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[Azam Zanganeh continues...] of the last stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes": "In all the house was heard no human sound. / A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door; / The arras, rich with horseman, hawk, and hound / Fluttered in the besieging wind's uproar / And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor." The word 'arras'—Arras is a city in northern France known for its tapestry work. So arras now in English means a tapestry. That's a beautiful example.

JL: So of those six languages you know well—Nabokov was a famous "synesthete," so this is my synesthesia question—are there any that have flavors for you?

LAZ: Definitely. They have flavors, connected with their colors. It's strange, I've never talked about it or really thought to articulate it, but they definitely do. Italian is bright yellow, like citrus. Spanish is blood-orange. French is green for some reason, blue-green. English—English is red, an honest red. And Persian I would say is in the dark red, garnet red. They all have different hues. Though Russian is red, too, somehow. How strange. Russian is definitely a brighter shade of red.

JL: Now we know why you always wear red.

LAZ: Ha! And they all have particular tastes. They all have moods. I'm attached to them sentimentally in different ways.

JL: But you must play favorites...

LAZ: I think the language that sounds most beautiful to me is Russian. When it's spoken well and when you read the poetry of Pushkin in his native Russian, it's unbelievable. The economy of language that is at work in the most simple, clearest, crispest little poem of five lines. I would say, musically, that's the language that touches me most.

My grandfather spoke perfect Russian. They say he spoke it with a St. Petersburg accent. He went to Russia often and so maybe there is some Russian line of influence. My mother has studied Russian and speaks it well, too. I also had an uncle who was half- Russian, famously blond and blue-eyed, and one of my grandmothers had Georgian blood, so maybe there's a touch of Russian something-or-other in us. I don't know what it is, but it moves me like nothing else. In terms of the sheer fun of street language, I love Spanish, spoken like castellano is in Spain—although South Americans find it a little snobby. I've always loved its guttural sounds. Whenever I hear it in airports or if I'm lucky enough to be in Spain, which happens rarely, it makes me giddy. I don't know why, it feels instantly thrilling, even sensual.

JL: Let's set aside languages for a moment. When I met you, I was a little surprised to learn—because you seemed so invested in literary culture—that you're a huge enthusiast of science. Conversations with you will randomly turn to astronomy or evolution, and it's not unusual for you to ask out-of-town friends to meet you at the Museum of Natural History instead of, say, a bar.

LAZ: I always feel very frustrated about the fact that people like me who have had a liberal arts background and supposedly, have been well-educated—a person who's deemed relatively cultured in the literary sense and is blessed to have received a good, substantive education—is in reality incredibly ignorant as to a great part of the culture, which is science.

We act as though science is not a part of culture, yet it very much is. Understanding even the rudiments of string theory or neuroscience or evolutional biology is absolutely as important and remarkable as knowing Hamlet or Dante. I can't understand why the educational system basically decided for me that, because I was more gifted in one thing rather than another, I was going to be completely ignorant about the other.

JL: That's the French educational system...

LAZ: Maybe, the European at any rate. I feel science is a sibling to poetry. The mystery and beauty that provoke, as Nabokov says, "a tingle in the spine," when I'm learning about—or rather, when I finally understood a couple of years ago, more or less, what gravitation is, and the transition from Newton to Einstein, and space as something that was more like a fabric, if I understand it correctly, and so on. The sort of emotions one gleans from trying to grasp these things—that, to me, is as exciting as reading Shakespeare. It truly is, because it goes down to the same root. To a source question. It's as moving as any great poetry.

Vladimir Nabokov was fascinated, in both art and science, by patterning. The "non-utilitarian delights" of discerning a secret order or concord in the way things are set up, or strung or woven together—the very matrix of nature and art. He loved to talk about "the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist." I think patterning is one of the keys to Nabokov's cross-passion, so to speak.

JL: Well, you brought up Einstein and space-time. One of the main thematic frames of The Enchanter is that Nabokov is the—or at least a—writer of happiness. But he's also a writer who wrestles with time in a really interesting way. Those are some of the passages I really enjoy in the book, where you consider his intense awareness of time, the strangeness of that recognition, when he recalls being "plunged into the pure element of time"—his description of the beginning of consciousness. I can't say I have a similar memory to draw on. What is your first memory? What is your version of being plunged into the pure element of time?

LAZ: It's a tricky question, for two reasons. First of all, Nabokov himself has a changing definition of time. The "pure element of time" initially is a sort of sensual awakening—a feeling akin, he said, to bathing in shiny seawater with fellow swimmers. So it's really an awakening to time before he eventually, at a more mature age artistically, negates time as he does quite radically and poetically in Ada, or Ardor.

Nabokov hated Freud—"the Viennese quack"—but Freud does say that we have a lot of false memories. And I'm not sure what my first memory is because I feel it has probably been imagined and reconstructed. But some of my first memories are very mundane really. You know, falling asleep in my mother's arms after a long day at the sea—but I believe

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