The Daily Beast and The New Criterion on The Secret History
Long after I expected the well of reviews for The Secret History to have run dry, two new appraisals popped up. Earlier this month, Jeffrey Meyers weighed in on the book for The New Criterion. In “Legacy of Sorrows,” Meyers—a biographer of Edmund Wilson and many other literary figures—declares that The magician buried his past […]
The New York Review of Books looks at The Secret History
Nabokov had a complicated relationship with his critics, not least Edmund Wilson, whose 1965 review of Eugene Onegin in The New York Review of Books put a stake through the heart of their friendship. Here’s Wilson’s opening line: This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a […]
Declassified documents and public records in The Secret History
What’s so secret about The Secret History? The most important history in the book is information that was once public knowledge but which has fallen out of public memory–Nabokov’s secret history as our forgotten past. But there is also some actual secret history in there: classified documents and public records that shed light on Nabokov’s life […]
