In this article I concentrate on VN’s rhetoric strategy in his letter to Gleb Struve of July 14, 1959 (cf. as translated by Véra Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov: “I wish I knew what idiot could have told you that I found "antisemitism" in Doctor Zhivago: I am not concerned with the "ideas" in a bad provincial novel, but how members of the Russian "intelligentsiia" can avoid being jarred by the complete dismissal of the February Revolution and by the overblown treatment of the October one... And how could you, orthodox believer that you are, not be nauseated by the cheap, churchy-sugary reek?”). I argue that VN’s carefully stylized anger has nothing to do with the "envy" so often attributed to him, and is—at least partially—caused by his addressee’s lack of interest in Pnin and VN’s reservations about conventional Christianity.