Playboy: Though many readers and reviewers would disagree that her charm is tender, few would deny that it is queer - so much so that when director Stanley Kubrick proposed his plan to make a movie of Lolita, you were quoted as saying, "Of course they'll have to change the plot. Perhaps they will make Lolita a dwarfess. Or they will make her 16 and Humbert 26." Though you finally wrote the screenplay yourself, several reviewers took the film to task for watering down the central relationship. Were you satisfied with the final product?

Nabokov: I thought the movie was absolutely first-rate. The four main actors deserve the very highest praise. Sue Lyon bringing that breakfast tray or childishly pulling on her sweater in the car - these are moments of unforgettable acting and directing. The killing of Quilty is a masterpiece, and so is the death of Mrs. Haze. I must point out, though, that I had nothing to do with the actual production. If I had, I might have insisted on stressing certain things that were not stressed - for example, the different motels at which they stayed. All I did was write the screenplay, a preponderating portion of which was used by Kubrick.

Playboy: Do you feel that Lolita's two-fold success has affected your life for the better or for the worse?

Nabokov: I gave up teaching - that's about all in the way of change. Mind you, I loved teaching, I loved Cornell, I loved composing and delivering my lectures on Russian writers and European great books. But around 60, and especially in winter, one begins to find hard the physical process of teaching, the getting up at a fixed hour every other morning, the struggle with the snow in the driveway, the march through long corridors to the classroom, the effort of drawing on the blackboard a map of James Joyce's Dublin or the arrangement of the semi-sleeping car of the St. Petersburg-Moscow express in the early 1870s - without an understanding of which neither Ulysses nor Anna Karenin, respectively, makes sense. For some reason my most vivid memories concern examinations. Big amphitheater in Goldwin Smith. Exam from 8 a.m. to 10:30. About 150 students - unwashed, unshaven young males and reasonably well-groomed young females. A general sense of tedium and disaster. Half-past eight. Little coughs, the clearing of nervous throats, coming in clusters of sound, rustling of pages. Some of the martyrs plunged in meditation, their arms locked behind their heads. I meet a dull gaze directed at me, seeing in me with hope and hate the source of forbidden knowledge. Girl in glasses comes up to my desk to ask: "Professor Kafka, do you want us to say that . . .? Or do you want us to answer only the first part of the question?" The great fraternity of C-minus, backbone of the nation, steadily scribbling on. A rustle arising simultaneously, the majority turning a page in their bluebooks, good teamwork. The shaking of a cramped wrist, the failing ink, the deodorant that breaks down. When I catch eyes directed at me, they are forthwith raised to the ceiling in pious meditation. Windowpanes getting misty. Boys peeling off sweaters. Girls chewing gum in rapid cadence. Ten minutes, five, three, time's up.

Playboy: Citing in Lolita the same kind of acid-etched scene you've just described, many critics have called the book a masterful satiric social commentary on America. Are they right?

Playboy: But haven't you written yourself that there is "nothing more exhilarating than American Philistine vulgarity"?

Nabokov: No, I did not say that. That phrase has been lifted out of context, and like a round, deep-sea fish, has burst in the process. If you look up my little afterpiece, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," which I appended to the novel, you will see that what I really said was that in regard to Philistine vulgarity - which I do feel is most exhilarating - no difference exists between American and European manners. I go on to say that a proletarian from Chicago can be just as Philistine as an English duke.

Playboy: Many readers have concluded that the Philistinism you seem to find the most exhilarating is that of America's sexual mores.

Nabokov: Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude - all this is something I find too tedious for words. Let us skip sex.

Playboy: Not to belabor the subject, some critics have felt that your barbed comments about the fashionability of Freudianism, as practiced by American analysts, suggest a contempt based upon familiarity.

Nabokov: Bookish familiarity only. The ordeal itself is much too silly and disgusting to be contemplated even as a joke. Freudism and all it has tainted with its grotesque implications and methods appear to me to be one of the vilest deceits practiced by people on themselves and on others. I reject it utterly, along with a few other medieval items still adored by the ignorant, the conventional or the very sick.

Playboy: Speaking of the very sick, you suggested in Lolita that Humbert Humbert's appetite for nymphets is the result of an unrequited childhood love affair; in Invitation to a Beheading you wrote about a 12-year-old girl, Emmie, who is erotically interested in a man twice her age; and in Bend Sinister, your protagonist dreams that he is "surreptitiously enjoying Mariette [his maid] while she sat, wincing a little, in his lap during the rehearsal of a play in which she was supposed to be his daughter." Some critics, in poring over your works for clues to your personality, have pointed to this recurrent theme as evidence of an unwholesome preoccupation on your part with the subject of sexual attraction between pubescent girls and middle-aged men. Do you feel that there may be some truth in this charge?