This short series of posts begins with a review of the 2016 book The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam – an initially interesting but ultimately sloppy book – and then goes on the examine some of the claims Beam makes in the book and in his subsequent Boston Globe article.
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Review: The Feud
Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship by Alex Beam An amusing, light-footed but increasingly partial and even sloppy account of the infamous disintegration of a long-standing literary friendship. What’s important in a friendship? Does loyalty and tolerance in disagreement come first – or does principal, character and rapport count for…
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Gerschenkron and Nabokov
This follows up in detail on the review of Alex Beam’s The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship. You can read my (not entirely positive) review here. The dust-up of the feud, and the spectrum of reviews, seems unsatisyingly damning for Beam. So, as a final word on the…
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Nabokov, Pasternak, Ivinskaya and Zhivago
Beam’s carelessness reaches an apogee in the Boston Globe article Nabokov was such a Jerk. It’s not worth dwelling on much of the content: there’s little there of substance. But I shall take a look at the claim that Beam makes regarding Doctor Zhivago. Zhivago is important to this story, as while Nabokov hated the…