Dear Volodya:

Roger Straus lent me the MS of your book, and I read it when I was in New
York — though rather hastily, because I had to give it back, and I have waited
to write you about it till I could get some other opinions. I also had Elena and
Mary read it. I enclose Marv's reactions from a letter to me, which she says I
may quote to you. Elena seems to have liked the book better than either Mary
or I - partly, I think, because she has seen America from the foreigner's point
of view and understands how it looks to your hero. The little girl, for example,
seems quite all right to her, though rather implausible to me.

I am afraid that you will never get the book published by anybody except
perhaps Laughlin. I have, however, written about it to a man named Weldon
Kees, a poet, who has just written me that he is associated with a new
publishing venture in California, and that they want to bring out books of a
kind that might otherwise not be published. have also talked about it to Jason
Epstein at Doubleday. It seems that, when they wiped out your part of the
advance on that Russian book we were going to do, there was some sort of
understanding that you would eventually submit novel. Did you ever send
them anything? I also suggested that he might be interested in your
translation of Onegin for his paperback Anchor series. This has been a huge
success, and I have been making money out of the two books of mine they
have published. They would give you a big advance, but, as a paperback, the
book might never get reviewed. To me, this doesn't matter a bit, and I am
going to give them a collection of my essays on Russian subjects. If I were
you, I'd send Epstein the Onegin when you finish it. He's a highly intelligent
boy, very well read and with a good deal of taste.

Now, about your novel: I like it less than anything else of yours I have read.
The short story that it grew out of was interesting, but I don't think the
subject can stand this very extended treatment. Nasty subjects may make fine
books; but I don't feel you have got away with this. It isn't merely that the
characters and the situation are repulsive in themselves, but that, presented
on this scale, they seem quite unreal. The various goings‐on and the climax at
the end have, for me, the same fault as the climaxes of Bend Sinister and
Laughter in the Dark: they become too absurd to be horrible or tragic, yet
remain too unpleasant to be funny. think, too, that in this book there is what
is unusual with you - too much background, description of places, etc. This is
that makes with Roger Straus in feeling that the second half drags. I agree
with Mary that the cleverness sometimes becomes tiresome, though I don't
think I agree with her about the “haziness.” (I have suggested a few minor
corrections on the MS.) am sorry that we see so little of you. We're going to be
in New York for a week beginning December 15. If you're coming on for the
holidays, let us know. We'll probably be staying at the Algonquin, but if we're
not, you can reach me at the New Yorker office. As ever,

EW
McCarthy's letter to Wilson] About Vladimir's book - I think have a midway
position. I say think because I didn't quite finish it; I was three‐quarters
through the second vol. ume when we had to leave. At Roger ‘ Straus’
instructions, I left it at the Chelsea for Philip Rahv to pick up‐ he may run
some of the first part in P[artisan] R[eview]. I don't agree with you that the
second volume was boring. Mystifying, rather, it seemed to me; I felt it had
escaped into some elaborate allegory or series of symbols that I couldn't
grasp. Bowden [Broadwater] suggests that the nymphet is a symbol of
America, in the clutches of the middle‐aged European (Vladimir); hence all
the descriptions of motels and other U.S. phenomenology (I liked this part, by
the way). But there seems to be some more concrete symbolism, in the second
volume; you felt all the characters had a kite of meaning tugging at them from
above, in Vladimir's enigmatic empyrean. What about that pursuer, for
instance? I thought maybe I'd find the answer if I finished it‐is there one? On
the other hand, I thought the writing was terribly sloppy all through, perhaps
worse in the second volume. It was full of what teachers call haziness, and all
Vladimir's hollowest jokes and puns. I almost wondered whether this wasn't
deliberate‐ part of the idea.

[Elena Wilson's letter to Nabokov]

We'Meet Cape Cod, Mass. November 30,1954

Dear Vladimir:

The little girl seems very real and accurate and her attractiveness and
seductiveness are absolutely plausible. The hero's disgust of grown‐up women
is not very different, for example, from Gide's, the difference being that Gide
is smug about it and your hero is made to go through hell. The suburban,
hotel, motel descriptions are just terribly funny.

I don't see why the novel should be any more shocking than all the now
commonplace “etudes of other unpleasant moeurs.” These peculiar tastes are
surely as prevalent even if they haven't been written about as often. Why
shouldn't the book be published in England, or certainly in France and then
come back here in a somewhat expurgated form and be read greedily?

Unfortunately, my opinion is very unimportant. We would love to see you

soon. Please give my love to Vera.

Elena In other words, I couldn't put the book down and think it is very
important.

