The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship by Alex Beam

Not thinking of the proud world's pleasure,
But cherishing your friendship's claim
I would have wished a finer treasure
To pledge my token to your name

Alexander Pushkin, dedication of Eugene Onegin (translated by James F. Falen, Oxford, 1990)

My impression is that few people remember Edmund Wilson, one of the foremost critics of the 20th Century, and several more remember Vladimir Nabokov, one of the great novelists (and if they do it's mostly for Lolita, 1955).  Least remembered is the falling out that Wilson and Nabokov, once great friends, had over Nabokov's four-volume translation of Alexander Pushkin's 1825 Eugene Onegin -- the translation was only 257 pages out of a total of 1895, the rest was relentless "commentary," footnotes and the original Russian text.  Wilson wrote a review in The New York Review of Books in 1965 which Alex Beam. in The Feud (Pantheon Books, 2016) says "It remains a classic of its genre, the genre being an overlong, spiteful, stochastically accurate, generally useless but unfailingly amusing hatchet job, the yawning, massive load of boiling pitch that inevitably ends up scalding the grinning fiend pouring the hot oil over the battlement as much as it harms the intended victim."  Wilson thought Nabokov's English pretentious and his Russian not so great.  This feud continued until Wilson died in 1972, already being forgotten, while Nabokov lived in splendor in Switzerland until his death in 1977.

Wilson and Nabokov were opposites in many ways and opposites attract, until they don't:  Wilson the literalist and Nabokov the fantasist; Wilson was fascinated by Freud and Marx while Nabokov had no use for either; Wilson was married four times, Nabokov once. Of those who read Eugene Onegin I doubt many use Nabokov's translation; there are a number of other good translations (I like James Falen's) that are not as literal as Nabokov's and there is ultimately no ideal solution to how a poem, or anything else, should be translated.  If the feud over Pushkin represent Nabokov and Wilson at their worst I think Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) and Wilson's To the Finland Station (1940) represent them as great writers at their best.