The Nabokov-Wilson letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971

by Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, Simon Karlinsky

First Harper Colophon edition published 1980. Pages clean and unmarked. Slight wear from time on shelf like you would see on a major chain. Immediate shipping.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Russia, History, Criticism, Literature, Literary Criticism

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Vladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am hideously busy, but wanted to dash off these few words of affectionate appreciation.

Most likely a reread from a distant lifetime. Despite the pedantry, which stumbled my progress, I was drawn deeply to the bosom of both men. Wilson was such a help when Nabokov arrived stateside with wife and son. Despite vehement disagreement, Nabokov always recognized that generosity. The two authors are both part of a pantheon and simultaneously as bitchy and human as myself. I laughed aloud several times this morning, reveling in their rarefied sarcasm. I did find myself impervious to their puns. The endless debates over Pushkin were wearying but their conversations about the merits or disfavor of Henry James, Genet and Faulkner were delightful. I’m feeling humbled and enriched presently in the afterglow of this collection. Well worth anyone’s time.

[Nikola Jankovic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prepiska Vladimira Nabokova (još veći genije nego što sam ga smatrao) i američkog pisca i kritičara Edmunda Wilsona (e, za njega nisam ni čuo). Prepiska je trajala više od 30 godina, mada poslednjih 15 godina skoro da nisu ni održavali kontakt, samo poneko pismo tu i tamo.

Nabokov je duhovit, vispren, strastven, često se igra rečima i frazama; Wilson odmeren i kritičan, ne voli šale u tekstovima (Nabokovu čak savetuje da se "kloni šala u žurnalizmu, u SAD to ne prolazi"). Ima tu mnogo tema. Na primer, čisto logistične - dogovori za posetu, to traje i po desetak pisama ili godinu dana dok se konačno ne sretnu. Tu su i brige pisaca - kod koga izdavati, kakav je neko urednik, kako se cenjkati za honorar itd.

Tu su i komentari na druga dela i pisce. Nabokov voli Tolstoja, ponekad mu se sviđa Ostinova, ali žestoko kritikuje Dostojevskog, Henrija Džejmsa, Igoa, Foknera... Malo šta mu se stilski dopada, stičeš utisak da čovek nije mogao da uživa u čitanju. Nije ovo samo gordost i cinizam, prelazi to u gunđanje, sujetu, preteranu samouverenost. "Priznajem samo dve vrste knjiga, one za uzglavlje i one za smeće." Većina ih je za smeće, rekao bih.

Ipak, ostaje simpatičan kao i u svojim esejima (Nabokov - eseji o Tolstoju i Gorkom), a još bolji je kad piše o leptirima, porodici, politici, o situaciji u Sovjetskom savezu, svojim predavanjima. Ili kad gunđa oko novca ("Putovao sam dva meseca, upoznao mnogo zanimljivih ljudi, održao predavanja - i zaradio vrlo malo para"). Novca nikad nema dovoljno, godinama je živeo u finansijskim problemima - ili je bar bio uveren u to, nije na primer imao problem da iznajmi letnjikovac na celo leto. Kad izađeLolita, sve se to naravno menja.

Tada i ovo prijateljstvo kreće put propasti. Ima tu stalnih neslaganja, oko transkribovanja ruskih reči na primer, o tome kako prevoditi Puškina, vrednosti pisaca... Isto tako, jedan drugom stalno kritikuju dela, ali do Lolite to nekako i može da se shvati dobronamerno. Ali kad Nabokov pošalje Vilsonu rukopis Lolite, za koju je ubeđen da je njegovo najbolje delo i od koje ima velika očekivanja, ovaj reaguje katastrofalno. U trenutku kad Lolitu izdavači redom odbijaju, preti joj zabrana i cenzura čak i da je neko izda, i kad Nabokovu podrška druga najviše treba, Vilson je u pismu žestoko kritikuje. Nakon što Lolita kasnije ipak postigne planetarni uspeh, a Nabokov slavu i bogastvo, tu dolazi i otvorena Vilsonova ljubomora i prijateljstva nema više... Na kraju, glavna svađa se dešava u javnosti, povodom Nabokovljevog prevoda Jevgenija Onjegina. Ovo je interesantan članak na tu temu:
https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-j...

Na žalost, od Nabokova sam dosad čitao samo Lolitu. Ovo mora pod hitno da se menja. 2020. će biti u znaku Nabokova.

