SOURCE: “The Last Interview,” in Vladimir Nabokov, His Life, His Work, His World: A Tribute, edited by Peter Quennell, 1977. Reprint by William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980, pp. 119-25.

[The following is a British Broadcasting Company transcript of Nabokov's last interview in 1977.]

We arrived in February. Wintry laurels and the bare willow trees made the path at the side of the lake seem melancholy, and there was a curious feeling of taking a walk in an old photograph. We were calling on Nabokov to let him know we were there, and also to tell him he'd given us rather short measure. The Nabokov interview (on this occasion for The Book Programme on Bbc2) is an entirely structured affair: the questions are sent a fortnight or so before the event, the answers are composed and returned, and then all you have to do is get in front of a camera and serve the interview, like iced cake. But it was to be a twenty-five-minute programme, and he hadn't given us quite enough.

He had been very ill. When he came into one of the public rooms of that slightly left-over caravanserai, the Montreux Palace Hotel, he was leaning on a stick, his face was pale, and his collar was now a size or two too large. Mme Nabokov was with him and she, too, had been ill. I felt rather scared—I don't quite know why—and to my surprise, after we'd been talking for a few minutes and I'd said how agreeable it was to know the interview had already taken place, frozen on paper before the cameras arrived, precluding the possibility of anything unexpected, Mme Nabokov murmured in a low voice: ‘Were you frightened?’ I jumped up and cried, ‘Oh no, not at all, not a bit,’ but I suppose, in accepting the premise of so strange a question, I gave myself the lie.

As far as the length of the interview was concerned it was plain that Nabokov had said all that he wished to say, and wished to say no more. So it was decided that he would read one of his poems, and immediately, like a chef measuring out his ingredients in extraordinarily careful spoonfuls, he began to weigh the poem in terms of time: ‘So many strophes at so many seconds a strophe, let us say fifteen strophes.’ ‘No, it is twelve,’ interjected Mme Nabokov, ‘twelve, then say thirty seconds for each strophe, multiplied by twelve—that gives us an extra six minutes—yes, it is quite enough.’

We weren't allowed into the Nabokov quarters—six rooms on the top floor of the hotel (‘those attics,’ as Nabokov drily apostrophized them). We were excluded on the grounds of there not being space enough, but it would have been odd if a man who had devoted his life to holding the world entertainingly at bay should not have protected his privacy. So a faint social hiccup developed—we were calling on business, but they actually lived at the hotel—so that, when Nabokov said, ‘We could go into the bar, if you wished to offer a drink,’ I thought he must have meant, ‘if you wish to be offered a drink’: but not only was this a slightly absurd indulgence to extend to a writer who always takes pains to say precisely what he wants to say, it just didn't quite feel as though the Nabokovs' were ‘At Home’. …

We drank some vodka (‘Crepkaya, if it is for M. Nabokov,’ the waiter murmured) and Nabokov explained that he would like some vodka on the table in front of him when the interview was filmed the following day—‘but because I do not wish to give a false impression and have people think I am an old drunk, let them put the vodka in a water-jug.’ In short, he was saying that the illness had laid him low, and that the camera and the bright lights would tax his strength.

The next day a room at the Montreux Palace was lit for the cameras, and Nabokov seated himself at one of those Louis-the-Hotel tables, and propped his notes against the carafe that held the vodka, and we did the question and answer as I imagine Elizabethan actors conducted a duologue—moving stiffly through a sequence of conventional gestures and inflections which had been devised to relieve the participants of the idiocy of pretending the exchange was spontaneous. Neither Nabokov nor I made any attempt at mime: we lifted the cards to our eyes and read the words we had already exchanged on paper, aloud; at the end of the dance, I as it were handed my partner back to his seat and put on my glasses to read the words, ‘Thank you, Mr Nabokov. …’

Throughout the interview, Mme Nabokov had sat in a corner of the room, her hands clasped on her walking-stick, quite silent. I sensed her presence behind me throughout and, as I faced Nabokov, I felt her absorption too; he was all her care. The Nabokovs moved slowly out of the room, and I had some idea they were returning to a chess game they had left unfinished upstairs.

