-You’re a professional lepidopterist?
Yes, I'm interested in the classification, variation, evolution, structure, distribution, and habits, of Lepidoptera: this sounds very grand, but actually I’m an expert in only a very small group of butterflies. I have contributed several works on butterflies to the various scientific journals– but I want to repeat that my interest in butterflies is exclusively scientific.
-Is there any connection with your writing?
There is in a general way, because I think that in a work of art there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science.
-In your new novel, Pale Fire, one of the characters says that reality is neither the subject nor the object of real art, which creates its own reality. What is that reality?
Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless.
So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects–that machine, there, for instance. It's a complete ghost to me– don't understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron.
-You say that reality is an intensely subjective matter, but in your books it seems to me that you seem to take an almost perverse delight in literary deception.
The fake move in a chess problem, the illusion of a solution or the conjuror's magic: I used to be a little conjuror when I was a boy. I loved doing simple tricks–turning water into wine, that kind of thing; but I think I’m in good company because all art is deception and so is nature; all is deception in that good cheat, from the insect that mimics a leaf to the popular enticements of procreation…
-You talk about games of deception, like chess and conjuring. Are you, in fact, fond of them yourself?
I am fond of chess but deception in chess, as in art, is only part of the game; it’s part of the combination, part of the delightful possibilities, illusions, vistas of thought, which can be false vistas, perhaps. I think a good combination should always contain a certain element of deception.
From a BBC Nabokov Interview
blakekathryn
pixelskylines
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
gummygunk
gamechangershow
romaincrisis
