Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Speak

This book is a delight. Some of the criticisms listed here remark that the biography, though beautiful, is not informative enough, humorless, or even fundamentally dislikable. I disagree. I believe that Nabakov possessed enough skill and intent to write an autobiography in any tone or context he might choose; I therefore believe that the lens through which he shows us his youth has been carefully chosen and rendered. Dry accounts of facts and events in so many biographies make them a struggle to enjoy - not so here. Nabakov masterfully gives the story a quality of aged distance, sharing with us moments from his youth that have not only remained important to him as an adult, but presents these moments as breathtaking vignettes that when carefully studied reveal poignant beauty and touching nostalgia. Surely only Nabakov himself could decide the best way to present his memory, and what a stunning, well-articulated gift he has given us in doing so.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in Saint Petersburg, then capital of the Russian empire, in 1899. He was educated privately and at the Tenishev lyceum. His family emigrated in 1919 and he attended Cambridge, where he graduated in 1923. He married in 1925 and lived the precarious life of an émigré writer in Berlin until 1937. An only child had been born in 1934. I assume that it was his wife's (and then child's) Jewish origins that prompted him to move to Paris. His father had been murdered, at a political meeting in 1922, by a Russian monarchist who had meant to shoot someone else. After his mother's death in 1939, Nabokov moved his family to the US, where he became a college professor. The great commercial success of LOLITA after its final American publication, in 1958, allowed Nabokov to move back to civilisation in 1959. Thereafter he lived in Switzerland until his death in 1977.

Of his 78-year life span, Nabokov thus lived 20 years in European Russia, 19 in the US, and 39 in Western Europe. Although he became an American citizen and some of his works are being published in the Library of America, he was in no wise an "American" writer: there just isn't anything "American" about him. Like Tourguenev or Berdiaev, he was, all his life, a Russian aristocrat living abroad.

After 1940 he published in English as he could have done in French or German: in the manner W H Hudson, Joseph Conrad, George Santayana, Samuel Beckett or Héctor Bianciotti, his language is not an organic part of his literary imagination, but a translation of it.

This literary study on personal memory, which is not in any sense an autobiography, is finally an examination of his one real home: the country estate of his childhood imagination, in the Russia of his adult dreams. It is a book about inner exile as much as it is about real, physical displacement. As Nabokov says, "everybody is at home in his past"--provided, of course, that that past is fundamentally an inner experience seamlessly expressive of one's general consciousness.

This past-derived consciousness was the source of Nabokov's literary imagination: which is why he was most literarily active while living in the US in a kind of existential cocoon, and why he never completed the projected second part of this mémoire: his life post-1940 was basically not connected to anything he cared to write about.

Another beautiful and fragile part of Nabokov’s life is Colette. Like the butterflies which were sat upon by Nabokov’s nurse, Colette too, is abruptly gone (152). Colette, who was so animated and beautiful, turns into nothing but a “whisp of iridescence” that exists now only in Nabokov’s memories. Though iridescence vanishes, Nabokov is able to reap something from the memory he has of Colette. When Nabokov remembers Colette, he sees a swirl of color. This is similar to the color found inside the glass marble—the swirl of color that is preserved but vibrant (145, 152). It is animated even though the swirls no longer move because the swirls were caught mid-action. Nabokov cannot rewind time. He cannot play and repeat his life forever. Nor can Nabokov prevent physical death. What he can do, however, is not to “have not existed.” He can pause himself like the swirls in the marble. He defines his essence and gives it a name the same way he does Eupithecia nabokovi. He classifies himself, his life, by describing every memory and thought that he can, and calls it “that [which] the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen” (310).
Describing his life gives him a more fluid form than were he to list facts about himself. Both rubrics cube and the swirled marble hold colors and both are more than just a simple box or sphere. It is the marble only, which contains frozen movement. Nabokov describes his life using prose and nature. He could have written the entire book as he did Chapter Three, but that bland, impersonal writing style, the detached categorizing, would not be as appealing as his imagery from nature and his rich prose are.
“Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come own, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly—more swiftly than the petal fell—rose to meet it; and, for the fraction of a second, one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s recollection” (271).
Nabokov wants to make sure that his audience departs with what he is trying to convey—his ideas, himself. The petal is Nabokov, the “float down” is similar to death (the petals die after falling), the reflection is the water is the audience, and the reflection is the reflection of Nabokov’s essence. Nabokov wants the world, his audience, to catch him as he falls, to preserve him and reflect exactly what he sees himself as being. He worries that when he finishes falling, that the trick will not work. He is afraid that the petal will float away alone, the reflection lost somewhere in the stream. The “magic” connection is vital to Nabokov’s preservation. He wants to immortalize his memories, his thoughts, himself. To accomplish this, other people must remember him as he sees himself. He must be able to clearly convey what’s in his mind. The more people who remember him, understand him, and relate to him, the longer he will last. Writing about his life while using imagery from everyday life and nature is part of what Nabokov uses to ensure his preservation. The reason for this being that most people have seen some of nature and can imagine the feeling he is expressing through his imagery. Nabokov’s autobiography stays alive when it is preserved in nature because nature is living. The butterflies drifting amongst a sea of grass, the caterpillar stretching to see where its leaf went, all of these are in action (44). Writing about nature and life in prose serves to further add to this living feeling because prose is melodious and varies. So rather than kill his life by turning it into a list of facts and dates, Nabokov is able to seal it in a sort of biosphere, keeping everything inside his autobiography alive.
(...)

