James Salter, who died last week at the age of 90, wrote this essay on passing an hour with Vladimir Nabokov for the September 2007 issue of Vogue.

http://www.vogue.com/13275109/james-salter-remembers-vladimir-nabokov/

Like the sun rising in some distant place, slowly, among clouds that hold back its brilliance, was how he came to be known in the English-speaking world. His first novels were written in Russian, in Berlin, and had only the relatively small audience of Russian émigrés there in the twenties and thirties. One of his contemporaries, the writer Nina Berberova, also in exile, placed an early laurel on his brow. “A tremendous, mature, sophisticated modern writer was before me,” she wrote, “a great Russian writer, like a phoenix, was born from the ashes of revolution and exile. Our existence from now on acquired a meaning. All my generation were justified. We were saved.”