“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.
Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
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Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
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Overview
“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov’s supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101873700 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2021 |
| Series: | Vintage International |
| Pages: | 576 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
BRIAN BOYD, University Distinguished Professor of English, University of Auckland, has published on literature, art, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology, but most of all on Vladimir Nabokov, as annotator, bibliographer, biographer, critic, editor, and translator. His work has won awards on four continents.
ANASTASIA TOLSTOY is a junior research fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where she completed a DPhil on Vladimir Nabokov. She is the co-translator, with Thomas Karshan, of Nabokov's neo-Shakespearean blank verse drama The Tragedy of Mister Morn.
Read an Excerpt
1
Cambridge (Essay, 1921)
There’s a lovely saying: abroad, even the stars are tinny. Isn’t that true? Nature may be beautiful overseas, but it is not ours, and we find it soulless and artificial. One needs to gaze at it persistently to begin to feel it and love it, whereas at first something of the greenhouse wafts from the unfamiliar trees, and all the birds seem as if on springs, and the sunset looks no better than a rather dry watercolor. So I felt when I rode into this provincial little English town, where, like a great soul in a small body, an ancient university lives its proud life. The gothic beauty of its numerous buildings (called colleges) stretches gracefully upward; gold clock-faces glow atop precipitous towers; through gaps in age-old gates decorated with stuccoed crests, rectangles of lawn gleam sunnily green; while opposite these very gates modern shopwindows have their multicolored displays, blasphemous as colored-pencil doodles sketched in the margins of a sacred book.
Back and forth along the narrow streets dart bicycles covered in mud, ringing their bells, motorcycles cackle, and, wherever you look, all around swarm the kings of Cambridge town—the students: their dress ties flicker like striped crossing barriers, their extraordinarily crumpled, sinuous trousers flicker in all shades of gray, from whitish and cloud-colored to wild dark-gray trousers wonderfully matching the color of the neighboring walls.
In the mornings, grabbing notebooks and regulation cloaks in a heap, these doughty lads hurry to their lectures, making their way single file into the lecture halls, sleepily listen to the mumblings of a wise mummy on the rostrum, and, awakening suddenly, signal their approval through the pulsating stamping of their feet when, amid the dull flow of academic speech, a flash of wit splashes like a fish. After lunch, pulling on their lilac, green, and blue jackets, they fly off like crows in peacock feathers to the plush fields where balls will thwack until dusk; or to the river, which flows with Venetian languor past the gray and tawny walls and cast-iron lattices—and then Cambridge empties for a while. The burly policeman yawns, leaning against a lamppost, two old women in funny black hats prattle at the crossing, a shaggy dog snoozes in a rhombus of sunlight. . . . By five o’clock everything wakes up again, crowds throng to the tea shops, where toxically bright pastries glisten on every little table like fly-agaric mushrooms.
Sometimes I sit in a corner and look out on all of these smooth, no doubt very pleasant faces, but somehow always reminding me of a shaving soap advertisement, and then I suddenly become so bored, so weary, that I almost want to howl to break the windows. . . .
There’s a kind of glass wall between them and us Russians. They have their own round and solid world, like a scrupulously colored-in globe. Their souls lack that inspired whirlwind, that throb, that radiance, that dancing frenzy, that anger and tenderness, which carries us, God knows, to what heavens and what abysses. We have moments when the clouds are on our shoulders, the sea knee-high—and our souls roam free! To an Englishman this is incomprehensible, novel, perhaps even alluring. If he does get drunk and riotous, his riotousness is banal and hearty, so that even the observers of order look at him and simply smile, knowing he will never cross a certain line. And on the other hand, not even the headiest drunkenness will make him flow with feeling, bare his chest, throw his hat on the ground. . . . At any time signs of frankness jar him. You might be speaking to a friend about this or that, about strikes and steeplechases, when you ingenuously blurt out that you feel you’d give every drop of blood to see again some bog near Petersburg—but to utter such thoughts is indecent; he’ll look at you as if you’d whistled in church.
