Nabokov speak memory an autobiography revisited tattoo

There is also a similar concept expressed in On the nature of things by the Roman Poet Lucretius. Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now. Nabokov writes in the text that he was dissuaded from titling the book Speak, Mnemosyne by his publisher, who feared that readers would not buy a "book whose title they could not pronounce".

The Russian version was published in and called Drugie berega Other Shores. An extended edition including several photographs was published in as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. In Alfred A. Knopf issued a new edition with the addition of a previously unpublished section titled "Chapter 16". There are variations between the individually published chapters, the two English versions, and the Russian version.

Nabokov, having lost his belongings inwrote from memory, and explains that certain reported details needed corrections; thus the individual chapters as published in magazines and the book versions differ. Also, the memoirs were adjusted to either the English- or Russian-speaking audience. It has been proposed that the ever-shifting text of his autobiography suggests that "reality" cannot be "possessed" by the reader, the "esteemed visitor", but only by Nabokov himself.

Nabokov had planned a sequel under the title Speak on, Memory or Speak, America. He wrote, however, a fictional autobiographic memoir of a double persona, Look at the Harlequins! The chapters were individually published as follows—in the New Yorkerunless otherwise indicated:. The book was instantly called a masterpiece by the literary world.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more inwhen he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses—the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions—which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

I never knew this guy had synesthesia Q: 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. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much. Some are aural, others are optical, and by none have I profited much.

The fatidic accents that restrained Socrates or egged on Joaneta Darc have degenerated with me to the level of something one happens to hear between lifting and clapping down the receiver of a busy party-line telephone. Just before falling asleep, I often become aware of a kind of one-sided conversation going on in an adjacent section of my mind, quite independently from the actual trend of my thoughts.

It is a neutral, detached, anonymous voice, which I catch saying words of no importance to me whatever—an English or a Russian sentence, not even addressed to me, and so trivial that I hardly dare give samples, lest the flatness I wish to convey be marred by a molehill of sense. This silly phenomenon seems to be the auditory counterpart of certain praedormitary visions, which I also know well.

What I mean is not the bright mental image as, for instance, the face of a beloved parent long dead conjured up by a wing-stroke of the will; that is one of the bravest movements a human spirit can make. Nor am I alluding to the so-called muscae volitantes—shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field.

Perhaps nearer to the hypnagogic mirages I am thinking of is the colored spot, the stab of an afterimage, with which the lamp one has just turned off wounds the palpebral night. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see—projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid—gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts.

The long a of the English alphabet and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g vulcanized rubber and r a sooty rag being ripped. Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites.

I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl.

Adjacent nabokov speaks memory an autobiography revisited tattoo do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation.

I hasten to complete my list before I am interrupted. In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv. The confessions of a synesthete must sound tedious and pretentious to those who are protected from such leakings and drafts by more solid walls than mine are.

To my mother, though, this all seemed quite normal. The matter came up, one day in my seventh year, as I was using a heap of old alphabet blocks to build a tower. I casually remarked to her that their colors were all wrong. We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes.

These evoked no chromatisms in me whatsoever. Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. I knew my mother had gone to buy me the daily present that made those convalescences so delightful. TBV on hiatus. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

It is not a conventional autobiography. It doesn't present a chronological account of Nabokov's life, nor does it analyse his literary works. In fact there is hardly anything about his novels in this work. Typically something he sees triggers a memory, and that in turn may lead to other memories. He casually mentions that there were 50 servants on their country estate.

He speaks with much fondness of some nannies and tutors of whom he had many and with contempt of others. A bronze angle, a surface of glass or polished mahogany here and there in the darkness, reflected the odds and ends of light from the street, where the globes of tall street lamps along its middle line were already diffusing their lunar glow.

Gauzy shadows moved on the ceiling. He remembers his first romance and his first attempt at writing poetry. He also discusses time spent composing chess problems. There are memories of his brothers, and of his university years in England at Cambridge. He tells us about his father who was assassinated in Berlin. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be so safe from the intrusion of the artist.

I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.

Nabokov speak memory an autobiography revisited tattoo

But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snowboots and stormcoat. The vibration in my nabokov speaks memory an autobiography revisited tattoo is no longer their receding bells, but only my old blood singing.

The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers. He belonged to my generation. Among the young writers produced in exile he was the loneliest and most arrogant one. Beginning with the appearance of his first novel in and throughout the next fifteen years, until he vanished as strangely as he had come, his work kept provoking an acute and rather morbid interest on the part of critics.

Everything about him was bound to offend Russian conventions and especially that Russian sense of decorum which, for example, an American offends so dangerously today, when in the presence of Soviet military men of distinction he happens to lounge with both hands in his trouser pockets. Nabokov wrote this memoir in English and later translated it into Russian.

The writing is exquisite and his English is admirable. My vocabulary is richer for having read this lovely memoir. A large number of extracts here, but Nabokov says it more eloquently than I ever can. To me, this was always the Nabokov book. An old hardback of Speak Memory was on one of the bookcases at home when I was growing up, probably in the study - on a shelf low enough, as a small child, to become as familiar with the spine's unmistakable heavy block capitals, for them to seem as permanent an installation as any item of furniture that was older than I was.

