Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov by Golla Robert (review)

SEER, 97, 3, JULY 2019 544 Übermensch, ideas about pity, and conception of the otherworld as ‘materially continuous with this one’ (p. 139) effectively revise or reinterpret Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this way, Rodgers showcases not only how Nietzsche can help us be good readers of Nabokov’s books, but also how Nabokov provokes us to rethink concepts taken for granted in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Department of Language and Literature Laci Mattison Florida Gulf Coast University Golla, Robert (ed.). Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov. Literary Conversations Series. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS, 2017. xvii + 237 pp. Chronology. Index. $60.00: £55.95. Conversations with Nabokov is a new collection of twenty-eight interviews spanning the years 1958 to 1977. Many readers will have thought that Nabokov’s 1973 volume — Strong Opinions — represented an exhaustive selection of the best examples, but here we have material that pre- and post-dates it, and which also includes a number of previously uncollected pieces. This is not to say that thisnewmaterialisoflittlesignificance.Onthecontrary,muchofitrevealsafar more personable and relaxed figure, less controlling, less elusive, and therefore more exposed. As a collection, it of course does not replace Strong Opinions, but serves as a very valuable addition and complement to it, filling gaps in the existing interviews and adding new dimensions to our understanding of contemporary responses to the man and his work. Some interviews from Strong Opinions are included — for example, Peter Duvall-Smith for the BBC in 1962 and Alvin Toffler for Playboy, 1964. Alfred Appel’s 1967 interview is printed in full for the first time, although the additions are few, whilst James Mossman’s 1969 interview for the BBC which Nabokov reproduced from his ‘final typescript’ (Strong Opinions, New York, 1973, p. 141), is taken from the version in The Listener, which although is not as complete, does have a couple of amusing additions. All the rest of the material, covering 1958–62 and 1971–77, is new. Nabokov was notorious for finding interviews difficult. He did not care for the spontaneity of a question and answer exchange, was uncomfortable with speaking ‘off the Nabocuff’ (Strong Opinions, p. 62; Conversations, p. 175), and did not allow interviews to be taped. Instead, he preferred to see the questions in advance so that he could prepare his answers on paper, which has established his reputation for being overly formal and inhibited in conversation. Herbert Gold, however, viewed Nabokov’s claim to need to adopt this formula because of ‘his unfamiliarity with English’ as ‘a constant seriocomic form of teasing’ REVIEWS 545 (p. 143). ‘[H]is frequent apologies for his grasp of English clearly belong in the context of Nabokov’s special mournful joking: he means it, he does not mean it, he is grieving for his loss [of Russian], he is outraged if anyone criticizes his style, he pretends to be just a poor lonely foreigner, he is as American “as April in Arizona”’ (pp. 143–44). In interviews nearly twenty years apart, the impact of having to abandon his Russian for English seems to magnify, rather than diminish. In a 1959 interview, Nabokov describes the switch in terms of a move ‘from a darkened house to another on a starless night during a strike of candle makers and torchbearers. After a period of panic and groping, I managed to settle down rather comfortably’ (p. 35). In 1977, however, in a piece published shortly after his death taken from a meeting only a few months before, Nabokov describes his having to start writing in English as ‘exceedingly painful, like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion’ (p. 215). Unlike Strong Opinions, many of the pieces collected here are not conventional interviews, but magazine articles — accounts of visits to the Nabokovs in New York, London or Montreux, butterfly hunting in the Grand Canyon or the Swiss mountains, conversations with ‘the tweedy host’ (p. 184) over lunch, dinner or coffee. There is a full transcription of the 1958 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s television special with Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discussing Lolita. Various essays offer rare glimpses of an unguarded Nabokov: at Cornell, ‘slouching comfortably in his armchair’ (p. 18); in...

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