Volume 26, Number 12 · July 19, 1979
A Contest Between Conjurors
By Harry Levin
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940-1971
edited, annotated, and with an introductory essay by Simon Karlinsky
Harper & Row, 346 pp., $15.00
In the nostalgic evocations of his 'autobiography revisited,' Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov neatly characterized the external pattern of his uprooted career as a Hegelian triad. Its thesis comprised the first two decades, indelibly Russian. Its antithesis, during a little more than the next twenty years, had been his postrevolutionary expatriation in Western Europe. His roughly equal period in the United States (1940-1960), where he became not only a citizen but a writer in English, would be a synthesis as yet unchronicled. Toward the end of his last seventeen years, passed mainly in Switzerland, he envisaged a dialectical sequel, Speak On, Memory, which would cover his American sojourn, including his friendship with Edmund Wilson.
Review, 3349 words
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