It turns out that in Cambridge there’s a whole list of the simplest things that by tradition a student must not do. You shouldn’t, for example, take a rowboat on the river—hire a punt or raft; you shouldn’t wear a hat in the street—the city is ours after all, there’s no need to stand on ceremony; you shouldn’t shake people’s hands, and God forbid you greet a professor—he’ll only smile confusedly, mumble something, stumble. There is no shortage of these rules, and a newcomer will inevitably put his foot in it from time to time. If a wild foreigner nonetheless behaves in his own way, at first people will marvel at him—what an oddball, a barbarian—but then they will start to avoid him, to not recognize him on the street. Sometimes, it is true, a kind soul with a weakness for exotic creatures will come your way, but he will only approach you in a secluded spot, fearfully looking around him, and, having satisfied his curiosity, will disappear forever. This is why, at times, your heart swells with sorrow, feeling that it won’t find a true friend here. And then everything seems dull: the eyeglasses of the nimble old woman whose room you rent, and the room itself, with its dirty-red sofa, gloomy fireplace, absurd little vases on their absurd little shelves, and the sounds rising from the street, the cry of the newspaper boys: Paypa! Paypa! . . .
But one can get used to anything, adapt, and learn to notice beauty in what’s strange. Wandering on a smoky spring evening around the town, becalmed, you sense that there exists, beyond the speckle and bustle of our life, an altogether different life in Cambridge, the life of beguiling bygones. You know its large, gray eyes pensively and dispassionately look upon the caprices of a new generation, just as a hundred years ago they looked upon that limping, effeminate student Byron, and on his tamed bear, who remembered all too well his native pine forest and that cunning little peasant in fabled Muscovy.
Eight centuries have flown by: the Tatars swooped down like locusts; Ivan thundered; turmoil stirred across old Rus’, like a portentous dream; and then new tsars rose up like golden mists; Peter toiled, hacked with abandon and emerged from the forest into the great wide world;—and here all the while these walls, these towers, stood immutable. And in just the same way, year in, year out, smooth-faced youths gathered to the chiming of the bells in the dining halls, where, just as today, rays of light would stream through the stained glass of the high windows, daubing the tiles with pale amethysts, and these youths would joke around in just the same way, except perhaps that their talk would be fierier, their beer headier. . . . I think about this, as I stroll along the hushed streets on a smoky spring evening. I come out onto the river. I stand for a long time on a little pearl-gray arched bridge, and not far off, another little bridge just like it forms a complete circle with its crisp, charming reflection. Weeping willows, old elms, festively luxuriant chestnut trees rise up here and there, as though embroidered in green silk on the canvas of a fading and tender sky. It smells faintly of lilacs and slimy water. . . . And now bells begin to chime through the whole city. . . . Round, silvery sounds, distant, near, drift by, intercrossing in the sky; and, having hung like a magic net above the crenellated towers for a few moments, they disperse, melt lingeringly, near, distant, into the narrow, misty lanes, into the beautiful night sky, into my heart. . . . And, gazing at the tranquil water, where subtle reflections bloom like designs on porcelain, I begin to think still more deeply, about much, about the whims of fate, about my homeland, and about the fact that my best memories grow older every day, and so far nothing can replace them. . . .
2
Rupert Brooke (Essay, 1921)
I watched them; I admired them for a long time; barely flashing, they swam, swam tirelessly back and forth behind the glass barrier, in the haze of the still water, pale green, like slumber, like eternity, like the inner world of a blind man. They were huge, round, colorful: their porcelain scales seemed as if painted in bright colors by a meticulous Chinaman. I looked upon them as in a dream, spellbound by the mysterious music of their flowing, delicate movements. In between these gently shimmering giants darted multicolored fry—tiny specters, reminiscent of the softest butterflies, the most translucent dragonflies. And in the half-gloom of the aquarium, as I watched all these fantastical fish, gliding, breathing, staring wide-eyed into their pale-green eternity, I recalled the cool, meandering verses of the English poet who sensed in them, in these supple, iridescent fish, a profound symbol of our existence.
