[NABOKOV, VLADIMIR]
WILSON, EDMUND. The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. First edition, inscribed by the author "To Volodya & Vera [Nabokov]/with love/from EW/Wellfleet/Oct. 2 1955." Publisher's cloth, in original dust jacket. 7 1/4 x 4 inches (18.5 x 11 cm); 121 pp. Creases and chips to jacket extremities, the volume fine.
An important inscribed copy from Edmund Wilson to Vladimir (Volodya) and Vera Nabokov, just before their famous feud over Lolita erupted, and with the added association of Jason Epstein, Nabokov's Doubleday editor and future officer of The Library of America series. While Wilson and Nabokov shared an interest in racy literature (Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was banned in America until 1959), Wilson was dismissive of Lolita as derivative and add to that criticism of Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin and a long lasting literary feud was born. Chronologically, the present volume sits between Nabokov's publication of Lolita in Paris in 1955 and it becoming a sensation in America in 1958, his literary reputation quickly surpassing that of Wilson. While the text of the work is quite clean, a penciled question mark on p. 37 next to a comment on the failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 is likely in Nabokov's hand.