say on the lesser screen. I have just
finished correcting the last proofs of my work on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin—
four fat little volumes which are to appear this year in the Bollingen
Series; the actual translation of the poem occupies a small section of
volume one. The rest of the volume and volumes two, three and four contain
copious notes on the subject. This opus owes its birth to a casual remark my
wife made in 1950—in response to my disgust with rhymed paraphrases of
Eugene Onegin, every line of which I had to revise for my students—“Why
don’t you translate it yourself?” This is the result. It has taken some 10
years of labor. The index alone runs 5,000 cards in three long shoe boxes;
you see them over there on that shelf. My translation is, of course, a
literal one, a crib, a pony. And to the fidelity of transposal I have
sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage,
and even grammar.
Playboy: In view of these admitted flaws, are you looking forward to reading
the reviews of the book?
Nabokov: I really don’t read reviews about myself with any special
eagerness or attention unless they are masterpieces of wit and acumen—which
does happen now and then. And I never reread them, though my wife collects
the stuff, and though maybe I shall use a spatter of the more hilarious
Lolita items to write someday a brief history of the nymphet’s tribulations
. I remember, however, quite vividly, certain attacks by Russian émigré
critics who wrote about my first novels 30 years ago; not that I was more
vulnerable then, but my memory was certainly more retentive and enterprising
, and I was a reviewer myself. In the 1920s I was clawed at by a certain
Mochulski who could never stomach my utter indifference to organized
mysticism, to religion, to the church—any church. There were other critics
who could not forgive me for keeping aloof from literary “movements,” for
not airing the “angoisse” that they wanted poets to feel, and for not
belonging to any of those groups of poets that held sessions of common
inspiration in the back rooms of Parisian cafés. There was also the amusing
case of Georgy Ivanov, a good poet but a scurrilous critic. I never met him
or his literary wife Irina Odoevtsev; but one day in the late 1920s or
early 1930s, at a time when I regularly reviewed books for an émigré
newspaper in Berlin, she sent me from Paris a copy of a novel of hers with
the wily inscription “Thanks for King, Queen, Jack”—which I was free to
understand as “thanks for writing that book,” but which might also provide
her with the alibi: “Thanks for sending me your book,” though I never
sent her anything. Her book proved to be pitifully trivial, and I said so in
a brief and nasty review. Ivanov retaliated with a grossly personal article
about me and my stuff. The possibility of venting or distilling friendly or
unfriendly feelings through the medium of literary criticism is what makes
that art such a skewy one.
Playboy: What is your reaction to the mixed feelings vented by one critic in
a review which characterized you as having a fine and original mind, but “
not much trace of a generalizing intellect,” and as “the typical artist
who distrusts ideas”?
Nabokov: In much the same solemn spirit, certain crusty lepidopterists have
criticized my works on the classification of butterflies, accusing me of
being more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus
and the family. This kind of attitude is a matter of mental temperament, I
suppose. The middlebrow or the upper Philistine cannot get rid of the
furtive feeling that a book, to be great, must deal in great ideas. Oh, I
know the type, the dreary type! He likes a good yarn spiced with social
comment; he likes to recognize his own thoughts and throes in those of the
author; he wants at least one of the characters to be the author’s stooge.
If American, he has a dash of Marxist blood, and if British, he is acutely
and ridiculously class-conscious; he finds it so much easier to write about
ideas than about words; he does not realize that perhaps the reason he does
not find general ideas in a particular writer is that the particular ideas
of that writer have not yet become general.
Playboy: Dostoievsky, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as
universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world’s
great authors. Yet you have described him as “a cheap sensationalist,
clumsy and vulgar.” Why?
Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all
Russians love Dostoievsky as much as Americans do, and that most of those
Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a
prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of
his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily
amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be
endured for one moment—by this reader anyway.
Playboy: Is it true that you have called Hemingway and Conrad “writers of
books for boys”?