[Uday · Rating 5 out of 5]

While scanning through a dictionary all through its thick, authoritarian spine, never will one come across 'friendship' defined as 'the undulation of attitudes'. For these two gentlemen, friendship does not simply start and end; friendship through these letters is often a spectrum in itself, a medium in which their thoughts and moods swimmed, and an element in which the levers of love, arrogance, and indifference were carefully calibrated from letter to letter.

Not all is grim; your to-read list may swell twenty-fold if Nabokov's and Wilson's readings are to be followed (and I tracked them all quite closely). The amount of stuff these two read is at once daunting and miscellaneous. Nabokov recommends Dorothy Sayers, trashes Christie, and while changing his mind about Austen, reports reading Kotzebue's "Lover's Vows", the entire play-withn-the-play shebang; Wilson strenuously pushes for Faulkner and Malraux, continues to bat for Trostsky, Gorki, and alas Lenin. These are only major names, but trivia galore follows: Russian emigres are peppered throughout - Poplavsky, Berberova, Bunin et al. You will see Nabokov discuss the issues of Life and People with speckled parody, you will see Wilson narrate the drama when Roman Jakobson was almost about to fight with French professors for claming a Russian epic discourse was a 19th century forgery.

With great sadness my fingertips registered the thinness of pages which were actually signalling the thinning of a great, intellectual bond. The months and years, the particularity of dates and places, so securing and gladdening when moving in slow jumps - so stolid and unmoving time seemed to be in the early stages - assume a monstrous, unmerciful quality when fleeting quickly. The last ten years of friendship pass by in a matter of twenty or so pages (and this is a three-hundred page book) - September stopped appearing after August, and entire years started vanishing into the hypothetical. So suddenly did the affinity taper towards its end, that I imagined entire events in between dates to console myself that the world must have still been spinning. What happened between May of one year and March of the next? No one will know.

Its overwhelming when you see Nabokov write enthusiastically that its been twenty (20!) years since they first met, and if you have followed the journey throughout, it is hard not to feel the emotions on the verge of spilling as Nabokov, ever the gentleman with the olive branch, restarting again what had abruptly ceased, after a gap of seven years, pens again those comforting words, "Dear Bunny...." and goes on to joke about his friend's 'incomprehensible incomprehension'. He is a punster enwrapped in a coil of human warmth. Contrary to popular opinion, jokes and wordplay are not frivolous throwaways; they reveal the underside of the obvious, the nether sky which underlines any surface or word. He knows that he can play with words, he may flippantly phrase a genuine sentiment, and hurt also, but when it matters most, when it's all said and done, he knows words mean something, and he uses them to the best effect, to bring out the human. Lolita does it, Pnin does it, and so does the man. And that is why he (and he knows this very very well), and we, must remember that words always, always, always, mean something.

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love that one of the first things Wilson writes to Nabokov is this: "do please refrain from puns, to which I see you have a slight propensity. They are pretty much excluded from serious journalism here."

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting, edifying, and quite sad book. The last thirty or so pages where the correspondence begins to deteriorate just before the two authors' public argument over Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin is particularly moving. While I found both men to be sympathetic, I found Wilson, despite his frequent errors and misunderstandings, to be the one I admired more (he was tremendously more open-minded that Nabokov was, and, at least in this correspondence, admits to making mistakes, which Nabokov never does). However, Nabokov's final letter to Wilson is heartbreaking. Intellectually invigorating and full of pathos.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frankly this was somewhat disappointing. I wanted it to be as sparkling as the Foote/Percy letters which I read a few months ago, but there is too much palaver about the Russian language and its grammar and about Russian writers I've never heard of. My favorite parts were when they got to the publication of Lolita (Wilson thought it was Nabokov's worst book), which are near the end of the correspondence. "I am extremely irritated by the turn my nymphet's destiny is taking," Nabokov writes, "But although I foreglimpsed the situation, I have no inkling how to act...."

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two glittering literati discuss editors, translation, pornography, their families and more.

[l · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nabokov is wonderful.

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two curmudgeons curmudgeon about writing, literature, versification, communism, Pushkin, the publishing industry, academia, butterflies, other writers, and (gasp!) each other.

Reading this made me kind of sad that letter writing is pretty much an obsolete practice. I think that we’d all probably have a lot more faculty for language and storytelling and attention and communication in general if we actually had to compose long-form writing on a regular basis like this. In a similar vein, I’m wondering what kind of literary correspondence, if any, contemporary authors will leave behind now that all our distanced communication has become so immediate and fragmented. I wonder if in 50 years we’ll all be reading a book of Sally Rooney’s texts or something.

