Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

This is simply a beautifully-written memoir. I let myself be carried away by the luxurious prose, not stopping to look up the words I didn’t know (the most in any book I’ve read recently). A recurrent theme is homesickness. If you’re even more envious by nature than the rest of us are, you’ll oscillate between outrage at the matter-of-fact way Nabokov recounts his aristocratic childhood or satisfaction when all is swept away by the Russian Revolution. But it’s not the kind of nostalgic yearning that makes one wish things had gone differently and that one were still cushioned in that privileged world. Nabokov is self-aware enough to know that it is that constant sense of loss that made him the writer he became.
The book’s show more structure is loosely chronological, but each of the fifteen chapters centers on one aspect of the first fifty years of his life. One chapter explores the beginning of Nabokov’s lifelong passion for lepidoptery. He spends another entire chapter describing the composition of his first poem, followed immediately by another on his first romance (the sequence is telling, albeit not unusual).
Despite the political involvement of his father, a hero to Nabokov, there is little political discussion in the book. Like his father, Nabokov was both anti-Tsarist and anti-Bolshevik. In the chapter in which he describes his years at Cambridge, he recounts the fruitless discussions with a classmate whom he calls Nesbit, an English socialist with a romantic view of Lenin. Even worse for Nabokov is that his anti-Bolshevism led to his being taken up by the ultraconservatives.
But literature, not politics, was his calling. I enjoyed his identification of the untrammeled extension of time (in contrast to cramped space) that was the fundamental property of Cambridge. Without being a fetishist about the stones of the pavement or walls, he was conscious of the proximity to Milton, Marvell, and other aspiring writers who had been there before him.
The book is dedicated to his wife, Véra, and in the last chapters, which are set in the time after they married, he addresses remarks to her, such as: “In the spring of 1929, you and I went butterfly hunting in the Pyrenees” (281).
The books ends just as his years in Europe do, on the eve of the fall of France, as he, his wife, and their son are about to board the ship that would take them to America. It felt like an appropriate place to bring this extended meditation on memory to its close. show less

how hard it is to mine the actual past, instead of the invented past. I don't fully believe the man, but I believe his love for his own childhood which has led him to create a wonderfully complete terrain . . . even though some of it is doubtless spun out of the rags of memory, it's spun with such desire, you forgive it, and even more, you permit yourself to believe it.

This version is identical to the other version on my list except that it has one additional chapter. Chapter 16, 'On Conclusive Evidence' (which is the original name of the memoir; i.e., conclusive evidence that Nabokov existed), is a pseudo-review that Nabokov planned to use but then later abandoned.

A few bon-mots from the text:

"[Nabokov] is out to prove that his childhood contained, on a much reduced scale, the main components of his creative maturity; thus, through the thin sheath of a ripe chyrysalis one can see, in its small wing cases, the dawning of color and pattern, a miniature revelation of the butterfly that will soon emerge and let its flushed and diced wings expand to many times their pupal size."

"I would moreover submit show more that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known."

Nabokov is referring here to the 1917 and 1918 revolutions that effectively evicted Nabokov's family and many other wealthy families from the country -- if they were lucky enough not to have been shot. What follows the prior paragraph is one of the funniest lines in the entire book:

"Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialized child prodigies -- pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters."

I remember meeting at Day's Murray Music music store one of the original "Spanky's Gang" TV show cast members when I was a young boy, which would put him about sixty- or seventy-years old. What's funny is that he was everything thing Nabokov described: a second-rate violinist playing second- or third-chair in the Murray municipal symphony; a sad-eyed, neck-brace-wearing, lumpy- and sexlessly-rumped sad-sack of a man. Now I know that he is a type: the Former Prodigy in Decline.

I could go on and on for hours quoting "Speak, Memory" and in the end I'd have typed out the entire book. I'll leave you with these little bookends:

From the introductory paragraph: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternitiues of darkness."

Which sounds kind of nihilistic until you get to this little line: "Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine thorugh life's foolscap."

And even though Nabokov didn't subscribe to religion at all, and wouldn't claim belief in an "anthropomorphic deity", he did believe in a kind of intelligent design, although not of the brand we're familiar with today. No, he felt that this was an artistic kind of deity, a benevolent mind, and that one's life purpose was to discover "Its" unique design in, on or with one's life. Thus we get to this concluding paragrpah:

"The following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography."

That, in a nutshell, is the subject matter of "Speak, Memory": a man's search for the personality or soul of his maker. show less

In these fifteen essays, Vladimir Nabokov covers personal, and familial territory traversing his first forty years up to his emigration to America in 1940. Those were varied years. From a childhood of opulence in St. Petersburg, his family was reduced both monetarily and personally by the upheaval in Russian following the 1917 revolution. His important and influential father was assassinated in Berlin in 1922. His younger brother died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945. But these are merely markers in a life filled with incident and history. Perhaps more interesting is Vladimir’s reflections on his boyhood, his education (via tutors, and latterly schools, eventually attending Cambridge University), his profound passion for show more lepidoptery, and later for poetry. Throughout, one is struck by his singular experience, which may have been substantially different from that of other forced émigrés. And ever and always it comes back to his languorous prose. It almost doesn’t matter the subject of any particular chapter. It is all so delicious to read.

