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I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child. This is how the author begins the introduction to this late life collection of exuberant l'esprit d'escalier.
The interviews, as he frequently emphasizes, are yet another of his creations. They reveal more about his daily activities than his memoir, but the information is presented in the same manner as in his novels and lectures: precise, concise, preserved, and controlled. Nabokov's boastful comment that his position at the lectern was so regular that it could be replaced by a tape recorder is repeatedly evident here. The questions are pre-reviewed and approved, and his answers, never allowed to stray too far into the conversational or confessional realm, change only in the direction of aesthetic improvement, and even then at a slow pace. The largely unvarying answers to common questions are a collection of animatronic devices that Nabokov gleefully employs in a closed circuit to both satisfy and frustrate the questioners' various tactics. Thus, the reader is forced to approach his life - his wit, observations, loves, and vexations - as a literary product, a carefully crafted verisimilitude that, although given the illusion of life, is in reality an obligate anaerobe of Nabokov's literary world.
The parts regarding his friend Edmund Wilson's attempt to dismantle his Eugene Onegin translation are the most striking example and exception of outside elements penetrating Nabokov's closed system, albeit still in forms of his own choosing. Without losing the cool of his lofty intellect, he is confronted in Wilson's piece with a more hot-tempered and less scrupulous mind, and is forced to publicly address issues outside his treatment of EO. Besides the scholarly, linguistic, and aesthetic points of dispute, which he methodically dispatches with his usual jujitsu wit, Nabokov is also forced to confront a much less logical problem: a resentful colleague and a friendship that seems to have been contentious for some time before it came to a head in this dust-up, which appears to be a proxy war for larger (or perhaps smaller?) issues.
That Wilson, an American who seems to have achieved a basic level of proficiency in Russian, would publicly challenge Nabokov, a trilingual native Russian, over matters he clearly had no serious understanding of is a powerfully surreal display of professional resentment. None of his disagreements are substantiated, and often end up exposing his own deficient understanding of the language and literature in ways that seem too perfectly ironic to be overlooked by a scholar and intellectual of his stature. The review ultimately functions on some level as the beginning of a desperate gambit to smuggle bizarre, often Kinbotian, criticisms of Nabokov's private life into a public debate.
The image from Wilson's published diaries of himself, a guest in Nabokov's house in upstate New York, glowering at his host from across a modestly crowded room, seems to typify their later friendship. Here was the native American, who had formerly hosted this once-obscure foreign writer when he first crossed the Atlantic seeking refuge in the early 1940s. Now, a decade or so later, he watched his fusty Russian friend achieve artistic, scholastic, and monetary success in this surrogate homeland, while his only success was, and would remain, as a critic.
I can't envision a person unfamiliar with at least most of Nabokov's oeuvre fully enjoying this book. Much of it deals with the author's art, scholarship, politics, pet peeves, and biography in a way that would likely be off-putting to the uninitiated. However, there is a great deal here for anyone interested in either an introduction to Nabokov or a view of a generously explicated creative process. The challenge is in finding it. Unfortunately, there is no index, but interviews 6 and 15 stand out both for the information they provide and for the acumen and thoughtfulness of the interviewers themselves.
The interviews, as he frequently emphasizes, are yet another of his creations. They reveal more about his daily activities than his memoir, but the information is presented in the same manner as in his novels and lectures: precise, concise, preserved, and controlled. Nabokov's boastful comment that his position at the lectern was so regular that it could be replaced by a tape recorder is repeatedly evident here. The questions are pre-reviewed and approved, and his answers, never allowed to stray too far into the conversational or confessional realm, change only in the direction of aesthetic improvement, and even then at a slow pace. The largely unvarying answers to common questions are a collection of animatronic devices that Nabokov gleefully employs in a closed circuit to both satisfy and frustrate the questioners' various tactics. Thus, the reader is forced to approach his life - his wit, observations, loves, and vexations - as a literary product, a carefully crafted verisimilitude that, although given the illusion of life, is in reality an obligate anaerobe of Nabokov's literary world.
The parts regarding his friend Edmund Wilson's attempt to dismantle his Eugene Onegin translation are the most striking example and exception of outside elements penetrating Nabokov's closed system, albeit still in forms of his own choosing. Without losing the cool of his lofty intellect, he is confronted in Wilson's piece with a more hot-tempered and less scrupulous mind, and is forced to publicly address issues outside his treatment of EO. Besides the scholarly, linguistic, and aesthetic points of dispute, which he methodically dispatches with his usual jujitsu wit, Nabokov is also forced to confront a much less logical problem: a resentful colleague and a friendship that seems to have been contentious for some time before it came to a head in this dust-up, which appears to be a proxy war for larger (or perhaps smaller?) issues.
That Wilson, an American who seems to have achieved a basic level of proficiency in Russian, would publicly challenge Nabokov, a trilingual native Russian, over matters he clearly had no serious understanding of is a powerfully surreal display of professional resentment. None of his disagreements are substantiated, and often end up exposing his own deficient understanding of the language and literature in ways that seem too perfectly ironic to be overlooked by a scholar and intellectual of his stature. The review ultimately functions on some level as the beginning of a desperate gambit to smuggle bizarre, often Kinbotian, criticisms of Nabokov's private life into a public debate.
The image from Wilson's published diaries of himself, a guest in Nabokov's house in upstate New York, glowering at his host from across a modestly crowded room, seems to typify their later friendship. Here was the native American, who had formerly hosted this once-obscure foreign writer when he first crossed the Atlantic seeking refuge in the early 1940s. Now, a decade or so later, he watched his fusty Russian friend achieve artistic, scholastic, and monetary success in this surrogate homeland, while his only success was, and would remain, as a critic.
I can't envision a person unfamiliar with at least most of Nabokov's oeuvre fully enjoying this book. Much of it deals with the author's art, scholarship, politics, pet peeves, and biography in a way that would likely be off-putting to the uninitiated. However, there is a great deal here for anyone interested in either an introduction to Nabokov or a view of a generously explicated creative process. The challenge is in finding it. Unfortunately, there is no index, but interviews 6 and 15 stand out both for the information they provide and for the acumen and thoughtfulness of the interviewers themselves.
