Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor by Vladimir Nabokov (PDF)

Description

A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.“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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The breadt of selections for this book allows one to see this writer from multiple angles. It is interesting to see his lancinating wit at work…and at play. His introduction to other authors, in commendation or condemnation, lets one seize a glimpse into his vast store of opinion snd information.

⭐I read “Think, Write, Speak” hoping to find some insights into “Lolita,” which I’d recently reread. While the book delivers these both in the form of some interviewers’ very perceptive questions and in Nabokov’s possibly disingenuous answers, the side effect of hearing so much from Nabokov is that I ended up rather disliking him. He comes across as an overbearing and narcissistic control freak, obsessed with cultivating a very specific public image. He’s sometimes rude to interviewers, is highly critical of most other writers and translators, finds the women’s movement ridiculous, defends the American involvement in Vietnam, and is contemptuous of student movements. It gets tiresome and I began to wonder how his Véra tolerated it.His most interesting comment in regard to Lolita may be in his 1975 interview with Bernard Pivot on French television: “It’s the imagination of the sad satyr that makes a magic creature of this little American schoolgirl, as banal and normal in her way as the poet manqué Humbert is in his. Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert.”In a 1962 interview, Nabokov, asked whether the reader should take the duel between Humbert and Quilty seriously, replies, “Down with the serious and sincere reader. After all, not all readers are children who ask if the story is true.” In that same year, he told another interlocutor, [Lolita] “is not humor. It’s not a story. It’s a poem.” In a 1959 BBC radio interview, he said, [Lolita] “has no special purpose; it has no special message.”Referring to the passage in the book where Humbert tracks down the now pregnant Mrs. Dolly Schiller, Nabokov comments, “She’s not pretty any more, she’s not graceful, she’s going to have a baby, and it’s now that he loves her. It’s the great love scene. He says to her, “Leave your husband and come with me,” and she doesn’t understand. It’s still his Lolita and he loves her very tenderly.”In another interview, he offers, “In the end, Humbert realizes that he has destroyed Lolita’s childhood and that makes him suffer. It’s a work of pity… Humbert has confused morbid love and human love and he has remorse. So he understands why he is writing this book.” Speaking with Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of the few modern French writers Nabokov admires, he says, “We know very little of Lolita’s passion, but it’s my hero at first who feels this sensual passion, this storm of sensations, and then at the end, so to speak, human and divine love. My hero renounces this passion, but although she’s no longer a nymphet, she is now the love of his life.”He also makes some interesting comments about the creative process. In character, he compares himself to God: “I suspect the Almighty’s interest in Adam and Eve was neither very sincere nor very enduring, despite the success, on the whole, of a really marvelous job. I, too, am completely detached from my characters, while making them and after making them.”On memory: “When you remember a thing, you never remember the thing itself, you remember the relation, the association of the thing with something else. And it’s the imagination that makes this link between things.”On reality: “I don’t believe there’s an objective reality. But the combinations the artist invents give or should give the reader the feeling not of average reality, but of a new reality distinctive to the work.”On objects: “The nuance of a wave interests me as much as the girl drowning in it.”On the pleasures of science: “Radiant silence at the bottom of a microscope.”Fun discovery: The book includes Nabokov’s reviews of books now forgotten and long out of print. One of the few interesting ones is about a persecuted Russian religious group called the Dukhobors. Tolstoy helped many of them find refuge in British Columbia, where they would protest against public education and military service by burning down their own homes and marching nude.

⭐I think few Nabokov readers are not completists. Once you’ve come under the spell of his prose, there can be no end to you hunger for more Nabokov. I would welcome his grocery lists, if they’re ever made available!Until those grocery lists are available, you can make do with this comprehensive catalogue of previously uncollected early essays, reviews, and later, letters to editors, reviews, and brief and lengthy interviews.He never fails to entertain, and he wields the English language more beautifully than most native authors. The delights are endless!

⭐A feast of table scraps, some nutritious, justifying the cost of the meal:Cambridge (1921)Rupert Brooke (1921)Laughter and Dreams (1923)Painted Wood (1923)On Poetry (1924)Play: Breitendstrater-Paolino (1925)A few Words on the Wretchedness of Soviet Fiction and an Attempt to Determine Its Cause (1926)On Generalities (1926)A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (1927)Anniversary (1927)Vladislav Khodasevich, Collected Poems (1927)Man and Things (1928)On Opera (1828)Aleksey Remizov, The Star Above Stars (1928)In Memory of Yuli Aykhenvald (1928)Ivan Bunin, Selected Poems (1929)Alexander Kuprin, The Glade: Short Stories (1929)The Triumph of Virtue (1930)What Should Everyone Know? (1931)Writers and the Era (1931)Nina Berberova, The Last and the First (1931)In Memory of Amalia Fondaminsky (1937)Pushkin, or the True and the Seemingly True (1937)Diaghilev and a Disciple, (1940)Soviet Literature 1940, (1941)The Creative Writer, (1941)

⭐This is a wonderful book. The kind of book that you can pick up and open to any page and read something very interesting. However I must say the cover is absolutely awful. For such elegant writing the cover looks like it was a high school art project. Still highly recommended

⭐There’s no bad Nabokov, but this is really shoe scrapings.

⭐An excellent book corralling many of the occasional thoughts and opinions of a man of literary genius.The editors, Boyd and Tolstoy, have performed a significant service to those desiring more information on this complex, opinionated author, who was at home with three languages and lived many places during a century torn by conflict and revolution.People interested in great literature, Lolita, butterflies, Freud, the USSR, translations, and freedom will enjoy this book.”In a sense we all are crashing to death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall.” p. 194.

⭐Collected essays and interviews of a literary master dating back to the 20s. Never dull, always fascinating.

⭐This important addition to the Nabokov cannon comprises of juvenilia (including two brilliant essays from 1921, while still at Cambridge), essays, editorial correspondences, book reviews and interviews recorded and reproduced from his latter life as a literary celebrity. Indeed this is a treasure trove of fathomless imagery and mordant wit, and should be treasured as the last installment of his unbuplished material following Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings and Insomniac Dreams: Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov. The entries included are varied and multifarious, and in number exceed one hundred and fifty, and they are arranged in chronological order from the essays he wrote while still in Cambridge to the interviews he gave shortly before his death.What particularly held my attention was his essay on Rupert Brooke (1921) which starts with this passage of quintessential Nabokovian imagery: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, colourful: their porcelain scales seemed as if painted in bright colours 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.Indeed a man’s tribute to a forgotten and lesser known British war poet (and one who died in the first world war) could not be greater! What beautiful imagery and how arcane the use of metaphor in prose that has a rhythmic complexity and nuances of meaning akin to verse!Another essay that was quite special was ‘Laughter and Dreams’ (1923) that starts with this amazing reflection:Art is a permanent wonder, a wizard with a trick of putting two and two together and making five, or a million, or one of those gorgeous giant numbers which haunt and dazzle the delirious mind writhing through a mathematical nightmare.Indeed there are many hidden and unburied treasures that can be gleaned from and can be savoured again and again. On the hindsight I must say that Nabokov is one of my big favorites and I literally soak up everything that he has written. So I guess I can recommend this only to those who have had a through intro to the writer’s work and life.In structure and presentation this reminds me a lot of D.H.Lawrence’s great posthumous memorabilia-collection Phoenix 1: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrenceand Phoenix 2.

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