Vladimir Nabokov: Playboy Interview

Few authors of this generation have sparked more controversy with a single book than a former Cornell University professor with the resoundingly Russian name of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. Lolita, his brilliant tragicomic novel about the nonplatonic love of a middle-aged man for a 12-year-old nymphet, has sold 2,500,000 copies in the United States alone.

It has also been made into a top-grossing movie, denounced in the House of Commons, and banned in Austria, England, Burma, Belgium, Australia and even France. Fulminating critics have found it to be "the filthiest book I've ever read," "exquisitely distilled sewage," "corrupt," "repulsive," "dirty," "decadent" and "disgusting." Champions of the book, in turn, have proclaimed it "brilliantly written" and "one of the great comic novels of all time"; while Nabokov himself has been compared favorably with every writer from Dostoievsky to Krafft-Ebing, and hailed by some as the supreme stylist in the English language today. Pedants have theorized that the book is actually an allegory about the seduction of the Old World by the New—or perhaps the New World by the Old. And Jack Kerouac, brushing aside such lascivious symbolism, has announced that it is nothing more than a "classic old love story."

Whatever it is, Nabokov would seem to be incongruously miscast as its author. A reticent Russian-born scholar whose most violent passion is an avid interest in butterfly collecting, he was born in 1899 to the family of a wealthy statesman in St. Petersburg. Fleeing the country when the Bolsheviks seized power, he made his way to England, where he enrolled as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Cambridge. In the Twenties and Thirties he drifted between Paris and Berlin earning a spotty living as a tennis instructor and tutor in English and French; achieving a modest degree of fame as an author of provocative and luminously original short stories, plays, poems and book reviews for the èmigrè press; and stirring praise and puzzlement with a trio of masterful novels in Russian—Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift and Laughter in the Dark. Finding himself again a refugee when France fell to the Nazis in 1940, Nabokov emigrated with his wife to the United States, where he began his academic career as a research fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Now writing in English—in a style rich with inventive metaphors and teeming with the philosophical paradoxes, abstruse ironies, sly non sequiturs, multilingual puns, anagrams, rhymes and riddles which both illuminate and obscure his work—he produced three more novels during his subsequent years as a professor in Russian and English literature at Wellesley, and then at Cornell. First came Bend Sinister, an unsettling evocation of life under a dictatorship; then Pnin, the poignant, haunting portrait of an aging èmigrè college instructor; and finally the erotic tour de force which was to catapult him almost overnight to world-wide eminence—Lolita.

This brief recital of biographical facts, however, outlines only the visible Nabokov, revealing nothing of the little-known interior man; for the labyrinth of his creative intellect has remained a hall of mirrors to all who have attempted to explore it. And his amused indifference to the most erudite appraisal of his work and worth has served merely to enhance the legend of his inscrutability. Shunning personal publicity, he grants interviews only rarely—having consented to see Playboy only after satisfying himself that the subjects we proposed to discuss were worthy of his attention.

Tweedy, bespectacled, absent-mindedly professorial in mien, the 64-year-old author greeted our interviewer, freelance writer Alvin Toffler, at the door of Nabokov's quiet apartment on the sixth floor of an elegant old hotel on the banks of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, where he has lived and worked for the past four years—most recently producing Pale Fire, the extraordinary story of a gifted poet as seen darkly through the eyes of his demented editor; and a belated English translation of The Gift. In a week-long series of conversations which took place in his study, Nabokov parried our questions with a characteristic mixture of guile, candor, irony, astringent wit and eloquent evasiveness. Speaking in a curiously ornate and literary English lightly tinctured with a Russian accent, choosing his words with self-conscious deliberation, he seemed somewhat dubious of his ability to make himself understood—or perhaps skeptical about the advisability of doing so. Despite the good humor and well-bred cordiality which marked our meetings, it was as though the shadowed universe within his skull was forever beckoning him away from a potentially hostile world outside. Thus his conversation, like his fiction—in which so many critics have sought vainly to unearth autobiography—veils rather than reveals the man; and he seems to prefer it that way. But we believe our interview offers a fascinating glimpse of this multileveled genius.