RH: Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud?
VN: "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."
Two different sets of interviews. Fictional Kinbote reports the first
one, moving from Shade's reaction to Shakespeare's "purple passages"
towards the "impacts and penetrations of Marxism and Freudism." As I see
it, it's hardly a coincidence to find, close to the word "police", a
critical and clever succession of "poll- political-pollination."
In the second interview Nabokov compares his talents as a speaker to his
father's, before he adds:"It's probably psychological" and asserts
that he "can imagine what old Freud would have said." In his article about
"Negation" Freud observes that when a patient exclaims: " I'm not thinking about
my mother now," such a comment is obviously contradictory and self-revealing. No
secret police is needed, nor any indiscrete
freudian probing.
To avoid disclosing one's secrets the only solution is the one
Nabokov has just described when he compares the creative artist to a
lone wolf for "as soon as he's together with somebody else
he shares his secret..." Freud believes that the more one
tries to hide a particular thought the bigger are one's chances of
revealing it by a gesture, a wink, a word.* And yet I think that, in
this case, what bothered Nabokov the most was having to share "his God with
somebody else," which I interpret as a fear of being robbed of his
uniqueness and private mysteries.** Nabokov feels a similar
loss (and describes it in SO) after he's lent one of his
cherished memories to one of his characters. Nevertheless, Nabokov
remains a generous author since this realization hasn't
kept him from vividly sharing his dearest childhood recollections with
an invisible audience - once they'd been artistically
caged and contained by the covers of "Speak,
Memory."
................................................................................
* "He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no
mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his
fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore." Fragment of an Analysis of
a Case of Hysteria (1905) Ch. 2 : The First Dream
**In Richard Rorty's view, the obsessive and strident animosity that
Nabokov felt towards Freud was "the resentment of a precursor who may already
have written all one's best lines".Alan C. Elms (1994), quoted by
Durantaye: "Nabokov didn't hate Freud because their basic concepts of human
nature were so radically opposed; he hated Freud because they were so much
alike" (169).