On the Not-So-Unlikely Friendship Between Vladimir Nabokov and William F. Buckley, Jr.

Sarah Weinman in Literary Hub:

In 1999, Nina Khrushcheva met William F. Buckley at the offices of National Review. Then a fellow at the New School’s World Policy Institute (and now a professor of international affairs at the university) Khrushcheva had much to discuss with Buckley, whom she’d first met a few months earlier at an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Buckley had been a panelist along with her uncle Sergey, son of the Cold War-era Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, one of Buckley’s sworn enemies in his, and the conservative movement’s, ferocious fight against Communism.

National Review had gone so far to create a “Khrushchev Not Welcome Here” bumper sticker in 1959, in advance of the premier’s visit to the United States at President Eisenhower’s invitation. The “Kitchen Debates” with then-Vice President Richard Nixon did not alleviate any of Buckley’s concerns about the Communist threat. Forty years later, it all seemed rather ironic to Khrushcheva; her uncle had been an American resident since 1991. And she owned, and displayed, one of the bumper stickers in her own Upper West Side apartment.

More here.