This is not a systematic autobiography. Each of the chapters contained herein was published separately in various journals only to be collected later as a ’kind of’ autobiography. This explains the literary aspect of much of the writing, which is forced to entice and appeal in its own right quite apart from a readers specific interest in the man who would later become such a famous author. As such, Speak, Memory fully justifies the label of literary autobiography. It may well be read and appreciated even apart from Nabokov’s novels. But more likely it will inspire readers to return to the novels which have the roots in such rich soil.

Recommended. show less

Another one to put on the fairly small pile of books that I quite like, but also find morally or intellectually repugnant (see also: Rilke). Nabokov writes well, of course, and has quite a way with scenes and so on. He is also unmistakably racist, routinely belittles people because of their social class, and then has the gall to swear that he doesn't hate the Bolsheviks because they stole his patrimony (he says this just after telling us that he'd inherited a few million and a country estate from a relative he didn't really know very well, so, you know, there was plenty to steal)--he hates them because they stole his childhood. That's right: not because of the murders. So concerned was Nabokov to insist that he wasn't a materialist show more (which he so obviously was), that he'll come up with sentimental garbage to explain his opposition, rather than make a political statement. This book might be the single easiest way to help someone become more sympathetic to Lenin; if this was the kind of person who 'suffered' under Lenin's reign (and a fortiori Stalin's), perhaps those pigs weren't so bad.

To wit: we're expected to swallow the idea that the family's servants were better off weeding the paths of the delightful family residence than they were cleaning the streets for the Soviet state. The country estate might have been more picturesque; it certainly was no more just, and at least cleaning streets does good for people who are repulsively over-wealthy.

Great prose, but. show less

Nabokov's memoirs of his early years, "Speak Memory" is a beautiful book. His way with language is like watching honey pour out of a jar, slow and graceful, dense, yet translucent. He lived a privileged life and the moments he dwells on are little jewels.

I had real hope for this book after its first sentence, which started it off at 5 stars:
“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’s language in his autobiography is sometimes exquisite, but unfortunately, he’s not for me. His focus always seems to center on form as opposed to content, and I’m left thinking, oh, if only he had even a teaspoon of passion!

Nabokov was the son of affluence whose family lost everything fleeing the Bolsheviks, and later he had to flee the Nazis, though neither of these events are described in much detail here. He had private tutors and learned multiple languages at an early age. Perhaps his show more position in society is best captured in this line: “I would ascertain which of our two cars, the Benz or the Wolseley, was there to take me to school.” Or in another part of the book, when he describes the daughter of the coachman: “I was even more afraid of being revolted by her dirt-caked feet and stale-smelling clothes than of insulting her by the triteness of quasi-seignioral advances.” Ah, such a romantic devil, and man of the people.

I liked the photographs sprinkled throughout the book, and it’s certainly a good-looking family - the one of his 35 year old father holding him at age 7, the shot of his brothers and sisters when he was 19 (and Olga was 15), and the passport photo of his wife Vera, and son Dimitri at 5 are all quite nice.

I did not like his rambling about his family tree – chapter 3 is a complete snooze, until he delivers this 5 star passage at the very end:
“I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

Wow. And that’s what’s maddening to me about Nabokov. Such talent, such gifts. He occasionally produces brilliant description of ordinary events, such as this one of his rotund governess sitting down:
“And now she sits down, or rather she tackles the job of sitting down, the jelly of her jowl quaking, her prodigious posterior, with the three buttons on the side, lowering itself warily; then, at the last second, she surrenders her bulk to the wicker armchair, which, out of sheer fright, bursts into a salvo of crackling.”

Unfortunately, there is just not enough of these to recommend the book. I may be harsh and raise eyebrows to say it, given the book’s immense popularity and standing with both professional critics and readers on LT, but to me these are the musings of a prig. And there’s nothing Nabokov seems to like more than to attack authors whose focus is the reverse, on passion as opposed to literary form, which is another sore point with me. Can’t you just feel the egotistical rising of his voice in his italicization of the word ‘my’ in this line: “…[he] was an authority on Dickens, and besides Flaubert, prized highly Stendhal, Balzac and Zola, three detestable mediocrities from my point of view.”

I smiled at this passage, in which I think he captures the problem himself:
“I used to sit up far into the night, surrounded by an almost Quixotic accumulation of unwieldy volumes, and make polished and rather sterile Russian poems not so much out of the live cells of some compelling emotion as around a vivid term or a verbal image that I wanted to use for its own sake.”

Yep. show less