"Speak Memory" is an autobiography, but it's an autobiography like none other. Although it does include factual information about the writer, it is mostly an account of how Nabokov has made sense of his life. His interpretation of his life has left him without bitterness or blame...or even disappointment at having lost everything as a young man when his world was turned upside down by the Russian revolution. Nabokov treats his own life as a work of art. The writing is so graceful it is soothing to read.
I first read this book in 1971 when I was an 18 year old college freshmen, and I loved it then. I was inspired to read it again after recently reading Azar Nafisi's "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Although Nafisi claims to be a Nabokov scholar, she seems to have learned nothing from him. Like Nabokov, Nafisi was born into a privileged life which was turned upside down when her native country undergoes revolution. Nabokov tells us that his losses made it possible to have a richer, more meaningful life. Nafisi cannot stop whining about her losses, even though they are far less severe than Nabokov's. She is overwhelmed by self-pity and bitterness. She expresses contempt toward her less "sophisticated" countrymen and their vulnerablity to the appeal of the Ayatollah, but she fails to see the failures of her own economic and social class. I'd choose Nabokov over reading about Nabokov anyday.

I re-read SPEAK, MEMORY once a year or so; on every occasion I am left in awe of Nabokov's skill as a prose stylist, and am dazzled by the memories he re-creates here.

This is notable as the work of a writer of astounding technical skill and erudition, but also the work of someone who has a well-formed regard for his audience. At the very least, Nabokov expects that his audience will also be very intelligent.

Thus, what we are left with here is something far beyond a typical "self-portrait at 20," instead we are left with recollections reframed, recalled and rendered with an adamantine clarity that shimmers and dazzles - after reading the descriptions of a youth spent on a Russian estate one can smell the frost in the air, note the detail on the wings of the butterflies oft referenced, or almost see the long, northern latitude sunsets for yourself.

Technically formidable, engrossing and magical - this is one of very few books that I think everyone should read once.

-David Alston

Most autobiographies are undestandably self centered, and Nabokov (who was not crippled in the egosphere) certainly provides a slightly stylized series of portraits of the key personae in his life that reveal a great deal about Vladimir the man and Nabokov the phenomenon. Don't expect diffuse self revelation a la Anais Nin, nor a chronological dissection of his life. Nabokov has instead constructed something almost like a building, with almost physical panels dedicated to his mother, a haunting chapter on his father, a chunky wall of a chapter describing his memorable French teacher, another on his passion for Butterflies...and as you pass through the gallery of the book you are embraced, as it were, by these expansive portraits that are much more like wide mosaics rather than framed canvases, and they fit into each other with the snug elegance of architrave and narthex, crowned by a dome of artistry and overarching sense. Most books are tract homes or shacks: this book is a Cathedral.

The haunting visual imagery throughout this book weaves Nabokov's personal passion with the drama of his moment in history: a shiver goes down my back whenever I read the final passage in the chapter dedicated to his father, V.D. Nabokov, where you can see him out the window, tossed into the air by his tenant farmers, in the pose of an ethereal Orthodox saint on some iconic wall painting: life and art continually fuse throughout this book, where Nabokov's life in art is demonstrated tangibly on every page. The words seem to breathe.

Another favorite and seminal passage in the book describes a butterfly hunt that begins in Vyra in the teens of the 20th Century, and the author as child becomes the adult author in America capturing the same butterfly, as it were, more than forty years later in Rocky Mountain Park--a powerful trope! He shows the continuity of his lepidopterological passion and the continuity of Northern Hemisphere ecological zonation in the same swoop, as it were, of his butterfly net. And he proceeds to morph both actions into one of the great Nabokovian philosophical apostrophes: "I confess, I do not believe in time...."

And so this magical book proceeds not only to illustrate graphically--sensually-- the real life of a literary master, and to capture and preserve the very sounds and smells and tastes of Russia and Western Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Here he has erected an astonishing Horatian edifice, albeit only a cornerstone of Nabokov's shimmering oevre. This is a book designed to be reread throughout your own rich life.

