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January 30, 1966
Why Nabokov Detests Freud
The following are excerpts from an interview the National Educational Television network conducted with Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-born author of "Lolita," at his home in Switzerland. The program, produced by Robert Hughes, is on Channel 13 Thursday from 9:30 to 10 P.M.The first part of my life is marked by a rather chronological neatness. I spent my first twenty years in Russia, the next twenty years in Western Europe, and the 20 years after that, from 1940 to 1960, in America. I have been living in Europe again for five years now, but I cannot promise to stay around another 15 so as to retain the rhythm. Nor can I predict what new books I may write. I am in the process of translating "Lolita" into Russian, which is like completing the circle of my creative life, or rather starting a new spiral. I live in Montreux for certain family reasons*I've a sister in Geneva and a son not very far away in Milan*and also because I find the view so wonderfully soothing and exhilarating according to my mood and the mood of the lake.
Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called "great books." That, for instance, Mann's asinine "Death in Venice," or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written "Dr. Zhivago," or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered "masterpieces" or at least what journalists term "great books," is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's "Ulysses"; Kafka's "Transformation"; Bely's "St. Petersburg," and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, "In Search of Lost Time."
What do you think of recent American writing?
Well, seldom more than two or three really first-rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years.
I'm not a good speaker, you see. When I start to speak, I have immediately four or five lines of thought*sort of roads, you know, trails going various ways. And I have to decide which trail I'm going to follow, and while I decide this, hawing and hemming begins, and it may be very upsetting because I hear it myself. I can never understand those limpid, fluid speakers, as my father was, who just deliver perfect phrases, beautifully built, with an aphorism here, you know, and a metaphor there. I can't do it. I have to think it out; I have to take a pencil; I have to write it down laboriously; have it before me. I do things like that. It's probably psychological. I can imagine what old Freud would have said, whom I heartily detest, as my readers know by now.
Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud?
I think he's crude, I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don't have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don't see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons.
I think that the creative artist is an exile in his study, in his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He's quite alone there; he's the lone wolf. As soon as he's together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else.
What is your greatest pleasure in writing?
There is the first satisfaction of arranging it on a bit of paper; after many, many false tries, false moves, finally you have the sentence that you recognize as the one you are looking for, the one you have lost somewhere, sometime... It seems perfect to you . . . It doesn't mean that perhaps five years hence it won't look to you horrible . . . The next pleasure is of reading it to your wife. She and I are my best audience, you see. I should say my main audience. After that, when the thing is published, I do imagine a number of people whom I like, whom I admire, with whom I feel close kinship. It is nice to think that those people are reading that, perhaps at this very instant. But that's about all. I don't care about the general public.
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