Despite knowing how their friendship ended, I was sort of shocked by how critical Nabokov and Wilson could be of one another. If they didn’t like something the other wrote, they said so without anything even resembling tact or sensitivity. While reading this I often thought that if they’d had enough discretion to keep their more unfavorable opinions of the other’s work to themselves, they probably could have enjoyed a long, harmonious friendship. But of course doing so would’ve lessened the value of their praise (which was often emphatic, even in moments of conflict). And, in any case, I doubt that it would have been possible for them to prevent themselves from engaging in the kind of linguistic grandstanding that they do here. It seems like it would be untenable for two such formidable egos to remain in orbit without one of them eventually swallowing up the other.

And if any two people deserve formidable egos, it’s certainly Nabokov and Wilson. They’re both horrible pedants — especially Nabokov, whose disdain for sociohistorical criticism and most other writers I found quite frustrating (cf. his complaints about James, Faulkner, Mann, Dostoevsky, Conrad, and all woman writers other than Austen 😐) — but you can understand why: even just in their correspondence, it’s clear that their linguistic mastery and literary knowledge is unmatched. Holy shit. Reading this correspondence will make anyone who has ever thought about writing for even for a second understand that they’re playing wiffle ball to Nabokov and Wilson’s MLB.

[Lars Reijnen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why does Faulkner suck? How were duels fought in Puschkin's Russia? How many stress-accents does a Russian use per word? Read this book and find out! Well, except about those stress-accents...

An interesting friendship. Some interesting letters, some less so. In later years they mostly wrote each other when they suffered from some illness. It is a nice companion book to Letters to Vera, because it deals with a different period in Nabokov's life. The infamous Nabokov-Wilson Feud becomes a very sad affair when you've read this book. Only recommended for Nabokov (or Wilson) fans who want to get to know him better.

For almost 25 years Russians in exile have craved for something - anything- to happen that would destroy the Bolsheviks, - for instance a good bloody war. Now comes this tragic farce. My ardent desire that Russia, in spite of everything, may defeat or rather utterly abolish Germany - so that not a German be left in the world, is putting the cart before the horse, but the horse is so disgusting that I prefer doing so. First of all I want England to win the war. Then I want Hitler and Stalin dispatched to Christmas Island and kept there together in close and contstant proximity to each other. And then - I quite realize that everything will happen in some ridiculously different way - just as an automobile advertisement juicily interrupts the account of hideously dramatic events.

Read an older edition where some letters were missing.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book records an exchange of letters between two formidable writers during a period of time prior to the internet. Karlinsky's commentary is quite helpful in explaining various details to which the writers refer. The affection between the writers, who do have some sharp differences of opinion, extends to their families also. Yet after a number of years they cease to communicate. Karlinsky provides an explanation which tends to favor Nabokov. I would tend toward him also but I have to add that after appreciating many of Nabokov's books over a number of years, I was surprised to read that he did not like female writers.

[Franc · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a running dialogue over 30 years that can be read almost like a novel. VN here is not the same persona that we see in his Letters of VN, particularly the late letters, nor the ardent lover of the one-sided (but wonderful) Letters to Vera. Instead, he is writing to Wilson as a peer, and it shows. Wilson is one of the few men of letters who could arguably be said to be more knowledgable and prolific than Nabokov. There’s lots of lively discussion about various books. Wilson tastes are decidedly more catholic than Nabokov’s famously eccentric list of heroes and villains. One could keep profitably busy for a year or so just reading the books Wilson recommends to Nabokov in these letters, and I have been so impressed with Wilson’s thinking in these letters that I’ve since ordered two of his books.

Readers of Nabokov biographies will note that many of the best gems from these letters have been previously mined, but there is still much more. There are very few of the lyrical flourishes you see in Vera and no show-off bits, but there are a excellent, almost-travelogue pieces, where you can see to germ of the road trip sections of Lolita. VN mentions elsewhere that he’d planned to write a second volume of Speak Memory, and you can in many of the early letters here whole sections that could have been used for a memoir. These alone are enough to justify this book. There’s a letter (#55) in which he describes the “aberrations of Homo Sap and Homo Sapiens” met on a lecture tour through the South. He describes a dinner at Spelman College Atlanta where W.E.B. Dubois, the great African-American author and educator, who told him amusingly that on a recent trip to Europe he’d been elevated by the cruise line to the rank of “colonel” because his Jim Crow-era passport bore the racial identification “col.”. He gives a long, hilarious account of a double-barreled bout of food poisoning. He tells Wilson of hunting butterflies above the town of Telluride “with the town and its tin roofs and the self-conscious poplars lying toylike at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets — delightful!” (the future epiphanic climax of Lolita.)

