Weekend Read: “The literature of social intent”

By Wyatt Mason

Today’s weekend read sends you off to lib.ru, a Russian website host to twenty-one interviews with Vladimir Nabokov. Some readers may recognize them from Nabokov’s collection, Strong Opinions. Although I would of course suggest that you pick up a good used copy, if you’ve not had the pleasure of reading Nabokov in the role of interlocutee, consider the first example, which begins:

Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?

I pride myself on being a person with no public appeal. I have never been drunk in my life. I never use schoolboy words of four letters. I have never worked in an office or in a coal mine. I have never belonged to any club or group. No creed or school has had any influence on me whatsoever. Nothing bores me more than political novels and the literature of social intent.

Still there must be things that move you—likes and dislikes.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

You write everything in longhand, don’t you?

Yes. I cannot type.

Would you agree to show us a sample of your rough drafts?

I’m afraid I must refuse. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.

The interview, which, like all those Nabokov granted, was conducted in writing, continues here. And those of you who would like to sample more before a hardbound copy arrives by mail, an absence of Russian won’t keep you from exploring the site, heavy though it is on cyrillic navigation. By replacing “01″ in the web address of the first interview with “02″, “03″, and on to “22″ (skipping a defunct “07″) your tired eyes are in for more mandarin fun than they can manage.