A.Stadlen: “I can see Jansy's point, but in a way it makes me all the more indignant. Is not someone who accepts money to give a public interview and then becomes an "unreliable interviewee", by lying (in, for example, a journal for which his admiring readers pay good money), dishonouring his contract? Of course, it's only an hypothesis that he was lying. But isn't it fairly clear by now that when Nabokov imagines a character molesting a minor female he is somehow "interested" in that imagined young girl in a way he explicitly and expressly pretends, in interviews, he is not.
Perhaps we should have been warned by his admission that his afterword to the paradigm book for this discussion "may" strike him himself as an "impersonation" of Vladimir Nabokov talking about his own book.”

Jansy Mello: In my opinion “unreliable interviewees” may denounce an excess of confidence on the written word or question the rights of the public to certain intimate points of view unexpectedly raised by the interviewer (recently we got news of VN’s very first “innocent” interview after the  success of “L*olita” and how wiser did he become after that initial kiss by fame). For example, in the early seventies I started to read a few articles in a very academic British Anthropological Journal (I don’t remember its name) with reputed texts by say, Edmund Leach, Evans Pritchard or W.H.Goodenough. One of the articles I held in my hands was about a “cultural body” and there were pictures of a human body dissected into various parts and the vocabulary couldn’t be more technical that it was. Too many years are past, the details elude me but its satirical spirit still tingles me! It had the strangest effect at the time since all the other published articles ended by being read in a slanted critical way I hadn’t attempted until then (the article that came next was about the importance of discarded squash peels in the Algonquins and I had a difficult time to keep a serious face while I perused it).  I’m often as indignant in relation to some of VN’s evasions as you are now but I never managed a “hold” strong enough that I could voice them correctly. His “unreliableness” (and that is a matter of opinion, highly questionable as a generalization) I find it actually quite admirable!