Lovers of Nabokovian wordplay will not be disappointed because the letters are larded with them, :

- “partizan” rhymes backwards with “nazitrap,”
- “You gin? One gin.” (Eugene Onegin)
- “I’m glad you are studying Blok — but be careful, he is one of those poets that gets into one’s system — and everything else seems unblokish and flat.”
- “I dislike Jane [Austen], and am prejudiced, in fact, against all women novelists.”
- On finishing his Gogol book: “It is a peach, an overripe peach with the velvet peeling off of one buttock and a purple bruise on the other — but still a peach.”
- When Wilson recommends a book called The Big Con, a psychologist’s study of confidence men (excellent btw,) VN responds with a crude French pun that he “had the wild hope that the big Con was French.”
- “‘Pushkin’ himself is a good example of nepotism (to ‘push’ one’s ‘kin.’”
- There are also plenty of arcane Russian and French ones, which the excellent editor, Simon Karlinsky, explains in is copious, helpful footnotes.

Those completely fluent (1) in Russia (2) English and (3) the prosody of both English and Russian poetry (I personally don’t know anyone who meets these criteria) will be rewarded by their exchanges on Russian poetry and VN’s impatient tutelage of Wilson much of which was later incorporated into the Onegin commentary. The rest of us can skim.

Something I found particularly surprising was how shockingly frank Wilson is with Nabokov in his opinions on VN’s works, to which VN never takes umbrage:

- On Bend Sinister: “You aren’t good at this kind of subject which involves questions of politics and social change, because you are totally uninteresting these matters . . . I think your invented country has not served you very well.” (on both these I’ve annotated agreement the margin of my copy.”
- Wilson does (I believe) miss the boat on Lolita which is surprisingly for the author of the sexually explicit (and also once-banned) Hectate County: “I like it less than anything of yours I have read. . . Nasty subject may make fine books, but I don’t think you have gotten away with this. It isn’t merely that the characters and the situation are repulsive in themselves, but that presented on this scale, they seem quite unreal. The various goings-on have for me the same faults as the climaxes of Bend Sinister and Laughter in the Dark: they become to absurd to be horrible or tragic, yet remain too unpleasant to be funny.”

The late letters are interestingly free the acrimony of their late public feuds over Onegin and Zhivago I think the only reference is one of the last letters where VN says: “Please believe me that I have long ceased to bear you a grudge for your incomprehensible incomprehension of Puskin’s and Nabokov’s Onegin.” Instead, always polite, the letters merely taper off, with the gaps between letters growing longer, and the letters themselves growing shorter. <

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating exchange of letters between two seriously important characters in modern literature. Wilson is learning Russian and the exchanges between the two apropos of Russian usage, authors, politics etc are highly amusing. At one point Wilson confesses that he cannot read "Soviet Russian"! Huh?

[DeterminedStupor]

Status: have only read the Editorial Note and Introduction (up to p. 25).

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s just wonderful to see how petty great men can be. If you’re not great, hopefully you have avoided such pettiness. I give credit to Edmund Wilson for helping Nabokov in his early American career. But I gave him even more credit for the brave recklessness he displayed by doing battle with Nabokov on the most arcane details of the Russian language. Suicidal, but valiant.

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read for those who love Nabokov's prose. Unsurprisingly (if you have read his interviews), Nabokov makes a rather "coquettish" impression. For example, he quite often makes references to his butterfly passion and sends Wilson copies of his scientific articles even though Wilson is rather indifferent to this field. It is particularly instructive to read the comments each of the two make on the subjects only one of them knew well (like Nabokov's corrections of Wilson's misconceptions about Soviet Russia or Wilson's remarks on English poetry).

[chantal Rich]

I'm still reading this one - it was a present from Jeremy. I brought it to work and keep it on my desk, that way I look pretentious and I have something to read for when it's slow.

[Kiof]

Vladimir gives Edmund his little lessons in Russian but not enough before it is too late. (See Wilson's review of Nabokov's Onegin translation, NYRB, July 15, 1965 Edition)