In a letter to Edmund Wilson dated 2 December, 1944, Nabokov makes fun of Pliny the Younger whom he describes as "the perfect poshliak. Although he is one of the inventors of the epistolary genre, Nabokov appears to object to the utilitarian intentions of Plinian writing, which are far removed from the Nabokovian credo of "art for art's sake", and his distaste for political tyrants probably made him unsympathetic to Pliny's unrestrained adulation of Emperor Trajan. Nonetheless, Nabokov overstates the case when he denies "any literary talent" to his Roman predecessor and there are more similarities between the two — especially in their mutual concern for self-promotion — than Nabokov might have cared to admit.