A blush of colour—Nabokov in Montreux

[Robert Robinson]: First, sir, to spare you irritation, I wonder if you will instruct me in the pronunciation of your name.

[Vladimir Nabokov]: Let me put it this way. There exists a number of deceptively simple-looking Russian names, whose spelling and pronunciation present the foreigner with strange traps. The name Suvarov took a couple of centuries to lose the preposterous middle ‘a’—it should be Suvoruv. American autograph-seekers, while professing a knowledge of all my books—prudently not mentioning their titles—rejuggle the vowels of my name in all the ways allowed by mathematics. ‘Nabakav’ is especially touching for the ‘a’s. Pronunciation problems fall into a less erratic pattern. On the playing-fields of Cambridge, my football team used to hail me as ‘Nabkov’ or facetiously, ‘Macnab.’ New Yorkers reveal their tendency of turning ‘o’ into ‘ah’ by pronouncing my name ‘Nabarkov.’ The aberration, ‘Nabokov,’ is a favourite one of postal officials; now the correct Russian way would take too much time to explain, and so I've settled for the euphonious ‘Nabokov,’ with the middle syllable accented and rhyming with ‘smoke.’ Would you like to try?

Mr NabOkov.

That's right.

You grant interviews on the understanding that they shall not be spontaneous. This admirable method ensures there will be no dull patches. Can you tell me why and when you decided upon it?

I'm not a dull speaker, I'm a bad speaker, I'm a wretched speaker. The tape of my unprepared speech differs from my written prose as much as the worm differs from the perfect insect—or, as I once put it, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author and I speak like a child.

You've been a writer all your life. Can you evoke for us the earliest stirring of the impulse?

I was a boy of fifteen, the lilacs were in full bloom; I had read Pushkin and Keats; I was madly in love with a girl of my age, I had a new bicycle (an Enfield, I remember) with reversible handlebars that could turn it into a racer. My first poems were awful, but then I reversed those handlebars, and things improved. It took me, however, ten more years to realize that my true instrument was prose—poetic prose, in the special sense that it depended on comparisons and metaphors to say what it wanted to say. I spent the years 1925 to 1940 in Berlin, Paris, and the Riviera, after which I took off for America. I cannot complain of neglect on the part of any great critics, although as always and everywhere there was an odd rascal or two badgering me. What has amused me in recent years is that those old novels and stories published in English in the sixties and seventies, were appreciated much more warmly than they had been in Russian thirty years ago.

Has your satisfaction in the act of writing ever fluctuated? I mean is it keener now or less keen than once it was?

Keener.

Why?

Because the ice of experience now mingles with the fire of inspiration.

Apart from the pleasure it brings, what do you conceive your task as a writer to be?

This writer's task is the purely subjective one of reproducing as closely as possible the image of the book he has in his mind. The reader need not know, or, indeed, cannot know, what the image is, and so cannot tell how closely the book has conformed to its image in the author's mind. In other words, the reader has no business bothering about the author's intentions, nor has the author any business trying to learn whether the consumer likes what he consumes.

Of course, the author works harder than the reader does; but I wonder whether it augments his—this is to say, your—pleasure that he makes the reader work hard, too.

The author is perfectly indifferent to the capacity and condition of the reader's brain.

Could you give us some idea of the pattern of your working day?

This pattern has lately become blurry and inconstant. At the peak of the book, I worked all day, cursing the tricks that objects play upon me, the mislaid spectacles, the spilled wine. I also find talking of my working day far less entertaining than I formerly did.

The conventional view of a hotel is as of a temporary shelter—one brings one's own luggage, after all—yet you choose to make it permanent.

I have toyed on and off with the idea of buying a villa. I can imagine the comfortable furniture, the efficient burglar alarms, but I am unable to visualize an adequate staff. Old retainers require time to get old, and I wonder how much of it there still is at my disposal.