February 23,1948

Dear Bunny,
You naively compare my (and the “old Liberals’ “) attitude towards the Soviet
regime (sensu lato)’ to that of a “ruined and humiliated” American
Southerner towards the “wicked” North. You must know me and “Russian
Liberals” very little if you fail to realize the amusement and contempt with
which I regard Russian emigres whose “hatred” of the Bolsheviks is based on
a sense of financial loss or class degringolade.’ It is preposterous (though
quite in line with Soviet writings on the subject) to postulate any material
interest at the bottom of a Russian Liberal's (or Democrat's or Socialist's)
rejection of the Soviet regime. I really must draw your attention to the fact
that my position in regard to Lenin's or Stalin's regime is shared not only by
Constitutional Democrats, but also by the Socialist] Revolutionaries and
various socialist groupings, and that Russian culture was built by liberal
thinkers and writers which think rather spoils your neat simile of “North and
South.” To spoil it completely I add that the rather local and special diffeience
betwev the North and South is much more comparable to that between first
cousins, between, say, Hitlerism (Southern race prejudice) and the Soviet
regime, than it is to the gap existing between fundamentally different systems
of thought (totalitarianism and liberalism).

Incidental but very important: the term “intelligentsia” as used in America

(for instance, by Rahv in The Partisan Review]) is not used in the same sense
as it was used in Russia. Intelligentsia is curiously restricted here to avant‐
garde writers and artists. In old Russia it also included doctors, lawyers,
scientists, etc., as well as people belonging to any class or profession. In fact a
typical Russian intelligent would look askance at an avant‐garde poet. The
main features of the Russian intelligentsia (from Belinsky to Bunakov') were:
the spirit of self‐sacrifice, intense participation in political causes or political
thought, intense sympathy for the underdog of any nationality, fanatical
integrity, tragic inability to sink to compromise, true spirit of international
responsibility… But of course people who read Trotsky for information anent
Russian culture cannot be expected to know all this. I have also a hunch that
the general idea that avant‐garde literature and art were having a wonderful
time under Lenin and Trotsky is mainly due to Eisen. stadt• films‐ “montage”
- things like that - and great big drops of sweat rolling down rough cheeks.’
The fact that pre‐Revolution Futurists joined the party has also contributed to
the kind of (quite false) avant‐garde atmosphere which the American
intellectual associates with the Bolshevik

I do not want to be personal, but here is how I explain your attitude: in the
ardent period of life you and other American intellectuals of the twenties
regarded with enthusiasm and sympathy Lenin's regime which seemed to you
from afar an exciting fulfillment of your progressive dreams. Quite possibly,
had the position been reversed, Russian avant‐garde young writers (living,
say, in an Americoid Russia) would have regarded the burning of the White
House with similar enthusiasm and sympathy. Your concept of preSoviet
Russia, of her history and social development came to you through a
Selections from the forthcoming title THE NABOKOV‐WILSON LETTERS
1940‐1971. Edited, Annotated and with an Introductory Essay by Simon
Karlinsky. Copyright © 1979 by Elena Wilson, Executrix of the Estate of
Edmund Wilson. Used by permission. pro‐Soviet prism. When later on (i.e.,
at a time coinciding with Stalin's ascension) improved information, a more
mature judgment and the pressure of inescapable facts dampened your
enthusiasm and dried your sympathy, you somehow did not bother to check
your preconceived notions in regard to old Russia while, on the other hand,
the glamor of Lenin's reign retained for you the emotional iridescence which
your optimism, idealism and youth had provided. What you now see as a
change for the worse (“Stalinism”) in the regime is really a change for the
better in knowledge on your part. The thunderclap of administrative purges
woke you up (something that the moans in Solovki or at the Lubianka’ had
not been able to do) since they affected men on whose shoulders St. Lenin's
hand had lain. You (or Dos Passos. or Rahv) will mention with horror the
names of Ezhov and Yagoda - but what about Uritsky and Dzerzhinsky?’ I am
now going to state a few things which I think are true and which 1 don't think
you can refute. Under the Tsars (despite the inept and barbarous characterof
their rule) a freedom‐loving Russian had incomparably more possibility and
means of expressing himself than at any time during Lenin's and Stalin's
regime. He was protected by law. There were tearless and independent judges
in Russia. The Russian sud’ after the Alexander reforms was a magnificent
institution, not only on paper. Periodicals of various tendencies and political
parties of all possible kinds, legally or illegally, flourished and all parties were
represented in the Dumas. Public opinion was always liberal and progressive.

Under the Soviets, from the very start, the only protection a dissenter could
hope for was dependent on governmental whims, not laws. No parties except
the one in power could exist. Your Alymovs’ are specters bobbing in the wake
of a foreign tourist. Bureaucracy, a direct descendant of party discipline, took
over immediately. Public opinion disintegrated. The intelligent. sia ceased to
exist. Any changes that took place between November 1919 and now have
been changes in the decor which more or less screens an unchanging black
abyss of oppression and terror.

