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A review of Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

by Vladimir Nabokov

Beautiful, frustrating memoir of a Russian childhood at the beginning of the century, and twenty years of subsequent exile

Reviewed by: Nancy Chapple

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited Vladimir Nabokov was no doubt a linguistic genius with a unique sensibility – and probably also a royal pain in the ass. Born in 1899, he goes way back in Speak, Memory (written in the 1940’s and 1950’s) to the early years of his happy childhood, winters spent in St. Petersburg, summers at the country estate. He was the coddled – or perhaps just well-loved – oldest son of an immeasurably wealthy family (50 manservants, two chauffeured cars drive him to school, weeks each year spent in Biarritz and on the Adriatic Sea). Though we learn that his father was politically active in the "liberal" party before the Revolution, we come to understand much more about the inner workings of Nabokov’s mind than the political details of what for him was a terrible time of upheaval after unmitigated bliss. It was no doubt an unusually abrupt change after a comfortable time which drew to a close: "The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century."

He doesn’t expound only on his earliest years – he goes on to describe life in exile after 1917: three years study in Cambridge, then alternating between Berlin and Paris, more involved with the community of Russian exiles than with his surroundings. But the amassed sensual impressions of the early years are most amazing, the pure untempered love for his mother and high regard and esteem for his father, his first experiences in catching butterflies (Nabokov later became a lepidopterist of scientific note). Maybe someone else has bathed and splashed and rejoiced in his earliest memories in this way elsewhere, but I’ve never come across it: "I may be inordinately fond of my earliest impressions, but then I have reason to be grateful to them. They led the way to a veritable Eden of visual and tactile sensations." He considers his nostalgic memories the wellspring of his later creativity as a writer.

I don’t always complain about great writers being a pain in the ass, but Nabokov must have been quite something what with his fastidiousness and pedantry, his hyper-self-awareness (he explains that he writes little about his siblings in his memoir because "the powerful concentration on one’s own personality, the act of an artist’s indefatigable and invincible will, has to bear certain consequences …"). He has "a fine case of colored hearing" – he connects certain sounds with specific colors, an unusual ability; this synaesthesia is hard for the rest of us to quite get our minds around, though quite fascinating. He attempts to explain his special feelings to us: "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 we do believe him, but with a bit of a sigh at the great amount of protesting that goes into his assertions. With similar self-obsession he writes about his lifelong difficulties in falling asleep: "All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. … I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me."

One might imagine that Nabokov came to the English language late in life in the exile forced on him by historical circumstances. That’s not true – he and his brother had a series of English governesses; his mother read him bedside stories in English; his parents slipped easily from Russian into French into English. But both his Russian and English language usage attained an unusual level of hyperconsciousness: he spent his Cambridge years poring over a four-volume dictionary of the Russian language, looking for the most beautiful and unusual turns of phrase he could use in his poetry, which he was engaged in constructing from language building blocks upwards to sound and then to meaning, recapturing a lost time by wallowing in its language. He loves English, but often chooses very rare words that have hardly been seen in print otherwise (many of the chapters originally appeared in The New Yorker; when it appeared in book form, he reinstated a few words that had been omitted because the magazine "pessimistically thought that an unusual term might bother some of its less brainy readers").

But I did love this book, believe it or not. I simultaneously wanted it to keep going forever and was glad when it was over.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Copyright © by Nancy Chapple, 2004










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