Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

It would be the height of hubris to write a review of Nabokov’s masterpiece; I’ll merely try to point out some of the points that struck this reader the most.Of all the literature I’ve read, it resembles most À la recherche du temps perdu. The meditations on memory, its impressionistic portraits of aristocratic life, the long, evocative sentences that run on with more of a sense for beauty than for what the words signify—it’s an admirable approximation of Proust.It’s also the most realistic portrait I’ve read of upper class life in Tsarist Russia. The tutors, servants, escapades in the family estate—all of these are turned into something one can appreciate; a far cry from Bolshevik propaganda.Finally, Nabokov wouldn’t be the intellect he is if he didn’t play with the notion of memory and autobiography. The goddess of memory speaks and the reader is led to believe that he’s reading the verisimilitude of an event. But then, with a swoop of a sand artist’s hand, the picture is wiped away and a new one is drawn. Nabokov even says that the autobiographical elements of his fiction make it difficult for him to recover the actual past. Whose is the memory that is speaking? It’s best left to each reader’s personal judgement.A great work, necessary reading for all who want to absorb a twentieth century author who can seem as enigmatic as the purported author of an ancient epic. Highest recommendation.

I honestly don't consider myself competent to judge whether Nabokov is one of the century's greatest writers. Like many of his contemporaries, much of his work is so obscure as to defy my comprehension, but I do very much like what I understand in Pale Fire and Lolita, both of which made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the Century, and, of course, to read him is to be exposed to an English language and a prose style that one little knew existed. So I am more than willing to acknowledge that he was a singular and immense talent. It is altogether fitting then that his memoirs too should be unique.For the most part, Nabokov's mission here is literally to let his memory speak. In so doing he recreates late czarist Russia in loving, painstaking detail. While to the best of my knowledge Nabokov was never particularly identified with the anti-Communist émigré movement, this book is its own kind of indictment of the USSR. The case it lays out is not the political or the economic one but the historical and cultural one. As he says:My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:...Beneath the sky Of my America to sigh For one locality in Russia.The crimes of the commissars are without number and most are far greater than this, but this richly textured, impossibly specific and deeply moving memoir so brilliantly transports the reader to what seems to have been a wonderful and altogether innocent existence that to that list of crimes must be added the Bolsheviks utter destruction of this world. Even if you've never liked any of his other books, do yourself a favor and read this one. Even the passages that defy comprehension are beautiful.GRADE: A

An Annotation on the writingSpeak, Memory is a loose collection of correlated and somewhat chronological personal short story memoirs by Vladimir Nabokov. These cover approximately the first forty years of his life, though they mostly focus on his childhood years growing up in Russia and Europe. The fifteen chapters each stood on their own at one time or another, most published in popular magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Harper’s Magazine, before they were brought together in this collection when he was in his late sixties. Many of these were translated and re-edited by Nabokov from stories he originally wrote in French or Russian and they were revisited again when published together in this format in 1967.There were three areas that especially impacted me as a new writer. The memoir is rich in word choice and the images created in my head cemented his story in a memorable way. I loved the analogies Nabokov used to paint a picture of his early life. These original analogies brought his story to life in a fresh way. Finally, his use of leading comments to foreshadow future events was creative and impactful and I hope to replicate some of these techniques in my own stories.The deep images where usually created with small powerful statements – demonstrating to me that with the right words you do not have to explain an entire backstory – the language itself will capture it without it the need for long descriptive paragraphs. One example was how he portrays his parents as having a deep love and respect for each other throughout the book. The sentence, “The double gleam on her fourth finger is two marriage rings – her own and my father’s, which, being too large for her, is fastened to hers by a bit of black thread” (50) speaks volumes, yet it is simple and powerful in its imagery. He does the same throughout the book when speaking of his father and their relationship of love and respect.Nabokov’s use of original analogies is something I would love to do and it inspired me to begin thinking about analogies and writing them down, as I have a tendency to go to well-worn and overused analogies that have lost their original thought provoking power to native English speakers. One example in his introduction is when he informs us he will not be rehashing summaries of his novel in this book, stating, “I felt that the trouble of writing them had been enough and that they should remain in the first stomach.” (14); Other examples speak for themselves, “It was the primordial cave that lay behind the games I played when I was four.” (22); “To fix correctly, in terms of time, some of my childhood recollections, I have to go by comets and eclipses, as historians do when they tackle the fragments of a saga.” (25); “…by the time I was ten, nature had effaced with the thoroughness of a felt eraser wiping out a geometrical problem.” (40); “Not only were the kitchen and the servants’ hall never visited by my mother, but they stood as far removed from her consciousness as if they were the corresponding quarters in a hotel.” (45); “Apart from the lips, one of her chins, the smallest but true one, was the only mobile detail of her Buddha-like bulk.” (105); “The rain, which has been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation.” (216) “Seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near and as glowing as ever.” (230); “Of the games I played at Cambridge, soccer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period.” (267); “Leftist groups of sparrows were holding loud morning sessions in lilacs and limes.” (295). His use of analogy is not exaggerated; instead it is simple and easy to follow and captures in a fresh way the moment he is trying to portray.Lastly, I was impressed by his use of leading sentences foreshadowing events in a powerful and simple way. Some examples include; “But that was not yet the closest I got to feeding upon beauty.” (24); “The other police story involves a less dramatic masquerade.” (56); “…had I been a better crystal-gazer, I might have seen a room, people, lights, trees in the rain – a whole period of émigré life for which that ring was to pay.” (81) “…and ten years were to pass before a certain night in 1922, at a public lecture in Berlin, when my father shielded the lecturer from the bullets of two Russian Fascists...” (193)As a memoirist, I took a number of other things from his writing, including the way he visualizes and describes events as young as four (31) and seven (53) without it feeling inauthentic to the reader; the way he jumps from memory to memory in each chapter and doesn’t follow a strict chronological sequence; and the way he goes deep when sharing his passions, including using the actual names of the butterflies he catches – give us detailed descriptions of the differences between an Oak Egger or Large Emerald butterfly or a Goat moth and a Silvius Skippe moth.Lastly, his book is packed with memorable quotes and wisdom and I will end with some of those that jumped out at me.“Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” (19)“To love with all one’s soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded.” (40)“One is always at home in one’s past…” (116)“I discovered in nature the non-utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.” (125)“…a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.” (218)“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies…this is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else…It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.” (139)