You once entertained the possibility of returning to the United States. I wonder if you will.

I will certainly return to the United States at the first opportunity. I'm indolent, I'm sluggish, but I'm sure I'll go back with tenderness. The thrill with which I think of certain trails in the Rockies is only matched by visions of my Russian woods, which I will never revisit.

Is Switzerland a place with positive advantages for you, or is it simply a place without positive disadvantages?

The winters can be pretty dismal here, and my old borzoi has developed feuds with lots of local dogs, but otherwise it's all right.

You think and write in three languages—which would be the preferred one?

Yes, I write in three languages, but I think in images. The matter of preference does not really arise. Images are mute, yet presently the silent cinema begins to talk and I recognize its language. During the second part of my life, it was generally English, my own brand of English—not the Cambridge variety, but still English.

At any point do you invite your wife to comment on work in progress?

When the book is quite finished, and its fair copy is still warm and wet, my wife goes carefully through it. Her comments are usually few but invariably to the point.

Do you find that you re-read your own earlier work, and if you do, with what feelings?

Re-reading my own works is a purely utilitarian business. I have to do it when correcting a paperback edition riddled with misprints or controlling a translation, but there are some rewards. In certain species—this is going to be a metaphor—in certain species, the wings of the pupated butterfly begin to show in exquisite miniature through the wing-cases of the chrysalis a few days before emergence. It is the pathetic sight of an iridescent future transpiring through the shell of the past, something of the kind I experience when dipping into my books written in the twenties. Suddenly through a drab photograph a blush of colour, an outline of form, seems to be distinguishable. I'm saying this with absolute scientific modesty, not with the smugness of ageing art.

Which writers are you currently reading with pleasure?

I'm re-reading Rimbaud, his marvellous verse and his pathetic correspondence in the Pléiade edition. I am also dipping into a collection of unbelievably stupid Soviet jokes.

Your praise for Joyce and Wells has been high. Could you identify briefly the quality in each which sets them apart?

Joyce's Ulysses is set apart from all modern literature, not only by the force of his genius, but also by the novelty of his form. Wells is a great writer, but there are many writers as great as he.

Your distaste for the theories of Freud has sometimes sounded to me like the agony of one betrayed, as though the old magus had once fooled you with his famous three-card trick. Were you ever a fan?

What a bizarre notion! Actually I always loathed the Viennese quack. I used to stalk him down dark alleys of thought, and now we shall never forget the sight of old, flustered Freud seeking to unlock his door with the point of his umbrella.

The world knows that you are also a lepidopterist but may not know what that involves. In the collection of butterflies, could you describe the process from pursuit to display?

Only common butterflies, showy moths from the tropics, are put on display in a dusty case between a primitive mask and a vulgar abstract picture. The rare, precious stuff is kept in the glazed drawers of museum cabinets. As for pursuit, it is, of course, ecstasy to follow an undescribed beauty, skimming over the rocks of its habitat, but it is also great fun to locate a new species among the broken insects in an old biscuit tin sent over by a sailor from some remote island.

One can always induce a mild vertigo by recalling that Joyce might not have existed as the writer but as the tenor. Have you any sense of having narrowly missed some other role? What substitute could you endure?

Oh, yes, I have always had a number of parts lined up in case the muse failed. A lepidopterist exploring famous jungles came first, then there was the chess grand master, then the tennis ace with an unreturnable service, then the goalie saving a historic shot, and finally, finally, the author of a pile of unknown writings—Pale Fire, Lolita, Ada—which my heirs discover and publish.

Alberto Moravia told me of his conviction that each writer writes only of one thing—has but a single obsession he continually develops. Can you agree?

I have not read Alberto Moravia but the pronouncement you quote is certainly wrong in my case. The circus tiger is not obsessed by his torturer, my characters cringe as I come near with my whip. I have seen a whole avenue of imagined trees losing their leaves at the threat of my passage. If I do have any obsessions I'm careful not to reveal them in fictional form.

Mr Nabokov, thank you.

You're welcome, as we say in my adopted country.