An Index to The Nabokov-Wilson Letters

The following index was compiled by Dieter E. Zimmer, editor of the multi-volume "Collected Works" of Nabokov being put out by the German publisher Rowohlt. The German edition of the Nabokov-Wilson letters contains nearly sixty letters that were not available when Simon Karlinsky published his English language volume of the correspondence. In addition to this new material, Zimmer's edition contains annotations beyond those in the excellent 1980 Karlinsky edition.

Page numbers preceding the asterisk (*) refer to the 1980 Harper & Row English edition, titled The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. Page numbers following the asterisk refer to the 1995 German edition, Vladimir Nabokov: Briefwechsel mit Edmund Wilson. For the German edition, page numbers in bold indicate that the reference is in a letter by Nabokov.

Scholars and students should find this index useful in at least three ways. First, it provides a quick on-line means of checking to see whether a given person, book, or thing is mentioned by Nabokov and/or Wilson in their published correspondence. Second, it allows one to deduce the nature of the additions to the German edition by comparing the number of page references for a given entry in the two editions. Third, it permits the user to determine, for the more complete German edition, whether it is Nabokov who makes reference to the entry.

(Slavic personal names appear according to the Library of Congress system of romanization, or in the form by which they are most commonly known, e.g. "Bely, Andrey" instead of "Belyi, Andrei." German terms have been translated into English, with the exception of those found under the entries for Nabokov and Wilson and their works, where the German titles appear in addition to the English to facilitate use of the German edition.)