Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya

"[The letters] have been edited by Simon Karlinsky with useful annotation throughout and a superb introductory essay in which Karlinsky reviews disagreements that flicker and blaze through the letters, anticipating the famous public battle upon the occasion of Vladimir Nabokov's edition of Eugene Onegin.... There is a lot of interesting talk about money, illness, jobs, writing projects, editorial policy at The New Yorker, books, persons and butterflies. But the disagreements will attract the most attention not only because they make the best literary gossip but also because they give fascinating complexity to the drama of the Nabokov-Wilson letters and the disastrous friendship." - Leonard Michaels, The Nation "When two such brilliantly ebullient intellectuals get together by mail, they charge the air with all sorts of pyrotechnics." - Carlos Baker, author of Hemingway "It is good to have...[Karlinsky's] ample record of a former friendship between two polymathic, intensely committed minds and drolly stubborn, cagey personalities.... This package is blessed in its editor...[who is] able to footnote with authority and a fine thoroughness the copious quibbling between the two men.... Both the correspondents, tireless devotees of linguistic fine points, would have relished their editor's scrupulous rigor." - John Updike, The New Yorker"

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Simon Karlinsky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of The Sexual Labyrinth of Nicolai Gogol (1992) and Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought (1997).

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