Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition
Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify...
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praise for the first edition:"When two such brilliantly ebullient intellectuals get together by mail, they charge the air with all sorts of pyrotechnics."—Carlos Baker, author of HemingwayWashington Post Book WorldTwo strong-willed literati arguing about books, translation, the scansion of verse, pornography and more.
\ Washington Post Book WorldTwo strong-willed literati arguing about books, translation, the scansion of verse, pornography and more.\ \ \ \ \ NewsdayThe correspondence ends abruptly in 1965, when Wilson's harsh review of Nabokov's translations of Pushkin led to a prolonged public feud. But in 1971, Nabokov has been rereading the correspondence and sends a melancholy note-'It was such a pleasure to feel again; that constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.' In this new, expanded paperback edition of the letters, it is an excitement every reader can share.\ \ \ Washington Post Book WorldTwo strong-willed literati arguing about books, translation, the scansion of verse, pornography and more.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThis collection first appeared in 1979, but since that time 59 new letters have emerged in the now notorious correspondence between the jokester novelist Nabokov and the somewhat stern man of letters Wilson. Karlinsky's new edition incorporates those and adds some annotations largely inspired by books that have appeared since 1979, especially Brian Boyd's monumental biography of Nabokov and Wilson's five volumes of journals. What obtained in 22 years ago still holds: as "Kirkus "put it, here is a "correspondence in which these tetchy titans are most often seen with their hackles up and their blind spots front and center." Nabokov mocks Wilson's taste in fiction; Wilson abhors Nabokov's lame puns, and then the main event occurs: their knockdown drag-out over metrics and Pushkin. Karlinsky, we noted correctly back then, favors Nabokov, and his introduction is still "pompous," as we argued, and appears here to be identical to the original, despite the publisher's claim otherwise. Without quite calling a draw, "Kirkus "concluded that "whichever way the one-upmanship came out, followers of literary give-and-take will find both verbal warriors in top form."\ \
