#TheFeud25 #VladimirNabokov #EdmundWilson by #AlexBeam
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Paul Theroux observed that "friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness [emphasis added.]"
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After reading Wilson's piece at home in Montreux, Nabokov cabled Barbara Epstein in New York: "Please reserve space in next issue for my thunder."
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Poor Vladimir. An exile. An orphan. A stranger to two worlds and in two languages. A Conrad manqué. Wilson was trafficking in precisely the kind of "human interest" twaddle that Nabokow reviled. #TheFeud25 #VladimirNabokov #EdmundWilson
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"The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,' finally appeared in July 1965
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www.nybooks.com/articles/196...
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What takes Pushkin 140 iambs to express takes Nabokov fifteen pages of dense analysis. The "Pedal Digression," Nabokov writes, "is one of the wonders of the work.""
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Mr. Nabokov has the point of view of an old-fashioned Russian of the better classes, one, that is say, who quite normally spoke French to his equals and Russian to his servants....
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The New Yorker, titled "On translating Eugene Onegin." The opening lines are famous:
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Pushkin's own sketch of himself and Onegin, lounging on the Neva embankment. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
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Onegin is some of the most beautiful Russian poetry ever written. Its organization is chaotic. It is all very Russian.
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"He and I disagree on everything in literature except Pushkin," Wilson told an interviewer not long before this, their final meeting. Pushkin would be the last to go.
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In his income tax jeremiad, Wilson concluded, "I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me."
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Wilson thought he "could always attend to this obligation later," and the one time he decided pay a tax bill--his 1955 book on the Dead Sea Scrolls sold well-_his check bounced.
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In October 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature. and Doctor Zhivago leapfrogged over Lolita to the number-one spot on best-seller lists all over the world. #TheFeud25 #VladimirNabokov #EdmundWilson
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Nabokov left a brief rhyme in Russian: "There are nights when as soon as I lie down/My bed sails off to Russia."
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"Edmund Wilson regrets ..." Perhaps the most infamous three-by-five- inch card in twentieth-century American literature. (Private collection
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Nabokov might have admired Conrad more had he known that the Anglicized Pole shared his disdain for Fyodor Dostoyevsky. "[Conrad] hated him because he was Russian, because he was mad, and because he was confused,"
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When he reprinted the review in a 1950 collection Wilson added one final line that he must have known would irk Nabokov. "In spite of some errors, Mr. Nabokov's mastery of English almost rivals Joseph Conrad's."
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When the Nabokov-Wilson imbroglio boiled over in 1965 Nabokov archly observed that "I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels."
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(Nabokov pronounced the word "NEE-hil-ist," Wilson " NIE-i-list.)"
"Dear Volodya: Nihilist [NI-hilist] is pronounced the way I pronounce it---not NEE-hilist. See any dictionary."
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The thank-you note was heartfelt: "Dear Bunny, I got that Guggenheim Fellowship. Thanks, dear friend. ... have noticed that whenever you are involved in any of my affairs they are always successful."
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Undated photo of Vladimir Nabokov (far right) with a group of Nina Chavchavadze's friends in Cambridge, England in the early 1920s, Of royal blood, Nina ended up living next door to Edmund Wilson on Cape Cod. (Courtesy Sasha Chavchavadze
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She was prepared to kill the assassin.
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Nabokov famously never had a home. In the United States he and his wife, Vera, always rented. At Cornell University in Ithaca New York, where he taught for a decade, thev occupied homes vacated by professors on sabbatical.
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And he had lost the connection to his true mother tongue: "My private tragedy," he called it.
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Many years later he recalled that "I learned Russian, primarily, I think, in order to read Pushkin, the Shakespeare of Russian letters.
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He never fully surrendered his admiration for Lenin, for which Nabokov attacked him on first acquaintance.
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WHO WAS EDMUND WILSON in 1940? Although history would later reverse their order of importance, he was older-- forty-five years old to Nabokov's forty--more famous, and arguably more accomplished than Vladimir Nabokov at that time.
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Nicolas addressed his correspondent as "mon cher Huileson," a play on the French word for "oil," and signed his name "Nab O' Cough." Punning ran in the family.
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For Nabokov "Leninist reality" as the Soviets liked to call it, would always be "a pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom."
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