Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense.

From the Trade Paperback edition.The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception. No dry recital of dates, names, and addresses for this linguistic magician–instead, Speak, Memory is a succession of lapidary episodes, in which the factoids play second fiddle to the development of Nabokov’s sensibility. There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the author’s family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and fin-de-siècle oddities). And Nabokov’s account of his tenure at St. Petersburg’s famous Tenishev School–where he counted Osip Mandelstam among his schoolmates–offers a lovely glimpse into the heart of Russia’s silver age. Still, Nabokov is much too artful an autobiographer to present Speak, Memory as a slice of reality–a word, by the way, that he insisted must always be surrounded by quotation marks. Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Defense.

From the Trade Paperback edition.