I think I shall eventually polish this letter and publish it somewhere. ‘°

Yours,

V■

1. “In a broad sense.” While this letter may well be a reply to a now last
Wilson letter or a response to things said during a personal discussion
between the two writers, the mention of Wilson's name in conjunction with
those of Philip Rahv and John Das Passos later on in the letter suggests that
Nabokov may be reacting to the book Discovery of Europe (New York, 1947),
edited by Rahv and with contributions by, inter °hos. Wilson and Dos Passos.
The book is a collection of impressions of Europe written by Americans
between the eighteenth century and the beginnings of World War II.

The entries on Russia are Andrew D. White's account of his conversations

with Tolstoy, the astonishingly bland and uninformed letters on the Russian
scene of 1901 by Henry Adams (who saw the country as frozen in the early
Middle Ages), impressions of Lenin and the October Revolution by John Reed
and Lincoln Steffens, and Edmund Wilson's “On the Margin of Moscow” (an
excerpt from his travel account which appeared in Travels in Two
Democracies in 1936 and was later included, in an expanded version, in Red,
Black, Blond and Olive, 1956). The three selections on post‐Revolutionary
Russia are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Lenin‐Trotsky takeover of
power while Rahv's introductory material is careful to draw the distinction
between the heroic and liberating October Revolution and the Stalinist
regime that supposedly reversed and betrayed it.

2. “Loss of class position.” The most frustrating experience of Russian writers

who lived the West during the 1920s and 1930s was their inability to make
their Western colleagues see that their opposition to the Soviet system was
based on its suppression of human rights and on its practicing enslavement
while preaching li,,eration, rather than on loss of property or soc!.)I status, as
was invariably assumed in the Wr. A For a good account of au, entire
phenomenon. see Nina Berberova's utohiography The holies Are Mine. New
York. 1969, pp. 229‐237.

3. Vissarion Betinsky (1811‐1848), often called “the father of the Russian

intelligentsia,” was radical literary critic of the Romantic period. Ilya Bunakov
(18110‐1942), whose real name was Fondaminsky, was one of the leaders of
the Socialist Revolutionary party before the Revolution. Atter the Revolution,
Bunakov edited the excellent literary journal Contemporary Annals
(.Sovremennye zapiski ). published in Paris, in which much of Nabokov's
early work appeared. He died in a German concentration camp

4. I.e.. Sergei Eisenstein.

5. In Chapter Two of The Gift. when Fyodor's mother came to see him in
Berlin, they “visited a cinema where a Russian film was being shown which
conveyed with particular brio the globules of sweat rolling down the
glistening faces of the factory workers - while the fictory Owner smoked a
cigar all the time’

6. Soluvki was a concentration camp on the site of the famed old monastery
on Solovetsky Island in the far North, where several hundred Socialists and
non‐Leninist Marxists were deported in 1923. Lubianka is the name given to
one‐time insurance company building in the center of Moscow. which was
converted into detention house by Felix Dzerzhinsky during the terror of 1918
and has remained the most dreaded place in the city throughout much of
Soviet history
7. Nikolai Ezhov (also speiwo mid Heinrich Yagoda carried out Stalin's purges
during the 1930s and later themselves fell vic. tims of these purges. Moses
Uritsky was in charge of the mass terror ordered by Lenin in 1918: Uritsky's
assassination by the young poet Leonid Kannegiser unleashed a further wave
of retaliatory terror. Felix Dzerrhinsky established the Cheka (‐Extraordinary
Commission') in December 1917, setting the pattern for political police
repression in subsequent years.

8. “Legal system.”

9. Sergei Alymov (18924548) wrote lyrics for patriotic and propagandistic

popular songs Be,. cause of his good knowledge of English •— be lived abroad
between 1911 and 19M — Alymov was often attached as an escort to visit
American writers during the 193Iks (and was occasionally mentioned in their
accounts as a major Russian literary figure). Wilson got to know Alymov
during his stay in the Soviet Union.

10. This was dune when a portion of this letter was incorporated into Chapter
Thirteen of Speak, Memory. Describing his reunion with Cambridge
classmate, disguised in the text palindromically as Nesbit (his younger self)
and Ibsen (the same man in maturity), Nabo kov wrote:

“In the early twenties Nesbit had mistaken his own ebullient idealism for a
romantic and humane something in Lenin's ghastly rule. Ibsen, in the days of
the no less ghastly Stalin, was mistaking a quantitative increase in his own
knowledge for a qualitative change in the Soviet regime. The thunderclap of
purges that had affected ‘old Bolsheviks.’ the heroes of his youth, had given
hint a salutary shock, something that in Lenin's day all the groans coming
from the Solovki forced labor camp or the Lubyanka dungeon had not been
able to do. With horror he pronounced the names of Ezhov and Yagoda — but
quite forgot their predecessors, UriLsky and Dzerxhinsky. While time had
improved his judgement regarding contemporaneous Soviet affairs, he did
not bother to ream. viler the preconceived notions of his youth, and still saw
in Lenin's short reign a kind of awnquennium Nenaus.”