Nabokov's interview. Bayerischer Rundfunk [1971-72]
In October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux to
film an interview for the Bayeriscber Rundfunk. Of its
many topics and themes I have selected a few for reproduction
in this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comes
from a carefully executed and beautifully bound
Ahnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by my
German publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-RowohIt.
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example
"applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by
means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are
inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession,
stretches and sections of space. When we speak of the "passage
of time," we visualize an abstract river flowing through a
generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of
time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists,
they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature
Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada.
He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of
Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being
"an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration," of being able to
delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and
spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of
its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum." He also
is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of
metaphors."
Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which
would imply motion-- and Time does not move. Van's greatest
discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between
two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence
between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only
embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart
but the missed heartbeat.
PERSONAL PAST
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of
content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described
by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present,
but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant
accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for
constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out
and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting
through memory. The act of retention is the act of art,
artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination
of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and
the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by
a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good
memoirist, on the other hand, does his best! to preserve the
utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his
intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the
right patch of remembered color.
ANCESTRAL PAST
It follows that the combination and juxtaposition of
remembered details is a main factor in the artistic process of
reconstructing one's past. And that means probing not only
one's personal past but the past of one's family in search of
affinities with oneself, previews of oneself, faint allusions
to one's vivid and vigorous Now. This, of course, is a game for
old people. Tracing an ancestor to his lair hardly differs from
a boy's search for a bird's nest or for a ball lost in the
grass. The Christmas tree of one's childhood is replaced by the
Family Tree.
As the author of several papers on Lepidoptera, such as
the "Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides," I
experience a certain thrill on finding that my mother's
maternal grandfather Nikolay Kozlov, who was born two centuries
ago and was the first president of the Russian Imperial Academy
of Medicine, wrote a paper entitled "On the Coarctation of the
Jugular Foramen in the Insane" to which my "Nearctic Members
et cetera," furnishes a perfect response. And no less
perfect is the connection between Nabokov's Pug, a little
American moth named after me, and Nabokov's River in Nova
Zembla of all places, so named after
my great-grandfather, who participated at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in an arctic expedition. I learned about
these things quite late in life. Talks about one's ancestors
were frowned upon in my family; the interdiction came from my
father who had a particular loathing for the least speck or
shadow of snobbishness. When imagining the information that I
could now have used in my memoir, I rather regret that no such
talks took place. But it simply was not done in our home, sixty
years ago, twelve hundred miles away.
FAMILY TREE
My father Vladimir Nabokov was a liberal statesman, member
of the first Russian parliament, champion of justice and law in
a difficult empire. He was born in 1870, went into exile in
1919, and three years later, in Berlin, was assassinated by two
Fascist thugs while he was trying to shield his friend
Professor Milyukov.
The Nabokov family's estate was adjacent to that of the
Rukavishnikovs in the Government of St. Petersburg. My mother
Helen (1876-1939) was the daughter of Ivan Rukavishnikov,
country gentleman and philanthropist.
My paternal grandfather Dmitri Nabokov (1827-1904) was
State Minister of Justice for eight years (1878-1885) under two
tsars.
My grandmother's paternal ancestors, the von Korffs, are
traceable to the fourteenth century, while on their distaff
side there is a long line of von Tiesenhausens, one of whose
ancestors was Engelbrecht von Tiesenhausen of Liviand who took
part, around 1200, in the Third and Fourth Crusades. Another
direct ancestor of mine was Can Grande della Scala, Prince of
Verona, w-ho sheltered the exiled Dante Alighieri, and whose
blazon (two big dogs holding a ladder) adorns Boccaccio's
Decameron (1353). Della Scala's
granddaughter Beatrice married, in 1370, Wilhelm Count
Oettingen, grandson of fat Bolko the Third, Duke of Silesia.
Their daughter married a von Waldburg, and three Waldburgs, one
Kittlitz, two Polenzes and ten Osten-Sackens later, Wilhelm
Carl von Korff and Eleonor von der Osten-Sacken engendered my
paternal grandmother's grandfather, Nicolaus, killed in battle
on June 12, 1812. His wife, my grandmother's grandmother Anto
inette Graun, was the granddaughter of
the composer Carl Heinrich Graun (1701-1759).
BERLIN
My first Russian novel was written in Berlin in 1924--
this was Mary, in Russian Mashenka, and the first
translation of any of my books was Masbenka in German
under the title Sie kommt-- kommt Sie?, published by
Ullstein in 1928. My next seven novels were also written in
Berlin and all of them had, entirely or in part, a Berlin
background. This is the German contribution to the atmosphere
and production of all my eight Russian novels written in
Berlin. When I moved there from England in 1921,1 had only a
smattering of German picked up in Berlin during an earlier stay
in the winter of 1910 when by brother and I went there with a
Russian tutor to have ! our teeth fixed by an American dentist.
In the course of my Cambridge University years I kept my
Russian alive by reading Russian literature, my imain subject,
and by composing an appalling quantity of poems in Russian.
Upon moving to Berlin I was beset by a panicky fear of somehow
flawing my precious layer of Russian by learning to speak
German fluently. The task of linguistic occlusion was made
easier by the fact that I lived in a closed emigre circle of
Russian friends and read exclusively Russian newspapers,
magazines, and books. My only forays into the local language
were the civilities exchanged with my successive landlords or
landladies and the routine necessities of shopping: Ich
mochte etwas Schinken. I now regret that I did so poorly; I
regret it from a ! cultural point of view. The little I ever
did in that respect was to translate in my youth the Heine
songs for a Russian contralto-- who, incidentally, wanted the
musically significant vowels to coincide in fullness of sound,
and therefore I turned Ich grolle nicbt into Net,
zloby net, instead of the unsingable old v-ersion Ya ne
serzhus'. Later I read Goethe and Kafka en regard's
I also did Homer and Horace. And of course since my early
boyhood I have been tackling a multitude of German butterfly
books with the aid of a dictionary.
