Nostalgic & Brilliantly Written. "Speak Memory" - Vladimir Nabokov - A Review

It is known that the great author worked on this project for many years, collecting photographs, letters, scraps of unfinished poetry, searching his past in order to write a close to accurate account of his early life. In fact this autobiography is atypical, similar to a wandering mind, grasping at images, sights and smells, recollections, reminisces, rather than a chronological,'factual' version of a life lived.

The opening sentence of Speak, Memory, to my mind, is probably one of the most moving and haunting recollections in an autobiography ever read:

"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."

The narrator continues on to describe a young chronophobiac who experienced panic when he viewed an old home movie, seeing his mother wave from an upstairs window and below, a brand-new baby carriage standing alone, realizing that the carriage was his own days before his actual birth. This disturbed him as the feeling of peering at a world days before he came into existence, sort of a reverse course of events, was akin to staring directly into eternity.

Nabokov's childhood and adolescence was an enchanting one, part of an aristocratic family, a beautiful mother and a liberal-minded father who had a vast library, where little Vladimir would arrive home to find him practicing his fencing, the clanging of blades, with a colleague. This was a civilized existence in St. Petersburg before the onslaught of the Russian Revolution. Similar to most aristocratic families at the time, the Bolsheviks seized the family fortune, forcing the family to flee their beloved Russia to Germany. But when Nabokov looks back at this tumultuous period, he says,

"My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet Dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes."

The book is strewn with old black and white photographs of Nabokov's family. There is one particular photograph of his father and mother taken circa 1900 at their estate at Vrya, which really depicts the aristocratic demeanour and pure strength of the author's father. In the background are the birches and firs of the countryside where Nabokov discovered his life-long passion with butterfly collecting.

Even if the reader is not familiar with the great novels of Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire, The Eye and many others, will certainly enjoy this unique and brilliantly written autobiography by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.