Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

First published: 1951, in Great Britain (U.S. edition, Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir, 1951); revised as Drugie Berega, 1954; revised again as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1966

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: August, 1903, to May, 1940

Locale: Russia and Europe

Principal Personage:

• Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, a Russian-born emigre American novelist, poet, essayist, and translator

Form and Content

Vladimir Nabokov was one of the many aristocrats and intellectuals who emigrated from Russia as the Bolsheviks rose to power during the revolution of 1917. Nabokov’s family moved, first, some fifty miles north from their estate to St. Petersburg, then to the vicinity of Yalta in the southern Crimea, and finally in 1919, by way of Greece, to London. Nabokov’s parents, along with his two sisters (Olga and Elena) and youngest brother (Kirill), left London to take up residence in Berlin, where on March 28, 1922, his father was shot to death by right-wing Russians. Nabokov and his younger brother Sergei, who was to die of starvation in a Nazi concentration camp in 1945, matriculated at the University of Cambridge. Nabokov, upon graduating from Cambridge, went to live in Berlin in 1923 and there, two years later, was married to Vera Evseevna Slonim, who would bear his only child, Dmitri, in 1934. After Adolf Hitler had established his dictatorship and had begun his persecution of German Jews, Nabokov and his wife, who was Jewish, moved to Paris. This was in 1937. A year earlier “Mademoiselle O,” written in French and the first part of what would become Speak, Memory, had been published in Paris.

Nabokov, his wife, and their son embarked at Saint-Nazaire, France, for the United States on May 28, 1940. This is the event with which Speak, Memory ends, although the final form of the work, published in 1966, includes references to many events occurring between 1940 and 1966. In the United States Nabokov saw his first publication of an English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), taught Russian grammar and literature at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948, concurrently holding a research fellowship with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, during which time he became an American citizen (in 1945) and taught Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959. After the great critical and commercial success of his novel Lolita (1955), Nabokov maintained financial independence through his writing. Retaining his much-prized American citizenship, he moved with his wife to Montreux, Switzerland, in 1960; he died there in 1977.

After his arrival in the United States, Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O” was translated into English by Hilda Ward, revised by himself, and then published in The Atlantic Monthly (January, 1943). Ultimately it became chapter 5 of Speak, Memory. Edmund Wilson, a literary ally who would later challenge Nabokov’s competence as a translator, brought him into association with The New Yorker, in which, from 1948 through 1950, eleven autobiographical reminiscences, each to become a chapter in Speak, Memory, were published. These were “Portrait of My Uncle” (January 3, 1948; chapter 3), “My English Education” (March 27, 1948; chapter 4), “Butterflies” (June 12, 1948; chapter 6), “Colette” (July 31, 1948; chapter 7), “My Russian Education” (September 18, 1948; chapter 9), “Curtain-Raiser” (January 1, 1949; chapter 10), “Portrait of My Mother” (April 9, 1949; chapter 2), “Tamara” (December 10, 1949; chapter 12), “Lantern Slides” (February 11, 1950; chapter 8), “Perfect Past” (April 15, 1950; chapter 1), and “Gardens and Parks” (June 17, 1950; chapter 15). Chapter 11 appeared initially as “First Poem” in Partisan Review (September, 1949), which later included “Exile” (January/February, 1951; chapter 14). Chapter 13 first appeared in Harper’s Magazine (January, 1951) as “Lodgings in Trinity Lane.” Accordingly, the order of the original composition and publication of the individual fifteen chapters in Speak, Memory is 5, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 2, 11, 12, 8, 1, 15, 13, 14.

The autobiographical pieces were substantially revised, given a generally chronological arrangement, and published in 1951 under the title Conclusive Evidence (“of my having existed,” Nabokov later explained) in the United States and as Speak, Memory in England. Nabokov revised the autobiography in 1954 when he translated it into Russian as Drugie Berega (other shores). Revisions and amplifications of both the English and Russian versions resulted in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, the final form of the work, the sequel to which, although planned, was never completed.