AMERICA
In America, where I wrote all my fiction in English, the
situation was different. I had spoken English with the same
ease as Russian, since my earliest infancy. I had already
written one English novel in Europe besides translating in the
thirties two of my Russian books. Linguistically, though
perhaps not emotionally, the transition was endurable. And in
reward of whatever wrench I experienced, I composed in America
a few Russian poems which are incomparably better than those of
my European period.
LEPIDOPTERA
My actual work on lepidoptera is comprised within the span
of only seven or eight years in the nineteen forties, mainly at
Harvard, where I was Research Fellow in Entomology at the
Museum of Comparative Zoology. This entailed some amount of
curatorship but most of my work was devoted to the
classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis
of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the
constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six
hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired
for ever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard
Museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult
life. Summers were spent by my wife and me in hunting
butterflies, mostly in the Rocky Mountains. In the last fifteen
years I have collected h! ere and there, in North America and
Europe, but have not published any scientific papers on
butterflies, because the writing of new novels and the
translating of my old ones encroached too much on my life: the
miniature hooks of a male butterfly are nothing in comparison
to the eagle claws of literature which tear at me day and
night. My entomological library in Montreux is smaller, in
fact, than the heaps of butterfly books I had as a child.
I am the author or the reviser of a number of species and
subspecies mainly in the New World. The author's name, in such
cases, is appended in Roman letters to the italicized name he
gives to the creature. Several butterflies and one moth have
been named for me, and in such cases my name is incorporated in
that of the described insect, becoming "nabokovi,"'
followed by the describer's name. There is also a genus
Nabokovia Hemming, in South America. All my American
collections are in museums, in New York, Boston, and lthaca.
The butterflies I have been collecting during the last decade,
mainly in Switzerland and Italy, are not yet spread. They are
still papered, that is kept in little glazed envelopes which are
stored in tin boxes. Eventually they will be relaxed in damp
towels, then pinned, then spread, and dried again on setting
boards, and finally, labeled and placed in the glassed drawers
of a cabinet to be preserved, I hope, in the splendid entomological
museum in Lausanne.
FAMILY
I have always been an omnivorous consumer of books, and
now, as in my boyhood, a vision of the night's lamplight on a
bedside tome is a promised treat and a guiding star throughout
the day. Other keen pleasures are soccer matches on the TV, an
occasional cup of wine or a triangular gulp of canned beer,
sunbaths on the lawn, and composing chess problems. Less
ordinary, perhaps, is the unruffled flow of a family life which
during its long course-- almost half a century-- has made
absolute fools of the bogeys of environment and the bores of
circumstance at all stages of our expatriation. Most of my
works have been dedicated to my wife and her picture has often
been reproduced by some mysterious means of reflec! ted color
in the inner mirrors of my books.
It was in Berlin that we married, in April, 1925, in the
midst of my writing my first Russian novel. We were
ridiculously poor, her father was ruined, my widowed mother
subsisted on an insufficient pension, my wife and I lived in
gloomy rooms which we rented in Berlin West, in the lean bosoms
of German military families; I taught tennis and English, and
nine years later, in 1934, at the dawn of a new era, our only
son was born. In the late thirties we migrated to France. My
stuff was beginning to be translated, my readings in Paris and
elsewhere were well attended; but then came the end of my
European stage: in May, 1940, we moved to America.
FAME
Soviet politicians have a rather comic provincial way of
applauding the audience that applauds them. I hope I won't be
accused of facetious sufficiency if I say in response to your
compliments that I have the greatest readers any author has
ever had. I see myself as an American writer raised in Russia,
educated in England, imbued with the culture of Western Europe;
I am aware of the blend, but even the most lucid plum pudding
cannot sort out its own ingredients, especially whilst the pale
fire still flickers around it. Field, Appel, Proffer, and many
others in the USA, Zimmer in Germany, Vivian Darkbioom (a shy
violet in Cambridge), have all added their erudition to my
inspiration, with brilliant results. I would like to say a tot
about my heroic readers in Russia but am prevented from doing
so-- by many emotions besides a sense of responsibility with
which I still cannot cope in any rational way.
SWITZERLAND
Exquisite postal service. No bothersome demonstrations, no
spiteful strikes. Alpine butterflies. Fabulous sunsets-- just
west of my window, spangling the lake, splitting the crimson
sun! Also, the pleasant surprise of a metaphorical sunset in
charming surroundings.
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself
mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that
it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so
much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is
frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are
frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels
and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent
characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a
Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are
victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a
reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a
frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing
stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning
sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride.
ALL IS VANITY
The phrase is a sophism because, if true, it is itself
mere "vanity," and if not then the "all" is wrong. You say that
it seems to be my main motto. I wonder if there is really so
much doom and "frustration" in my fiction? Humbert is
frustrated, that's obvious; some of my other villains are
frustrated; police states are horribly frustrated in my novels
and stories; but my favorite creatures, my resplendent
characters-- in The Gift, in Invitation to a
Beheading, in Ada, in Glory, et cetera-- are
victors in the long run. In fact I believe that one day a
reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a
frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing
stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel-- and assigning
sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride
