In the fall of 1966 Alfred Appel, Jr interviewed Vladimir Nabokov ‘in an opulent hotel’ overlooking Switzerland’s viviparous Lake Geneva.

When asked to give his advice to young literary critics, Nabokov Replies:  

My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on “ideas.” Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have  detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the “how” above the “what” but do not let it be confused with the “so what.” Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs.  Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.

* . * . * .

  Q…Yet your novels are filled with little details that seem to have been purposely pulled from your own life, as a reading of Speak, Memory makes clear, not to mention the overriding patterns, such as the lepidopteral motif, which extend through so many books. They seem to partake of something other than the involuted voice, to suggests to me clearly held idea about the interrelationship between self-knowledge and artistic creation, self-parody and identity. Would you comment on this, and the significance of autobiographical hints in works of art that are literally not autobiographical?

 

 

 

A. I would say that imagination is a form of memory. Down, Plato, down, good dog. An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.

 

 

. * . * .

The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill that accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. Science means to me above all natural science. Not the ability to repair a radio set; quite stubby fingers can do that. Apart from this basic consideration, I certainly welcome the free interchange of terminology between any branch of science and any raceme of art. There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts. Aphoristicism is a symptom of arteriosclerosis.

 

. * . * .

And this is how the dialogue dies:

Q. And as a closing question, sir, may I return to Pale Fire: where, please, are the crown jewels hidden?

 

A. In the ruins, Sir, of some old barracks near Kobaltana( q.v.); but do not tell it to the Russians.

 

Check the Index for Kobaltana or for “crown jewels,” but you still may never find them.