Rupert Brooke . . . This name is not yet known on the Continent, let alone in Russia. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) is represented by two slim volumes, in which around eighty poems are collected. His work has a rare, captivating quality: a kind of radiant liquidity—not for nothing did he serve in the navy, not for nothing does his very name mean “brook” in English. This Tyutchev-like love for everything streaming, burbling, brightly chilled, is so strikingly, so convincingly expressed in most of his poems that you want not to read them, but, rather, to suck them up through a straw, to press them to your face like dewy flowers, to lower yourself into them as into the freshness of an azure lake. For Brooke, the world is a watery deep, “A fluctuant mutable world and dim, / Where wavering masses bulge and gape / Mysterious. . . . The strange soft-handed depth subdues / Drowned colour there, but black to hues, / As death to living, decomposes— / Red darkness of the heart of roses, / Blue brilliant from dead starless skies, / And gold that lies behind the eyes, / The unknown unnameable sightless white / That is the essential flame of night, / Lustreless purple, hooded green, / The myriad hues that lie between / Darkness and darkness.” And all of these colors breathe and stir, producing those scaly creatures that we call fish; and thus, through his subtly eerie poems, the poet conveys all the tremble of their lives.
Fish (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat’ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud!—Death eddies near—
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
In this poem, in this trembling drop of water, the essence of all earthly religions is reflected. And Brooke is himself a “dreaming fish” when, cast on a tropical island, he promises his Hawaiian sweetheart the perfection of a land beyond the clouds: “There the Eternals are, and there / The Good, the Lovely, and the True, / And Types, whose earthly copies were / The foolish broken things we knew; / There is the Face, whose ghosts we are; / The real, the never-setting Star; / And the Flower, of which we love / Faint and fading shadows here; / Never a tear, but only Grief; / Dance, but not the limbs that move; / Songs in Song shall disappear; / Instead of lovers, Love shall be. . . .” But then, suddenly coming to, the poet exclaims: “How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, / Where there are neither heads nor flowers? / Oh, Heaven’s Heaven!—but we’ll be missing / The palms, and sunlight, and the south; / And there’s an end, I think, of kissing, / When our mouths are one with Mouth. . . . / Hear the calling of the moon, / And the whispering scents that stray / About the idle warm lagoon. / Hasten, hand in human hand, / Down the dark, the flowered way, / Along the whiteness of the sand, / And in the water’s soft caress, / Wash the mind of foolishness, / Mamua, until the day. / Spend the glittering moonlight there / Pursuing down the soundless deep / Limbs that gleam and shadowy hair, / Or floating lazy, half-asleep. / Dive and double and follow after, / Snare in flowers, and kiss, and call, / With lips that fade, and human laughter / And faces individual. . . .”
No other poet has so often, and with such heartrending and artistic acuity, looked into the twilight of the beyond. In trying to imagine it, he moves from one conception to the next with the fevered haste of a man looking for matches in a darkened room while someone knocks menacingly at his door. One minute it seems to him that, having died, he will wake up on a “long livid oozing plain / Closed down by the strange eyeless heavens” and see himself as “An unmeaning point upon the mud; a speck / Of moveless horror; an Immortal One / Cleansed of the world, sentient and dead; a fly / Fast-stuck in grey sweat on a corpse’s neck,” while in the next he foresees infinite bliss. That presentiment pulsates most ardently in his poem “Dust.”
Here it is in its Russian translation:
Kogda, pogasnuv, kak zarnitsy,
uydya ot dal’ney krasoty,
vo mgle, v nochi svoey otdel’noy,
istleyu ya, istleesh’ ty. . . .
When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;
When your swift hair is quiet in death,
And through the lips corruption thrust
Has stilled the labour of my breath—
When we are dust, when we are dust!—
Not dead, not undesirous yet,
Still sentient, still unsatisfied,
We’ll ride the air, and shine, and flit,
Around the places where we died,
And dance as dust before the sun,
And light of foot, and unconfined,
Hurry from road to road, and run
About the errands of the wind.
