In the interview with Vladimir Nabokov, conducted in March 1963 for Playboy magazine, the writer Alvin Toffler asked: “As a final question, do you believe in God?” “To be quite candid,” Nabokov replied, “—and what I am going to say now is something never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary chill—I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.” This is, perhaps, Nabokov’s most readily quoted and paraphrased statement on religion. And yet, verbal charm and rhetorical decussation notwithstanding, what precisely is he saying? The critic Michael Wood believes that here “Nabokov himself sounds quite a bit like Adam Falter,” a character in Nabokov’s last Russian-language fiction “Ultima Thule” (1940), who is bent on both revealing and concealing a metaphysical discovery.
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