Nabokov: That’s exactly what they are. Hemingway is certainly the better of
the two; he has at least a voice of his own and is responsible for that
delightful, highly artistic short story, The Killers. And the description of
the fish in his famous fish story is superb. But I cannot abide Conrad’s
souvenir-shop style, and bottled ships, and shell necklaces of romanticist
clichés. In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would
care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly
juvenile, and the same can be said of some other beloved writers, the pets
of the common room, the consolation and support of graduate students, such
as—but some are still alive, and I hate to hurt living old boys while the
dead ones are not yet buried.
Playboy: What did you read when you were a boy?
Nabokov: Between the ages of 10 and 15 in St. Petersburg, I must have read
more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five
-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe,
Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlanie, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander
Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg
and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual
child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Cambridge,
England, between the ages of 20 and 23, my favorites were Housman, Rupert
Brooke, Joyce, Proust and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe,
Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle and Rupert Brooke—have
faded away, have lost the glamor and trill they held for me. The others
remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned
. I was never exposed in the 20s and 30s, as so many of my coevals have been
, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I read them late in the season, around
1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only
remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why
anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some
sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than
I did.
Playboy: What are you reading habits today?
Nabokov: Usually I read several books at a time—old books, new books,
fiction, nonfiction, verse, anything—and when the bedside heap of a dozen
volumes or so has dwindled to two or three, which generally happens by the
end of one week, I accumulate another pile. There are some varieties of
fiction that I never touch—mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor,
and historical novels. I also detest the so-called “powerful” novel—full
of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog—in fact, when I receive a
new novel from a hopeful publisher—“hoping that I like the book as much
as he does”—I check first of all how much dialog there is, and if it looks
too abundant or too sustained, I shut the book with a bang and ban it from
my bed.
Playboy: Are there any contemporary authors you do enjoy reading?
Nabokov: I do have a few favorites—for example, Robbe-Grillet and Borges.
How freely and gratefully one breathes in their marvelous labyrinths! I love
their lucidity of thought, the purity and poetry, the mirage in the mirror.
Playboy: Many critics feel that this description applies no less aptly to
your own prose. To what extent do you feel that prose and poetry intermingle
as art forms?
Nabokov: Poetry, of course, includes all creative writing; I have never been
able to see any generic difference between poetry and artistic prose. As a
matter of fact, I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a
concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rhythm
and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by
bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also
certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of
thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation. As in
today’s scientific classifications, there is a lot of overlapping in our
concept of poetry and prose today. The bamboo bridge between them is the
metaphor.
Playboy: You have also written that poetry represents “the mysteries of the
irrational perceived through rational words.” But many feel that the “
irrational” has little place in an age when the exact knowledge of science
has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence. Do you agree?
Nabokov: This appearance is very deceptive. It is a journalistic illusion.
In point of fact, the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of
mystery. Moreover, I don’t believe that any science today has pierced any
mystery. We, as newspaper readers, are inclined to call “science” the
cleverness of an electrician or a psychiatrist’s mumbo jumbo. This, at best
, is applied science, and one of the characteristics of applied science is
that yesterday’s neutron or today’s truth dies tomorrow. But even in a
better sense of “science”—as the study of visible and palpable nature, or
the poetry of pure mathematics and pure philosophy—the situation remains
as hopeless as ever. We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning
of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the
nature of thought.
Playboy: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept
of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?
Nabokov: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I
never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know
more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not
have been expressed, had I not known more.
【在 c**b 的大作中提到】
: 随便什么人物访谈，千把字，不上万的那种。网上能看到的。或者告诉我哪种杂志/网
: 站这种访谈多。谢谢！
b*s
9 楼
嗯，这个好！
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
l*r
10 楼
啊，you mean it...晚上我得好好读读
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
r*e
11 楼
开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
【在 l****r 的大作中提到】
: 啊，you mean it...晚上我得好好读读
:
: the
: Lolita?
: there
，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
【在 l****r 的大作中提到】
: 啊，you mean it...晚上我得好好读读
:
: the
: Lolita?
