5 September (1951): In the 1940s, Vladimir Nabokov arrived in America to pursue his two interests, literature and lepidoptery (the study of butterflies). During this time, the novelist also struck up a friendship with writer and critic Edmund Wilson, who Nabokov sometimes addressed in correspondence by his childhood nickname “Bunny.” Wilson, who avowed a “warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation” for Nabokov, was credited by the writer for easing his first decade in America. Below, Nabokov shares with Wilson brief vignettes from his U.S. travels in a letter that would ultimately be reworked into the final pages of Lolita. I went to Telluride (awful roads, but then—endless charm, an old-fashioned, absolutely touristless mining town full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000’, to 10000’, with the town and its tin roofs and 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!) for the sole purpose, which my heroic wife who drove me through the floods and storms of Kansas did not oppose, of obtaining more specimens of a butterfly I had described from eight males, and of discovering its female... Keep reading here: theamericanreader/5-september-1951-vladimir-nabokov-to-edmund-wilson/
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 15:40:23 +0000