If you are a fan of Nabokov, you just have to read this. If you are not, this is as good a place to start as any. Anyway what is extra special about it is this: Everybody knows that Nabokov is a fabulous prosateur, a master magician with language. But here we have on display, along with the language, and he's never been better, a truly incredible memory. It's like he told his memory to speak, and it did. There is very little he can not remember, and talk about, in that fine, exquisite detail we expect. When you read Nabokov, you always experience this thing where he is writing about some kind of event you have known or seen yourself and he dazzles you with the way he gets it so exactly right and you know you cannot do this. So for this reason it is not a great surprise to discover, as we do here, that he has been logging all that stuff in his memory since he was a baby. A wonderful book!

If Chekhov, Proust, or Dante had written their memoirs in English, Nabokov might have had some competition. Compared to VN, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot sound like ambitious bumpkins. The only other prose in our language that is as good was written by Mark Twain.

Nabokov not only conjures up the Europe of his childhood, and the children of that Europe, he gives them eternal life. The memory of a youthful crush disappearing into a vortex of autumn leaves is a watercolor painted with words.

From the first line ("The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" ), Nabokov displays his mastery over our language. His depictions of his aristocratic childhood, finding a book bearing the mark of his father's library in a bookshop years later, hunting and mounting butterflies, and synesthesia are all beautifully wrought. Great memoir of his earlier life. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes memoirs or Nabokov or great writing.

The flavor , the style the special kind of intense perceptiveness of visual reality makes this autobiography a kind of impressionistic tone- poem. Nabakov writes of his childhood in the aristocratic home and family he is to be exiled from. He writes with longing of the world that has past, and with an intense kind of vitality of his own passions for literature, lepidoptery , love. This is next to Pnin, and Ada my favorite work of Nabakov.

It does not press forward on a bedrock of fact but swirls through the mind with color and a beautiful intricacy of language. Quintessential Nabokov .

I avoid reading autobiographies because so many authors fall on their faces when describing the defining qualities of their lives, in a manner that is interesting to an outsider. Nabokov is an exception: Everything he wrote about felt seemed so close and warm in the memory. He captured both the quintessence of the innocence of youth and the trials of growing up in a turbulent nation. This is one of the only books that I ever read where I was not sated in the end: Just a few more Nabokovian pages of literary richness, please.

As an aside, I loved his description of the "salvo" a chair would make when his zaftig governess (or was it his tutor?) sat down. It forever changed the way I perceive people, myself included, when they sit down. But anyway.

I purchased this for a book club having only read one other novel of Nabokov (Lolita). I am loving it! Although Nabokov is verbiose, uses tons of French and German phrases which are not translated (UGH), and can be rather haughty... I fell in love with him through this memoir. He was Russian aristocracy after all... didn't the aristocracy invent such things and make them charming...? He is at heart a great observer and storyteller, looking over his past in photographic detail, giving us snapshots of the poignant, humorous, and sometimes painful moments of his boyhood, which peaked with the crumbling of the Russian parliament into communism* (if I understand the politics correctly). This certainly makes me want to brush up on my Russian history and literature, and inspires me to look over my own childhood with fondness and longing.

Speak, Memory is one of about five books I could read over and over again. Nabakov's lyrical style is dream-like. His humility is amazing. Most people who had all that he had would be whining and crying, but all that matters to Nabakov is life, not the things of life. One critic said that the death of Nabakov's father luminates over the work, but I see butterfly wings and joy and happiness. Yes, losing his father was a terrible experience, but as Nabakov said, we are caterpillars to the angels. Everyone who considers themselves the least bit literate should read this book, and do so more than once. With Brian Boyd's superb introduction and the richly rewarding chapter 16, this edition is THE edition to buy and read--but don't loan it out, because it may not be returned.

This is the autobiography of the author of Lolita. Nabokov was a Russian intellectual born to a rich family in czarist Russia in 1899. His father being a member of the Kerensky government, they had to flee the Bolsheviks.
Nabokov wrote about his tutors, his girlfriends, and his other interests, including a fascination with butterflies. There are no exciting events in the book. But we get to know Nabokov, a craftsman with language, both in English and Russian. He was a likeable and brilliant man.
As for why this book is considered the greatest autobiography ever written, or one of the very finest works of the 20th Century, you got me. It has a style. Is that enough for you?

So much has been said about Nabokov and his glittering brilliance. To add my words and thoughts feels like an unimportant exercise in my ego's need for expression. However, I feel such an appreciation for the Master's wordsmithing that I can't resist. No one turns a phrase and evokes the specifics of a moment like Nabokov.