: there
l*k
12 楼
啧啧啧，还品味呢
满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
r*e
13 楼
呀莉莉好久不见。我叫黑胖来给你匀乎匀乎。。
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 啧啧啧，还品味呢
: 满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 啧啧啧，还品味呢
: 满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
r*e
14 楼
From the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an undesirable
boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
embarrassment.
你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 啧啧啧，还品味呢
: 满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
embarrassment.
你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 啧啧啧，还品味呢
: 满屏白花花的字，没露半分肉，眼睛都给我闪花了
m*e
15 楼
当年知道同学在医大要念一年寄生虫学，我想还好我不念医
canal,
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: From the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an undesirable
: boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
: sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
: embarrassment.
: 你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
canal,
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: From the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an undesirable
: boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
: sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
: embarrassment.
: 你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
r*e
16 楼
这个不用去医大上寄生虫啊，小时候自然常识课本里就有
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 当年知道同学在医大要念一年寄生虫学，我想还好我不念医
:
: canal,
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 当年知道同学在医大要念一年寄生虫学，我想还好我不念医
:
: canal,
l*k
17 楼
博格好久不见
你又失眠了?
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 呀莉莉好久不见。我叫黑胖来给你匀乎匀乎。。
你又失眠了?
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 呀莉莉好久不见。我叫黑胖来给你匀乎匀乎。。
l*k
18 楼
是呀，学infectious disease 那块有走马观花过
canal,
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: From the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an undesirable
: boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
: sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
: embarrassment.
: 你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
canal,
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: From the aesthetic point of view, the tapeworm is certainly an undesirable
: boarder. The gravid segments frequently crawl out of a person’s anal canal,
: sometimes in chains, and have been reported a source of social
: embarrassment.
: 你读得不仔细，这段跟你的专业多少还是相关的。。
r*e
19 楼
觉缺得厉害，失什么眠
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 博格好久不见
: 你又失眠了?
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 博格好久不见
: 你又失眠了?
m*e
20 楼
小学的自然课吗？已经不记得了
我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 这个不用去医大上寄生虫啊，小时候自然常识课本里就有
我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 这个不用去医大上寄生虫啊，小时候自然常识课本里就有
l*k
21 楼
嗯，春眠不觉晓呀
叫春了没?
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 觉缺得厉害，失什么眠
叫春了没?
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 觉缺得厉害，失什么眠
l*k
22 楼
哈，你怕这个呀
怎么圣经里还有虫图片呀
我最怕蜂窝照片那种密集图案
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 小学的自然课吗？已经不记得了
: 我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
: 中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
: 一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
: 那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
: 我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
: 研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
: 有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
: 后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
怎么圣经里还有虫图片呀
我最怕蜂窝照片那种密集图案
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 小学的自然课吗？已经不记得了
: 我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
: 中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
: 一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
: 那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
: 我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
: 研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
: 有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
: 后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
m*e
23 楼
不是啊，是那个行当的“圣经”
很怕，而且越来越厉害，是不是一种病。。。
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 哈，你怕这个呀
: 怎么圣经里还有虫图片呀
: 我最怕蜂窝照片那种密集图案
很怕，而且越来越厉害，是不是一种病。。。
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 哈，你怕这个呀
: 怎么圣经里还有虫图片呀
: 我最怕蜂窝照片那种密集图案
r*e
24 楼
ft，我正想贴张照片，找了半天，没好看的。小时候物质匮乏，很多人家买了瘟鸡豆肉
，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 小学的自然课吗？已经不记得了
: 我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
: 中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
: 一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
: 那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
: 我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
: 研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
: 有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
: 后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 小学的自然课吗？已经不记得了
: 我小学的时候家里有一期杂志，不知是知识就是力量还是什么别的
: 中间的彩页是某条绦虫的照片，false color的，
: 一小张一小张各种部位，拼了整整一页。头节像外星人
: 那段时间我哥经常拿这个来追得我抱头鼠窜
: 我大学时候上的普通生物学里有这个章节，都得把插图盖住才能看
: 研究生时候买了本本领域的圣经，封二有张虫子的照片
: 有次不小心摸到，把整本书都扔出去了啊
: 后来用别的纸把那张照片糊起来了
m*e
25 楼
教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: ft，我正想贴张照片，找了半天，没好看的。小时候物质匮乏，很多人家买了瘟鸡豆肉
: ，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: ft，我正想贴张照片，找了半天，没好看的。小时候物质匮乏，很多人家买了瘟鸡豆肉
: ，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
m*e
26 楼
找到好看的照片尽管贴啊，我现在telnet
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: ft，我正想贴张照片，找了半天，没好看的。小时候物质匮乏，很多人家买了瘟鸡豆肉
: ，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: ft，我正想贴张照片，找了半天，没好看的。小时候物质匮乏，很多人家买了瘟鸡豆肉
: ，舍不得扔，还是要吃下去，那个豆肉，就是tapeworm的小baby。
r*e
27 楼
叫不动了，话说现在勃都是微勃
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，春眠不觉晓呀
: 叫春了没?
