"Professor V. Nabakov" (1983) Summary and Analysis

Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and explorer of a thousand American motel rooms, follows his "beautiful memoir" Speak Memory with Strong Opinions, a collection of press clippings "in which he has preserved for future classes what looks to be every interview granted during the last decade," Vidal says. Professor Nabakov's answers to reporters' questions are "often amusing, sometimes illuminating, and always—after the third or fourth performance—unbearable in their repetitiveness."

In this very short essay, Vidal notes that the best interviews are those with one "Alfred Appell, Jr." who is "plainly a Nabakovian invention." His questions are longer and wittier than Nabakov's answers, which brings Vidal to question whether a new academic comedy team has been launched. Periodically, the Russian-born American author feels compelled to note in the interviews that he himself...