Trying to recover a few digitalized short-stories by V.Nabokov, I found a batch of interesting old news related to the NYT and The New Yorker:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/vladimir_nabokov/index.html
a small sample:
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
"I have never seen a more lucid, more lonely, better balanced mad mind than mine," Vladimir Nabokov said of himself with typical perverse-elegance. But other opinions varied. To some he seemed decadent: They would say of his writing what...
July 4, 1977, Tuesday
By ALAN LEVYMONTREUX, Switzerland
IN the glasshttp://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/nabokov/newyorker.htmed-in greenhouse that lobbies for the Edwardian rococo Palace Hotel, a dozen Trumanesque tourists and their plum-pudding ladies are worrying one another about the weather -- asking anxiously whether it will hold for their air-conditioned...
http://web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/nabokov/newyorker.htm
Nabokov's first contribution to The New Yorker was "Literary Dinner," a poem that appeared on April 11, 1942. It was followed in June by a poem, "The Refrigerator Awakes," composed over the 1941 Thanksgiving holiday, spent at the Wellfleet home of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. Over the next few decades, the magazine would prove Nabokov's most reliable source of income, as well as a high-profile forum through which he achieved most of his pre-Lolita popularity. Katharine White became his editor and contact at the magazine. Soon thereafter, she became a champion of his work - though not an unconditional one - and a good friend. In 1944, when Wilson contacted her about Nabokov's financial straits, she secured for him a $500 advance against future contributions, and won for the magazine a first-reading agreement that remained in effect until his death[ ] In 1963 and 1964, the magazine agreed to print several of his Russian stories in translation, excerpts from The Gift, and The Defense in its entirety over the course of two issues - the first such occurrence in the history of that magazine - for an unheard-of $10,400.