The final form of the work is in the nature of an apostrophe to his wife, Vera, to whom the book is dedicated but who is mentioned in it not once by name. In the 1951 edition of the work, only the last chapter includes repeated addresses to “you.” In the 1966 version, this second-person address to his wife in increased in the last chapter and is inserted into chapters 6, 10, 13, and 14.

The biography of his father in chapter 9 was considerably enlarged for its final version. Andrew Field calls this segment “wooden and constrained” and notes that the new material had been rejected by The New Yorker in 1966. Others, who are not conditioned to the sophisticated tone of The New Yorker, may accept the portrait of his father as actually the least pretentious and the most profoundly restrained and moving passage of the entire book. The portrait of his mother is filled with implicit endearment and gratitude but is unmarked by such depth of admiration and love as that which he expresses with quiet reserve in the chapter on his father.

In addition to the portraits of his parents, his uncle Dmitri, and his French governess (Mademoiselle O)—the last presented humorously and almost larger than life—the other major focuses in the autobiography are on Nabokov’s two young loves (“Colette” and “Tamara”), his enthusiasm for collecting butterflies (and his erudition in lepidopterology), the character sketches of his successive tutors in Russia (a Greek, a Ukrainian, a Lett, a Pole, “a Lutheran of Jewish extraction,” a Swiss, and “a young man from a Volgan province”), and his Cambridge education. The autobiography is not so much chronological or capitular as it is serial, a series of vignettes bound, not by transitions, but by thematic and imagistic variations.

Critical Context

Nabokov’s Russian-language novels, written between 1925 and 1940 and eventually translated into English with the sometime collaboration of his son, fall short of the greatness of his major English-language novels—Lolita, Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and Ada. Speak, Memory antedates these masterworks; Speak, Memory, the 1966 version of which adds references to Lolita and Pnin, antedates Nabokov’s masterpiece, Ada. Autobiographies ordinarily follow the literary successes of their subjects. Nabokov, like Robert Graves (who wrote his autobiography at age thirty-five and published I, Claudius four years later in 1934), confounds custom but confirms his own sense of his worth.

The autobiography, although most closely akin to Nabokov’s fiction, has much in common with his essays, criticism, and interviews. In Strong Opinions (1973), he mentions “the melodramatic muddle and phony mysticism of Dostoevski,” which phrase could serve as a gloss on “Dostoevskian drisk.” The phrase appears in a long defense of his 1964 translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin (1825-1833; Eugene Onegin) against Edmund Wilson’s charges of, among other faults, mistranslations and an “addiction to rare and unfamiliar words” (for example, rummer, dit, gloam, scrab, mollitude, stuss). Nabokov defends his work ably, although with some unpleasant arrogance and with occasional lack of convincingness.

If Nabokov’s works were to be listed in two columns, the first comprising fiction, poetry, drama, and translations, and the second comprising essays, criticism, interviews, and lectures, Speak, Memory, in its final revision, would be the link belonging to and connecting both columns. The posthumous publication of his Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981)—in which he rails at length at Fyodor Dostoevski and Gorky—and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983) offer readers the opportunity to appreciate Nabokov’s literary criticism and to see it as an extension of the attitudes expressed in Speak, Memory. These attitudes are summed up on his anti-Dostoevski lecture with the statement that “art is a divine game”— divine because the artist is creator, and a game because “it is all make-believe”; for Nabokov there is no access to true creation other than that afforded by the camouflage of make-believe and there is no divine gamester more productive of this access than he himself.

Bibliography

Appel, Alfred, Jr. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema, 1974.

Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, 1986.

Lee, L.L. Vladimir Nabokov, 1976.

Quennell, Peter, ed. Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, 1979.

Shloss, Carol. “Speak, Memory: The Aristocracy of Art,” in Nabokov’s Fifth Arc: Nabokov and Others on His Life’s Work, 1982. Edited by J.E. Rivers and Charles Nicol.

Stegner, Page. Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov, 1966.

Stuart, Dabney. “Speak, Memory: Autobiography as Fiction,” in Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody, 1978.