The Nabokov-Wilson Correspondence

Nabokov's relationship with Edmund Wilson was the most public of the close friendships of his American career. In the introduction to his edition of 264 letters exchanged by the pair (published by Harper & Row, 1979), Simon Karlinsky wrote that Nabokov's American career "can hardly be imagined without Wilson's help, advice and literary contacts." With Nabokov's first communication, in August 1940, Wilson became Nabokov's de facto literary agent, securing occasional book review assignments for him in The New Republic; arranging opportunities with other periodicals; introducing him to his first book publisher, James Laughlin, and later recommending him to other publishers; proposing him for teaching positions and fellowships; and pointing him to authors such as Austen and Dickens for his Cornell lectures. Wilson's high praise for The Real Life of Sebastian Knight appeared on the dust jacket of that book, and he gracefully refrained from reviewing Nabokov works he disliked, while promoting them to other critics. (He disapproved of Lolita, ignored Pale Fire, relentlessly attacked Eugene Onegin, and fired on Ada.)

Wilson had had good reason to extend himself for Nabokov. In 1935, he returned from a Guggenheim-funded excursion to Moscow determined to study Pushkin in the original Russian. Their mutual desire that Pushkin be introduced to the English-speaking world bound them for decades to come. They collaborated on a Pushkin translation; bandied about an idea for a collaborative book; and bantered over English and Russian theories of versification, sending each other examples of poetry in the language in question. Many of Nabokov's letters evidence his frustration at Wilson's failure to grasp the essential difference between Russian and American prosody, but are surprisingly tolerant of Wilson's failure to appreciate his novels.

The items listed below pertain to Nabokov's life and career and are the contents of the exhibition at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, on view from April 23 through August 21, 1999. This checklist, primarily of items from the Library's Nabokov Archive, is included here to provide a sense of the rich holdings in this special collection.

Vladimir Nabokov
List of clothing for trip to Cape Cod, Summer 1944
Holograph manuscript on the verso of a letter from Katharine White, dated July 3, 1944
Berg Collection

Edmund Wilson
Typed letter signed, with autograph corrections, to Vladimir Nabokov
The New Republic, November 12, 1940
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
Autograph draft of a letter to Edmund Wilson
December 14, 1940
Berg Collection

Mary McCarthy
Typescript comments, enclosed in a letter from Edmund Wilson to Vladimir Nabokov, with clipping annotated in Russian by Nabokov
Wellfleet, Cape Cod, November 30, 1954
Berg Collection

Edmund Wilson
"The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov"
From: The New York Review of Books, July 15, 1965
Berg Collection

Edmund Wilson
Greeting card with a separate note by Wilson and response on an index card by Nabokov
Wellfleet, Massachusetts, 1966
Berg Collection

Vladimir Nabokov
"Dreams"
Holograph notes on index cards, 1964
Berg Collection