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，春眠不觉晓呀
: 叫春了没?
r*e
28 楼
兴奋。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
r*e
29 楼
那就没效果了
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 找到好看的照片尽管贴啊，我现在telnet
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 找到好看的照片尽管贴啊，我现在telnet
r*e
30 楼
我叫去了，不对，是觉去了，莉莉mane晚安啊
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，春眠不觉晓呀
: 叫春了没?
【在 l******k 的大作中提到】
: 嗯，春眠不觉晓呀
: 叫春了没?
m*e
31 楼
因为有人吃了
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 兴奋。。。
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 兴奋。。。
m*e
32 楼
晚安
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 我叫去了，不对，是觉去了，莉莉mane晚安啊
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 我叫去了，不对，是觉去了，莉莉mane晚安啊
j*x
33 楼
认真地说
这推荐绝对适合他！
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
这推荐绝对适合他！
the
Lolita?
there
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 来，我给你贴一个。老头讲究起来真讲究，啰嗦起来真啰嗦，逗的时候真逗，恶的时候
: 真恶。
: Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov
: By ALVIN TOFFLER • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1964
: Playboy: With the American publication of Lolita in 1958, your fame and
: fortune mushroomed almost overnight from high repute among the literary
: cognoscenti—which you had enjoyed for more than 30 years—to both acclaim
: and abuse as the world-renowned author of a sensational best seller. In the
: aftermath of this cause célèbre, do you ever regret having written Lolita?
: Nabokov: On the contrary, I shudder retrospectively when I recall that there
l*k
34 楼
天呐～～～
我就去洗了个澡，你也不等等我，就自己去叫了，哼！
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 我叫去了，不对，是觉去了，莉莉mane晚安啊
我就去洗了个澡，你也不等等我，就自己去叫了，哼！
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 我叫去了，不对，是觉去了，莉莉mane晚安啊
b*s
35 楼
田大膀和四丫头？
开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
【在 r****e 的大作中提到】
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
b*s
36 楼
damn weirdo scientist!
教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
j*x
37 楼
为毛不是郑三炮和蝴蝶迷
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 田大膀和四丫头？
:
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
【在 b*s 的大作中提到】
: 田大膀和四丫头？
:
: 开什么玩笑？俺轻易不推荐，但凡推荐，那一定是好东西。同是一方面军出来的老土匪
: ，你难道不知道，俺的品味是久经考验的么？
l*r
38 楼
疯掉了，波哥这么阳春白雪的推荐给灌成这个样子，我正文还没看呢，已经头皮发麻了
。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
。。。
【在 m**e 的大作中提到】
: 教科书里（还是老师说的，忘了）叫米猪肉。。。
: 话说有次在买来的五香牛肉里发现苍蝇卵
: 去网上搜索确认，好一阵兴奋。。。
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