And every mote, on earth or air,
Will speed and gleam, down later days,
And like a secret pilgrim fare
By eager and invisible ways,
Nor ever rest, nor ever lie,
Till, beyond thinking, out of view,
One mote of all the dust that’s I
Shall meet one atom that was you.
Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow
Upon the peace; and, past desiring,
So high a beauty in the air,
And such a light, and such a quiring,
And such a radiant ecstasy there,
They’ll know not if it’s fire, or dew,
Or out of earth, or in the height,
Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue,
Or two that pass, in light, to light,
Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . .
But in that instant they shall learn
The shattering ecstasy of our fire,
And the weak passionless hearts will burn
Table of Contents
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Thinker, Writer, Speaker, Person by Brian Boyd xv
Note on Texts xxxix
1 Cambridge (Essay, 1921) 3
2 Rupert Brooke (Essay, 1921) 7
3 Laughter and Dreams (Essay, 1923) 25
4 Painted Wood (Essay, 1923) 28
5 On Poetry (Review Excerpt, 1924) 31
6 Play (Breitensträter-Paolino) (Essay, 1925) 33
7 Letter to the Editor, Zveno (1926) 38
8 A Few Words on the Wretchedness of Soviet Fiction and an Attempt to Determine Its Cause (Essay, 1926) 40
9 On Generalities (Essay, 1926) 55
10 A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (Review, 1927) 59
11 Anniversary (Essay, 1927) 61
12 Vladislav Khodasevich, Collected Poems (Review, 1927) 64
13 Man and Things (Essay, 1928) 68
14 On Opera (Essay, 1928) 74
15 Omar Khayyám Translated by Ivan Tkhorzhevsky (Review, 1928) 76
16 Aleksey Remizov, The Star Above Stars (Review, 1928) 80
17 In Memory of Yuli Aykhenvald (Obituary Essay, 1928) 82
18 Ivan Bunin, Selected Poems (Review, 1929) 84
19 Alexander Kuprin, The Glade: Short Stories (Review, 1929) 88
20 Questionnaire on Proust (1930) 90
21 The Triumph of Virtue (Essay, 1930) 92
22 International Survey on Populism (Questionnaire, 1930) 98
23 Boris Poplavsky, Flags (Review, 1931) 99
24 What Should Everyone Know? (Essay, 1931) 102
25 Writers and the Era (Essay, 1931) 105
26 Nina Berberova, The Last and the First (Review, 1931) 108
27 In Memory of A. M. Chorny (Obituary Essay, 1932) 111
28 Interview with Andrey Sedykh for Poslednie Novosti (1932) 113
29 In Memory of Amalia Fondaminsky (Obituary Essay, 1937) 115
30 Pushkin, or the True and the Seemingly True (Essay, 1937) 118
31 Bobbs-Merrill Author Questionnaire (1937) 133
32 Interview with Nikolay All for Novoe Russkoe Slovo (1940) 136
33 Definitions (Essay, 1940) 139
34 Diaghilev and a Disciple (Review, 1940) 142
35 Crystal and Ruby (Review, 1940) 144
36 Help, People! (Appeal, 1940) 146
37 Mr. Masefield and Clio (Review, 1940) 148
38 Prof. Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World (Review, 1940) 151
39 Homes for Dukhobors (Review, 1941) 154
40 Soviet Literature 1940 (Essay, 1941) 157
41 Faint Rose, or the Life of an Artist Who Lived in an Ivory Tower (Review, 1941) 164
42 Interview with Beth Kulakofsky for Wellesley College News (1941) 167
43 One Hundred Years of England in a Work Borh Scholarly and Timely (Review, 1941) 168
44 On the Occasion of M. Zheleznov's Review, Novoe Russkoe Slovo (Letter to the Editor, 1941) 171
45 [Shakespeare, the Professors, and the People] (Review, 1941?) 173
46 Sickle, Hammer and Gun (Review, 1941?) 179
47 Mr. Williams' Shakespeare (Review, 1941) 182
