"The Precision of Poetry and the Exactness of Pure Science": Nabokov, Stravinsky, and the Reader as Listener LEON BOTSTEIN Parallel Lives In his meticulously prepared compendium of interview; Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov reprinted a 1970 response to a question posed by Alfred Appel about whether he knew Igor Stravinsky, "another outspoken émigré." Nabokov replied, "I know Mr. Stravinsky very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print."' Nabokov's response to Appel, one of the first and mast respected of Nabokov scholars, revealed an uncanny but not unexpected doubt about Stravinsky's role in the authorship of the (by then) extensive accumulation of Stravinsky-Craft volumes of conversations. The questions about Robert Craft's role and who was responsible for what appeared in print as Stravinsky's words remain matters of controversy' Craft's contribution was, if not decisive, then certainly substantial. He confessed to Stephen Walsh, with pride, that one reviewer of the 1959 Conversations expressed the opinion that "the two finest writers of English prose" were Russians: Nabokov and Stravinsky? The idea that Stravinsky was considered a "fine writer" surely irritated Nabokov. Such a notion revealed a familiar philistinism and stupidity, not entirely unrelated to the evils of poshlare, Nabokov's term for the fake suggestion of genuine art, refinement, and judgment so rampant in so-called civilized society.' Nabokov's subtly worded skepticism about the authorship of the volumes anticipated what has remained for scholars a source of ambiguity with respect to understanding Stravinsky, particularly in his American years. It seems that everything Stravinsky published, from his Autobiography of 1935 and 1936 to the 1939 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and the volumes with Craft was, if not ghostwritten, then the work of close collaboration? This does not disqualify the utility of what was pub- lished under Strav