Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov - 1947 -352 Pages

 Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisted by Vladimir Nabokov - 1947 - 352 pages

"THE present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time." From the Preface

Novels by Vladimir Nabokov- written originally in English

• (1941) The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

• (1947) Bend Sinister

• (1955) Lolita, self-translated into Russian (1965)

• (1957) Pnin

• (1962) Pale Fire

• (1969) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

• (1972) Transparent Things

• (1974) Look at the Harlequins!

Born: April 22, 1899, Saint Petersburg, Russia

Moves to America 1940- becomes US Citizen in 1945

1961 moves to Switzerland 

Died: July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland

Children: Dmitri Nabokov

Spouse: Véra Nabokova (m. 1925–1977)

Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile.

Lolita transformed Nabokov life to that of a rich writer, from book sales and the movie rights. It is by consensus one of the greatest 20th century novels. The narrator is a European who sees American culture as decadent and shallow.

The memoir, a collection of rewritten for the book articles from various publications such as the New Yorker and Paris Review, covers the first 40 years of his life.

Nabokov was born into a fabulously wealthy Russian family with noble roots he traces to the 14th century. At one point his family had 50 servants. Nabokov's memoir is not straight forwardly chronological. He jumps from early childhood, focusing a lot on his tutors, to the rise of the Bolsheviks, World War One and the fall of the Tsar. There are elegant descriptions of his parents, his youthful crushes, lots of comments on servants, his sundry governess and such.

Here is a description of a teenage crush

"Seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near and as glowing as ever. She was short and a trifle on the plump side but very graceful, with her slim ankles and supple waist. A drop of Tatar or Circassian blood might have accounted for the slight slant in her eyes."

Here is his description of some books he found at age eight,perhaps the genesis of a life time interest butterflies and moths:

"In the store house storeroom of our country house, among all kinds of dusty objects, I discovered some wonderful books acquired in the days when my mother’s mother had been interested in natural science and had had a famous university professor of zoology (Shimkevich) give private lessons to her daughter. ...Still more exciting were the products of the latter half of the century—Newman’s Natural History of British Butterflies and Moths, Hofmann’s Die Gross-Schmetterlinge Europas, the Grand Duke Nikolay Mihailovich’s Mémoires on Asiatic lepidoptera (with incomparably beautiful figures painted by Kavrigin, Rybakov, Lang), Scudder’s stupendous work on the butterflies of England."

This is an elegant work of deep culture. Nabokov is famously dismissive of Frued as well as Stendhal, Balzac and Zola. He references Tolstoy and Gogol several times.There is a lot of fascinating material upon pre-revoluntunary Russia. When Nabokov talks of white Russians and I thought of the viciously anti-semetic activity of White Russian forces who blamed Jews for the fall of the Tsar.

Mel Ulm