48 The Art of Translation, New Republic (Letter to the Editor, 1941) 184
49 The Innocence of Hilaire Belloc (Review, 1941) 185
50 Style (Lecture Fragment, 1941?) 187
51 The Creative Writer (Essay, 1941) 191
52 [On Democracy] (Essay, 1942) 203
53 Lecture on Leonardo da Vinci (1942) 205
54 Interview with Kathleen Lucas for Wellesley College News (1942) 206
55 In Memory of Iosif Hessen (Obituary Essay, 1943) 208
56 Interview for The Last Word (1943) 211
57 Profile by Katherine Reese for We (1943) 213
58 Cabbage Soup and Caviar (Review, 1944) 215
59 On Learning Russian (Essay, 1945) 220
60 Profile by Sylvia Crane for Wellesley College News (1945) 224
61 The Place of Russian Studies in the Curriculum (Essay, 1948) 225
62 Thomas Mann, "The Railway Accident" (Lecture, 1950) 229
63 Interview with Harvey Breit for New York Times Book Review (1951) 233
64 News Feature Interview with Malcolm D. Rivkin for Harvard Crimson (1952) 236
65 Salutations (Seventieth Birthday Congratulations for Mark Aldanov, 1956) 237
66 Interview with Natalia Shakhovskaya for Voice of America (1958) 238
67 Interview in New York Post (1958) 241
68 Interview with Martha MacGregor for New York Post (1958) 242
69 Interview with Paul O'Neil for Life (1958) 244
70 Interview with Gladys Kessler for Cornell Daily Sun (1958) 246
71 Feature Story in Newsweek (1958) 248
72 Letter to the Editor, Cornell Daily Sun (1958) 249
73 "A G.S. Man," Cornell Daily Sun (Letter to the Editor, 1958) 250
74 Interview with Pierre Burton and Lionel Trilling for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1958) 251
75 Interview with Edward E. Van Dyne for Elmira Telegram (1958) 252
76 Interview with Thomas B. Turley for Niagara Falls Gazette (1959) 254
77 Interview with Alan Nordstrom for Ivy Magazine (1959) 256
78 Interview with Robert H. Boyle for Sports Illustrated (1959) 258
79 Interview with Lee Belser for Los Angeles Mirror News (1959) 265
80 Interview with Neil Hickey for Washington Post (1959) 266
81 Interview of Vladimir Nabokov and Alain Robbe-Grillet with André Parinaud, Roger Nimier, and Paul Guimard for Arts (Paris) (1959) 268
82 Interview with J.-F. Bergery for Arts (Paris) (1959) 273
83 Interview with Jeanine Delpech for Nouvelles Littéraires (1959) 274
84 Interview with Pierre Mazars for Le Figaro Littéraire (1959) 275
85 Interview with John Wain for The Observer (1959) 278
86 Interview with Jean Duvignaud for Les Lettres Nouvelles (1959) 279
87 Interview with Anne Guerin for L'Express (1959) 281
88 Interview with David Holmes for BBC Radio (1959) 288
89 Interview with John Coleman for The Spectator (1959) 291
90 Interview with John G. Hayman for The Twentieth Century (i959) 293
91 "Olympia Press," New York Times Book Review (Letter to the Editor, 1960) 295
92 Interview with Paul Karolus for Neue Illustrierte (1961) 296
93 Interview with Anne Guérin for L'Express (1961) 298
94 Interview with Janine Colombo for L'Information d'Israel (1961) 301
95 Interview with Gershon Svet for Novoe Russkoe Slovo (1961) 303
96 Interview with Rosalie Macrae for the Daily Express (1961) 305
97 Interview with Claude Mercadie for Nice-Matin (1961) 307
98 "Invitation to a Beheading," Esquire (Letter to the Editor, 1961) 308
99 Interview with Phyllis Meras for Providence Sunday Journal (1962) 310
100 Unidentified Interview (1962) 313
101 Interview with Maurice Dolbier for New York Herald Tribune (1962) 316
