Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition [Paperback]

Simon Karlinsky (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520220803 | ISBN-13: 978-0520220805 | Publication Date: April 2, 2001 | Edition: 1

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 the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Two strong-willed literati arguing about books, translation, the scansion of verse, pornography and more." -- Washington Post Book World

From the Inside Flap

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 Hemingway

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520220803
• ISBN-13: 978-0520220805
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,291,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two endearing blockheads and their fallout, June 22, 2008

By 

H. Schneider "Hamlet" (Pandistan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

I came to this endlessly fascinating collection of private letters between Nabokov and Wilson because of my Nabfandom.
Bunny Wilson, the influential literary critic, had helped Volodya, i.e. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian refugee, with his settlement in the US in the 40s, with landing teaching jobs and publishing contacts. Nab is for sure the far more important of the two, he was a creative writer of supreme status in two languages, Russian and English. He had written a dozen important novels and many short stories, not to mention poems and plays, under the name Sirin, before immigrating to the US.
I do not know any comparable writer who was as bilingual as Nab, maybe Beckett as single exception. But then Beckett is not as inportant to me as Nab. (Conrad wrote in his second language, but produced nothing in his first.)
There were reasons for friendship, but also a vast potential for conflict. Nab was a solid anti-communist, to the point of being an outright reactionary in his late years, while Bunny was a leftist, at least for some time. He was what has been called a 'fellow traveller', but apparently did not embarrass himself overmuch with his pro-Soviet sympathy, before he could withdraw it in view of obvious misdevelopments.
One interest that they shared and which eventually led to the end of their friendship, was Russian literature. Wilson considered himself an expert, and was apparently quite proficient in the language. They fell out over two subjects, which came out during the fifties: main stone of contention was Nab's translation of Pushkin's Onegin. Nab's concept was loyalty to contents at the expense of poetic considerations, hence he produced a prose translation, and accompanied it with a massive volume of annotations. Wilson hated the approach and accused Nab of killing the poetry. They even started arguing about language details.
Second issue was Lolita, the book that brought Nab's breakthrough in English and made him rich, though partly for the wrong reasons, as can be seen from the two idiotic movies that were made after the novel. For one of the movies, Nab even received a script Oscar, though Kubrick had largely ignored Nab's original script and had produced a film of outstanding stupidity, which was only surpassed recently by an even worse remake with Jeremy Irons. Wilson disliked Lolita and made negative comments, which Nab was unwilling to forgive.
So the friendship came to an end, some late attempts at restoration did not lead very far into the core of the problem. I think that the end of the friendship was more honest than the continuation would have been.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars wonderful and irreplacable, December 6, 2001

By 

Russael BK Johanys (Seoul, Korea) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

Here in an elegant paperback of modest proportions is a revised edition of the correspondence of two of America's greatest writers, containing a few newly located letters. Edmund Wilson was already an established writer when Nabokov immigrated to this country around 1940, and Wilson's role in introducing Nabokov around and getting him writing assignments and teaching positions in America was crucial to Nabokov at a critical time. The two men write in fascinating manner about literature, life, writing gigs, and life. The correspondence is sad, too, because the two men seem almost willfully to misunderstand each other on such seemingly innnocuous issues as the nature of Russian and English prosody. Also Wilson as an erstwhile Communist was fascinated with Russia, attempted to learn the language, but thought he knew it better than he did, even trying to correct Nabokov who of course was a native speaker, not to mention a great writer, in Russian. Toward the end of their friendship, Wilson published a memoir that revealed his jealousy of Nabokov, and there was a break, only healed when Wilson was near death. Simon Karlinsky has written a wonderful introduction to the correspondence, that may be worth the price of the book in itself. Nabokov thought highly of Karlinsky, and Karlinsky explains the Russian background of early life behind some of the stances of Nabokov that we Americans find it hardest to understand. For example, why did Nabokov refuse any social role to the artist? For writers, for Nabokov or Wilson lovers, and I count myself both, this is an essential and irreplacable book

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So Much More Than Letters Alone, March 13, 2006

By 

WILLIAM H FULLER (SPEARFISH, SD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

Never before have I read a published collection of previously private letters between two people, nor would it have occurred to me to do so now were it not for the fact that I enjoyed Nabokov's novel PNIN immensely, after which my wife gave me this collection as a Valentines Day gift. I am delighted that she did so.

My immediate reaction to this book is that I am swimming in a hodgepodge of impressions and vaguely related thoughts: What manner of ego leads a person, or in this instance two people, to save years of personal correspondence? On the other hand, how fortunate we are that computer technology and its e-mail capability did not exist for Wilson or Nabokov. Had their correspondence been in the form of e-mails and considering the eventual failure of every hard drive and floppy disk, these letters would most likely have never survived to be discovered by a later editor and publisher.

Since they were retained, since they did survive, and since they have been published, what do we actually receive from these collected letters? We do find wonderful insights into the personalities of both Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov. We see some of the very human delights, worries, triumphs and defeats of these two literary men. We get a peek into some of their desires and projects that never came to fruition. We see occasional frustrations. In brief, we see beyond the beauties of their published works and come to understand something of the minds that produced those works.

I was particularly struck by their elaborations, analyses and arguments over English and Russian poetry, especially its scansion, an aspect of poetic analysis that, I admit, has never attracted my interest, but to witness Wilson and Nabokov disputing it is quite entertaining. Their arguments over the quality of other, widely read authors are also enlightening, Nabokov dismissing Faulkner, Henry James, George Eliot (and many others) while Wilson thought well of them. Nabokov thought Stendhal "worthless" and described D. H. Lawrence as an artistic mediocrity. Amusingly, when confronted by a critical review of his own work, Nabokov noted that it was prompted by the fact that he himself had earlier "demolished" a novel written by the reviewer's wife! The point of all this? Perhaps it is that we should take anything a reviewer or critic writes about another author with a large grain of salt.

Some interesting history is also to be gleaned from these letters. Having read history books in school that overlooked this fact, I was fascinated to learn that Lenin was once much admired by American intelligentsia, who were quite convinced that his Bolsheviks had indeed created a utopian society, although it was subsequently kidnaped and degraded by Stalin, conveniently ignoring both the liberal movement under the czars and the terrors actually inflicted by Lenin and his followers. Equally fascinating was the fact that as recently as 1957 the British government requested the French government to join it in prohibiting the printing of books in English that might embarrass the moral sensibilities of English readers, and that the French government, for a short while at least, actually did so. Obviously, this hindered the publication of books such as Nabokov's LOLITA.

Beyond such marvelous revelations in the letters themselves, a twenty-one page introduction by Simon Karlinsky, professor emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley, provides the reader a "mini course" in the social, cultural and intellectual backgrounds of both Wilson and Nabokov. It is exceedingly well done and provides a wealth of information that goes far in helping the reader understand some of the factors that formed the personalities of the two men whose letters he is about to read.

For whom is this collection of value (other than those who are pursuing formal studies of Wilson or Nabokov, of course)? I would suggest that any reader who has enjoyed the literary creations of either man and who is curious about the writer behind those creations will appreciate DEAR BUNNY, DEAR VOLODYE. Be warned, though, that those who have read the works of only one of these men and who become introduced to both through these letters will surely want to add the works of the other to their "must read" lists. After all, having shared their personal correspondence, we are now intimates of both authors, and their other works do beckon!