"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 interviews, Strong Opinions, Nabokov, reprinted a 1970 response to a question posed by Alfred Appel about whether he knew Igor Stravinsky, "another outspoken émigré." Vladimir Nabokov replied, "I know Mr. Stravinsky very slightly and have never seen any genuine sample of his outspokenness in print." Nabokov's 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 of who was responsible for what appeared in print, and what Robert Craft's role actually was, remain a matter 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.3 It was the idea that Stravinsky was considered a "fine writer" that surely irritated Nabokov. Such a notion revealed a familiar philistinism and stupidity, not entirely unrelated to the evils of poshlose, Nabokov's term for the fake suggestion of genuine art, refinement and judgment so rampant in so called civilized society. 4 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 An Autobiography of 1935 and 1936 to the 1939 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, was, if not ghost-written, then the work of close collaboration .s This does not disqualify the utility of what was published by Stravinsky as sources for understanding Stravinsky. But there are no grounds for elevating the co