In this memoir he takes us through his privileged childhood, the memories of his beautiful mother and the fall into change that arrives with the transformation of Russia. No matter what Nabokov describes, the reader becomes mesmerized by the beauty of his writing and his sentences which deliberately fly away and return like the butterflies the Master so eagerly and methodically collected. Who else could have written a book like "Lolita" with its seamy, untouchable subject matter and turned it into a piece of literature which is still taught and marveled at to this day?

just look at nabakov ... whether you've read anything by him or not (I hadn't), you have to admit his life spanned such a fascinating era: born into russian upper class before the russian revolution, escaped to england, went to oxford (or cambridge, can't remember, read this a while ago), became literary giant...
it's simply a great autobiography of a life full of interesting perspectives. read it.

Reading this literary whirlwind is somewhat of a harsh inside joke, one that I happen to get and enjoy. He follows some of his motifs and images that he uses in his other novels (the window pencil, cyclical time, etcetera) to make the reader realize that by reading this memoir, the reader has come to know Nabokov less on page 310 than before on page 1! You have to find Nabokov in this book, and those who complain about tediousness and fortress enigmas--those should sigh and let Nabokov set and collect dust on their bookshelf.

This book is an invitation to a dreamy journey into a place where words become colorfully alive, and silence and nature bring ectasy. Such vivid images! It reads so natural and fluid, but always perfectly controlled and unpretentiously beautiful. Please read this book.

Nabokov's Speak, Memory consists of both the grand, exceptional aspects of his background and the kinds of trivial personal details that make his novels and stories relatable. As always, his use of language is a joy to read. He is funny and cantankerous by turns as he tells his story, much like his best known narrators in his English-language novels. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of his life and the chapters vary in style; most were written and published as short stories throughout the 1940s. This gives the book a certain uneven quality. However, Nabokov's stylistic touches and observations on life are well worth any unevenness in the read.

In this reflective gift to his wife, Nabokov employs his creative genius to both entertain the reader and to seemingly unburden his soul. Rich with catharsis, Speak, Memory reveals the sorrows of lost national identity. Simultaneously, Nabokov explores the many delights of his youth from butterflies to tennis matches with a constant stream of vivid images. In this autobiographical "verbal adventure," Nabokov delivers an amazing treasure which all writing enthusiasts should hasten to consume.

It is pointless for me to review this masterpiece. I would just like to say that this edition (Everyman's Library) is excellent, providing a well-written introduction and material usually not included in previous editions.

Nabokov is a brilliant writer but spends too much time trying to prove it. When he writes from the heart, and the work flows, it is a joy to read. However joy turns to frustration when he uses obscure references without explanation or presumes everyone reading him is a multi-linguist. This is the first of his works I have read and there was enough for me to give him another reading. If the second time out is the same my conclusion would be this is yet another stellar author in need of a great editor.

This book is a fantastic recollection of the moments and incidents in Nabokov's life which so profoundly afffected him. Written in the usual Nabokovian style, so if you're expecting a dull, chronological recitation of the major events, you won't find it here. An enjoyable read, though I would probably rec it to fans of the man's work.

The book was very difficult to get into and I gave up after about 1/3 of it. However, friends have said that it gets better, so I will try again. The use of foreign words and phrases were disconcerting as was some of the vocabulary, much of which I had to skip or, when English words were used, use a dictionary often. I was an English major in college, so this was an unusual occurrence for me.

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov, who is known for crafting memorable sentences in his novels, attempts to apply his abilities to a story that mirrors all the elegance of the New York telephone directory. And he comes up short.

If you open the book to any page, you are likely to recognize his rich writing style:

"This final dachshund followed us into exile, and as late as 1930, in a suburb of Prague (where my widowed mother spent her last years on a small pension provided by the Czech government), he could still be seen going for reluctant walks with his mistress, waddling far behind in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire - an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat."

But you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Two stars for effort.

This is Mr. Nabokov's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence in Tsarist Russia, his young adulthood in England and other western European countries, and finally Nabokov's emigration to America. He also attended Cambridge College in England.

I found the parts about Nabokov's childhood, with his British, French, and Russian female guardians and tutors rather charming and quite humorous. One of Nabokov's male guardians spies on him when Nabokov is out on a date with a young woman. With the help of Nabokov's mother the guardian is easily cured of this bad habit.

The discussion of the politics and personalities of Russia under the Tsars vs. the Soviets is rather diverting, as is Nabokov's early life with his aristocratic family. They, of course, lose their status under the Soviets.

While Nabokov is a fine, even poetic, writer, I found most of the book slow moving and tedious. Even the various section of the book which delve into Nabokov's butterfly collecting hobby lacks their usual verve. On the whole "Speak, Memory" is not particularly memorable.