Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

This book is amazing, not for the story it tells but for how that story is written. It consists of essays written and published at different times and places, but it all holds together. Each chapter follows the other in basically chronological order. Let the author speak for himself:

For the present final edition of Speak Memory I have not only introduced basic changes and copious additions into the initial English text, but have availed myself of the corrections I made while turning it into Russian. This re-Englishing of a Russian reversion of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphoses, show more familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before.

The book covers the years from his birth in 1899 to 1940, when he, his wife and son immigrated to the US. It begins with his Russian boyhood, followed by his émigré years in Europe. It covers his tutors, his passion for butterflies, a bit about his synesthesia, his coming-of –age, his first girlfriends, his writing and poetry. You clearly understand where he came from, but that is NOT the glory of the book. What is astonishingly good is how he describes memories. What a vocabulary! Words, words and more words. Adjectives and unusual verbal constructions. It is magical. If you want simple wording, I guess this is not for you though.

Since what is so stupendous about the book is the writing, I must offer you another sample. It is at the end of the book when he is soon off to America on an ocean liner. He is walking with his wife and six year-old son up a path in a park in Paris, and they spot the boat:

What I really remember about this neutrally blooming design( the park) is its clever thematic connection with transatlantic gardens and parks. For suddenly as we came to the end of its path you and I (his wife) saw something that we did not immediately point out to our child, so as to enjoy in full the blissful shock the enchantment and glee he would experience on discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he dottled about in his bath. There in front of us, where a broken row of house stood between us and the harbor and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale blue and pink underwear cake-walking on a clothesline or a ladies bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls a splendid ship’s funnel showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture. Find what the sailor has hidden that the finder cannot un-see once it has been seen.

I am writing what I have listened to in the audiobook version of this book, which is well narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, in a deep tone perfect for Nabokov’s words. The narration has just the right pomp!

I LOVED the book, but it might not be for everyone. show less

You will never read a better memoir in your life. I've read it three times and I'm still not satisfied that I've read it enough.

From the text:

"I would moreover submit 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 his and many other wealthy families from the country -- if they were lucky enough not to have been shot (Sadly, Nabokov's father was shot through the heart in 1922, while foiling an show more assassination attempt on his friend, in Berlin). What follows the prior paragraph is one of the funnier lines in the 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 love this because 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 at the time. 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; He was a neck-brace-wearing, lumpy- and sexlessly-rumped sad-sack of a man, with very sad eyes. Now I know that he is a type: the 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 through 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; Nabokov believed that one's life purpose was to discover "Its" unique design in, on or with one's life. Thus we get to this concluding paragraph:

"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

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

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

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

Pretentious language, not inviting unless you have an appreciation (but why read Nabokov if you don't?). It felt like he was holding me at a distance, taking the academic view, but then he would surprise me with some vulnerable detail or self-deprecatory vignette. It's just how the man writes, even when writing about himself, and his descriptions are beautiful. Early on he reveals where his mastery of English originates: it was the first language he could read and write.

Grown accustomed to the style, it was easier to appreciate the fun stories about childhood hijinks, the uncle who gave up his ticket on the Titanic, his fascination with butterflies, his first loves, etc. There's also some insights into pre-revolutionary (and show more revolutionary) Russian life, although he had the sheltered perspective of a youth among the nobility and makes few political comments until the exile. There's tragedy too, the death of his father especially. He's offended by sympathize with his loss of fortune in the revolution, something he was never bothered by and doesn't want to feel otherwise about. Russia was knocked out of World War One just in time to avoid his being of age to join it, and the same with the White Army's attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks, a different kind of fortune. The exile stings him, the inability to return home and see again the land of memories.

Ostensibly this memoir covers the years from his birth in 1899 up to 1940, but the last twenty years of that period are squeezed into its final fifty pages. This covers his exile from Russia, his study at Cambridge and a breezy look at his years in Europe. He draws a veil over the romance with his wife but ends with reflections on bringing up his son. While it's not stated explicitly, Nabokov implies the full-circle that a new father experiences from having lived his childhood to reliving it through his child. It's a strong note to end on. show less