5 September (1951): Vladimir Nabokov to Edmund Wilson

In the 1940s, Vladimir Nabokov arrived in America to pursue his twin 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.

623, Highland Rd.
Ithaca
Tel. 43109
[Early September 1951]

Dear Bunny,

I am ill. The doctor says it is a kind of sunstroke. Silly situation: after two months of climbing, shirtless, in shorts, in the Rockies, to be smitten by the insipid N.Y. sun on a dapper lawn. High temperature, pain in the temples, insomnia and an incessant, brilliant but sterile turmoil of thoughts and fancies.

I do not recall if I told [you] of some of my experiences in the San Miguel Mts. (Southwestern Colo., Telluride and vicinity) and near or in Yellowstone Park. 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. I was wholly successful in that quest, finding all I wanted on a steep slope high above Telluride—quite an enchanted slope, in fact, with hummingbirds and humming moths visiting the tall green gentians that grew among the clumps of a blue lupine, Lupinus parviflorus, which proved to be the food plant of my butterfly.

We then met some more charming people near W. Yellowstone, Mont[ana], and rented for a ridiculously small sum a ranch in the hills, which Véra and I had absolutely to ourselves,—aspens, pines, more warm-blooded animals than I have ever seen in one place, not a human for miles around, a distant gate we had to unlock when we drove through on a road with more flowers than sand—and all this for a couple of dollars per day. And provisions were much cheaper than in the dismal town I have come back to. In the meantime Dmitri was camping on Jenny Lake in the Tetons, in a small tent, and climbing mountains along their most difficult and dangerous sides. The thing with him is an extraordinary overwhelming passion. The professional alpinists there are really wonderful people, and the very physical kind of exertion supplied by the mountains somehow is transmuted into a spiritual experience.

I shall get quite an adequate salary at Harvard where, in addition to two Russian courses, I shall give one dealing with European novels (from Cervantes to Flaubert); but at present I am in quite awful circumstances, despite a thousand dollars I borrowed from Roman in spring. Not a single magazine has found fit to buy, or indeed to understand (and this refers also to the New Yorker) my last story, and as I have no intention whatever to come down to “human interest” stuff, I shall have to remain in the realm of what fools call “experimental” literature and face the consequences. I am underpaid here in a ridiculous and insulting manner. I love to complain – this is why I am telling you all this.

Around the 17^th of this month, if I am well, I shall take Dmitri to Harvard. Is there any chance of you and Elena being in Cambridge between the 17^th and the 20^th? (My classes here begin on the 21^st.) Véra and I would enjoy so much even a fleeting glimpse of you two.

С душевным приветом

From Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971. Edited by Edmund Wilson and Simon Karlinsky. Berkeley: U of California, 2001. Print.

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