Book review: Vladimir Nabokov's interviews and more

For any Vladimir Nabokov fan, this is "must read."

Brian Boyd, assisted by Anastasia Tolstoy, has chronologically assembled Mr. Nabokov's "Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor" which span 56 years and include the last interviews conducted the year Nabokov died (1899-1977).

His LTEs presented here are ones he wrote when annoyed by a reviewer's mistakes.

About two-thirds of the book are the interviews which fascinated me more than the essays which, I must confess, most of them I skipped (and the references to and mentions of lepidopterology since a lepidopterist like Mr. Nabokov, I am not.) (Mr. Boyd has written a separate book entitled Nabokov's Butterflies.)

Demands for interviews with Nabokov "exploded" after the publication of Lolita (1955) which Nabokov said in numerous interviews was based on total fiction and originated with a chimpanzee. (Source? "Wet market"? I had to ask.) (Editor Boyd claims to have omitted duplicate questions posed by interviewers but this question appears over and over, along with "How do you spend your day, Mr. Nabokov?" All answers, intriguing, and duplications, not annoying.)

It took months for Hollywood to convince Mr. Nabokov to write the screenplay for Lolita. He was immensely pleased with the end product. (West End Cinema screened it last year. Please request West End to show it again. The ticket agent told me the movie was moved to a larger theatre since more ticket sales were sold than expected.)
 
For his interviews, reporters had to submit questions in advance and Nabokov prepared answers in writing.

He claimed he was a terrible speaker and wrote on notecards while in the bath tub or standing at a lectern.

The only difference between a short story and a novel, he said, is the novel is longer and took him about a year to compose 200 pages; two weeks to write a ten-page short story (p. 409).

Nabokov has been described as the best American prose writer, and Lolita proves it.

In a 1974 interview he expressed that "climatic changes" could be more harmful to "butterfly life" than pollution (p. 429).

His favorite Russian writers were Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, he said in a 1974 interview: "I will not discuss my contemporaries since my rule is never to speak of living writers in public" nor "living readers" of which there are some "real geniuses" and "quite a few asses." (P. 438).

In another 1974 interview, he said the writers he most admired were Edmund White, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, and "some of Truman Capote's stuff." (P. 447)
His family fled the Nazis, arriving in the U.S. in 1940. Nabokov grew to love America, especially the West (Los Angeles) and while speaking fondly of it, had many harsh words always to say about his native Russia, often expressing no desire to ever return to the land seized by the Bolsheviks and run by the Soviets at the time.

In the U.S. Nabokov wrote and taught at various colleges (one of his students was Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) until the late 1950s when he and his wife, Vera, whom he married in 1925, returned to Europe. They took up residency in a hotel in Switzerland, planning to return to America at some point, he said in a 1972 interview (p. 415), but "I detest planes" and boats take "a long time." 

They never made it back.

Several times the St. Petersburg native declared himself "an American writer" (p. 416), althought his first books were written in Russian.  In a 1972 interview, he noted that his books were banned in Russia (until 1986), "but copies sneak in there all the time." He and his son, Dmitri (1934 - 2012), translated Lolita into Russian.

He cared not for Sigmund Freud ("has caused much harm, and his disciples have made much money," [p. 456], calling Freud "a comic author," [p. 468]), nor did Nabokov think highly of works by F. Scott Fitzgerald ("I don't remember anything of Fitzgerald's writings," [p. 476]).

The importance of his wife, Vera, to his writing success cannot be overstated. She may have been his "everything" but she was not a ghost writer, the couple said more than once. (She shows up often in the interviews, coaxing him to do this or that; correcting him.) Stacy Schiff's biography about her won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize.

Think, Write, Speak is one of those books I am sad to have already finished. You want it to go on. And on....

The house where Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899 and lived with his family until 1917 when they fled Russia and the Bolsheviks. Open for tourists unless, of course, it's the height of the tourist season when it is closed four days for maintenance. Located near St. Isaac's Cathedral/Photo by Patricia Leslie

 The house where Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899/Photo by Patricia Leslie

A plaque at the house where Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899/Photo by Patricia Leslie

 
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