bile, and have never once in my life asked or
thanked a reviewer for a review. My second favorite fact—or shall I stop at one?
No, please go on.
;e fact that since my youth—I was nineteen
when I left Russia—my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray
rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of
art. ;e social or economic structure of the ideal
state is of little concern to me. My desires are
modest. Portraits of the head of the government
should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No
torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters.
Why no music?
I have no ear for music, a shortcoming I
deplore bitterly. When I attend a concert—
which happens about once in ;ve years—I
endeavor gamely to follow the sequence and
relationship of sounds but cannot keep it up
for more than a few minutes. Visual impressions, re;ections of hands in lacquered wood,
a diligent bald spot over a ;ddle, these take
over, and soon I am bored beyond measure by
the motions of the musicians. My knowledge
of music is very slight, and I have a special
reason for ;nding my ignorance and inability
so sad, so unjust: there is a wonderful singer
in my family—my own son. His great gifts,
the rare beauty of his bass, and the promise of
a splendid career—all this a;ects me deeply,
and I feel a fool during a technical conversation among musicians. I am perfectly aware
of the many parallels between the art forms
of music and those of literature, especially in
matters of structure, but what can I do if ear
and brain refuse to cooperate? I have found
a queer substitute for music in chess—more
exactly, in the composing of chess problems.
Another substitute, surely, has been your own eu-
phonious prose and poetry. As one of few authors
who have written with eloquence in more than one
language, how would you characterize the textural
di;erences between Russian and English, in which
you are regarded as equally facile?
In sheer number of words, English is far richer
than Russian. ;is is especially noticeable in
nouns and adjectives. A very bothersome feature
that Russian presents is the dearth, vagueness,
and clumsiness of technical terms. For example,
the simple phrase “to park a car” comes out—
if translated back from the Russian—as “to
leave an automobile standing for a long time.”
Russian, at least polite Russian, is more formal
than polite English. ;us, the Russian word for
“sexual”—polovoy—is slightly indecent and not
It is always di;cult to think and reason in a
new language. —Charles Babbage, 1864
to be bandied around. ;e same applies to Russian terms rendering various anatomical and
biological notions that are frequently and familiarly expressed in English conversation. On the
other hand, there are words rendering certain
nuances of motion and gesture and emotion in
which Russian excels. ;us by changing the head
of a verb, for which one may have a dozen di;erent pre;xes to choose from, one is able to make
Russian express extremely ;ne shades of duration and intensity. English is, syntactically, an
extremely ;exible medium, but Russian can be
given even more subtle twists and turns. Translating Russian into English is a little easier than
translating English into Russian, and ten times
easier than translating English into French.
From an interview in Playboy. After publishing his
;rst eight novels while living in Berlin and Paris,
Nabokov moved to America in 1940. He became an
associate professor in 1948 at Cornell University,
where he taught Literature 311-312: “Selected
English, Russian, French, and German novels
and short stories of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries will be read. Special attention will be paid
to individual genius and questions of structure.”
Lolita was ;rst published in France in 1955 and
appeared three years later in the U.S.