102 Interview with Lewis Nichols for New York Times Book Review (1962) 318
103 Interview for Newsweek (1962) 319
104 Interview for Daily Colonist (1962) 321
105 Interview with Jacob Bronowski for Associated Rediffusion Television (1962) 323
106 Interview with Pierrette Blanc for Tribune de Lausanne (1963) 329
107 Interview with Henri Jaton for Radio Suisse Romande (1963) 331
108 Letter to the Editor, Russkaya Mysl' (1963) 333
109 Interview with M.V for Journal de Montreux (1964) 334
110 Interview with Douglas M. Davis for National Observer (1964) 336
111 Interview with Horst Tappe for Die Welt (1964) 338
112 Interview with Guy de Belleval for Journal de Genève (1965) 340
113 Interview with Gordon Ackerman for Weekly Tribune (1966) 342
114 Interview with Alberto Ongaro for L'Europeo (1966) 343
115 Interview with Penelope Gilliatt for Vogue (1966) 348
116 Interview with Dieter E. Zimmer for Norddeutscher Rundfunk (1966) 353
117 Interview with Pat Garian for German Harper's Bazaar (1967) 360
118 Interview with Drago Arsenijevic for La Tribune de Genève (1967) 361
119 Interview with Pierre Dommergues for Les Langues Modernes (1967-68) 364
120 Interview with Alden Whitman for New York Times (1969) 372
121 Interview with Roberto Tabozzi for Panorama (1969) 375
122 Interview with Gaetano Tumiati for La Stampa (1969) 377
123 Interview with Claudio Gorlier for Corriere delta Sera (1969) 379
124 Interview with Constanzo Costantini for Il Messagero (1969) 381
125 Interview with Nantas Salvalaggio for Il Giorno (1969) 384
126 Interview with Marina Bulgherini for American Literature (1969) 385
127 Interview with Nurit Beretzky for Ma'ariv (Tel Aviv) (1970) 386
128 Interview with Hanspeter Riklin (1970) 388
129 Interview with Andrew Field for His Biography (1970) 391
130 Interview with Christopher Givan for Los Angeles Times (1970) 399
131 Interview with Alan Levy for New York Times Magazine (1970-71) 400
132 Homage to Franz Hellens (Birthday Tribute, 1971) 406
133 Interview with Paul Sufrin for Swiss Broadcast (1971) 407
134 Interview with Stephen Jan Parker (1971) 408
135 Interview with Kurt Hoffman and Jochen Richter for Bayerischer Rundfunk (1971-72) 411
136 Interview for New York Times (1972) 412
137 Interview with Seth Goldschlager for Newsweek (1972) 413
138 Interview with Claude Jannoud for Le Figaro Littéraire (1972) 415
139 Interview with Mati Laansoo for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1973) 418
140 Interview with Roberto Cantini for Epoca (1973) 424
141 Interview with George Feifer for Sunday Telegraph Magazine (1974) 425
142 Interview with Helga Chudacoff for Die Welt (1974) 430
143 Interview with Peter Zeindler for Swiss Television (1974) 437
144 Interview with Dieter Zimmer for Hessischer Rundfunk (1974) 440
145 Interview with Gerald Clarke for Esquire (1974) 443
146 Interview with Tibor Wlassics (1974) 448
147 Interview with James Salter for People (1975) 449
148 Mr. Nabokov's Acceptance Speech (Essay, 1975) 450
149 Interview with Sophie Lannes for L'Express (1975) 452
150 Interview with Bernard Pivot for Apostrophes (1975) 459
151 Interview with Willa Petchek for The Observer (1976) 470
152 Authors' Authors (Questionnaire, 1976) 472
153 Reputations Revisited (Questionnaire, 1977) 473
154 Interview with Hugh A. Mulligan for Ithaca Post (1977) 474
155 Interview with Robert Robinson for BBC Book Programme (1977) 477
Acknowledgments 483
Notes 487
Index 511