Lolita belonged to a later, outside world, of cult books and lists of modern classics that became increasingly familiar through my teens. I somehow felt as if it were by another author altogether. Lolita wasn't the sort of book that would have been in the house. This early instinct about the difference between the two books as worlds was borne out in the reading far more than I, middle aged and, finally, about to start Speak Memoryhad figured it would be.

Several years after having read Lolitaand familiar with blurbs and reviews of other Nabokov books, there were things I expected from his work: intellectual, creepy, detached; makes one more aware of unpleasant sides of oneself. Beautifully written, which in combination with the subject matter, messes with my head in a way that is not fun and not welcome.

Anything but comfortable. I never expected something that, when I asked myself how I'd describe Speak Memory to someone who only knew of Nabokov because of Lolitaand was a bit uncomfortable with him because of that, brought to mind Downton Abbey. How else to communicate to the average Anglo reader this magical mingling of cosiness and grandeur?

But that comparison could still sound a little too mundane and plasticky, and may be heresy to the true Nabokov devotee, there being many among friends and friends-of-friends on GR. Nor a narrative voice I would bond with, to the extent that, looking through highlights a few weeks after reading, I felt as if I were reading lines from a character I'd once read and rehearsed for a term to act in a play.

Or as if it were notes made just after a vivid dream, that - along with that idyllic bit of summer between sixth form and university when I'd gone to a summer school and got to know, for the first time, people my age who were intimidatingly clever and entertaining, like people in books - there had been something similar when I was a pre-teen, when I'd met this other brilliant child who was obsessed with chess and butterflies.

It felt as if we had bonded over the experience of being looked after by an unusually rapid succession of employees nannies in my case, governesses and tutors in his that had provided something of a social panorama within an ostensibly sheltered life, and via a tendency towards intensively obsessive interests, a drive to collect and collate things and information - and odd intellectual losses; I used to be able to 'see through' anagrams, he had lost some preternatural ability with maths after a fever.

I don't have synaesthesia, but it has always made perfect sense to me and sounds like it's a dial turned up a little further on something I already experience. But I was overawed by what I heard about his family's house. Never mind the houses of a few people from school who lived in mini-mansions on a prestigious development and that itself seemed to be another tier of existence an where footballers would later live, when that became a yardstickthese people lived in an actual stately home.

Servants rushed outside with jackets when they were caught in the rain playing tennis; to go to school, there were two different chauffeur-driven cars. When he was little had been given gigantic display toys from shops as presents, which seemed like something that happened to the rich children from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The collecting.

Reading about it initially, I felt only sadness at all the dead butterflies. At one point I was moved to say to a butterfly sitting on the window - probably a small tortoiseshell, but its wings were closed so it was harder to tell for sure - "enjoy being alive". Why did they have to collect living creatures, why did every collector have to have examples?

But that particular angry point made wires in my head spark and connect and then of course I understood. Twitching - merely making lists - had somehow never felt like enough as a preteen birdwatcher I wondered how adults didn't get bored doing that for so many years and it all fell into place, what he would have got from the butterfly collecting.

The tangible, visible items to keep as badge of attainment and reminder of experience; the classification; their ultimate but unattainable finity, but possibility of completism in subcategories. Their special connection with place ; a reason for purposeful wandering and exploring outdoors; the thrill that items pertaining to the collection were out there for the taking if one could find them.

Indoors, the hoovering of complex factual information which also fits neat categories, and the satisfaction of using it later. A pursuit that can be entirely satisfying alone, but also, if desired, makes one part of a community where one can partake in the drug of relevant information with others and potentially acquire prestige. Of course.

I understood to the point of having a craving. It even sprang on me early one morning when I was unloading the dishwasher - the strongest impulse to go and do something as similar as possible that didn't involve killing anything. And where did this impulse lead? I can't be the first person to name a Beautifly 'Vladimir'. With so many hooks, and introduced just as gaming was going mainstream, no wonder it became massive.

I could understand exactly why a geeky kid had got into butterfly collecting in the days when it was an activity as acceptable as stamp collecting was when I was a preteen. For a couple of weeks afterwards, even just writing about it conjured up the same set of cravings. Curious to experience this intensely strong drive and understanding at the same time as being so sad about all the things that were killed by collectors for a couple of centuries or so, and find it appalling, in our fauna-depleted world, that something being rare was a particular reason to kill one.

Yet: got it!!! Speak Memory is a memoir of imaginings and tangents of mind almost as much as of things that happened - so why not take recursive licence to write more in response? So when reading Speak Memory from a marginally more detached and less dreamlike viewpoint, I had a sense of "does not compute": despite the well-known concept of the Russian and Central European intelligentsia, it seemed incongruous that razor-sharp intellect Vladimir Nabokov and his equally clever parents could have come from any sort of hereditary aristocracy, even one relatively recent compared with Anglo-Normans.

The sort of people, who, in an English inter-war novel, have a village manor house whose roof they can never quite afford to repair properly, financially on a par with doctors and lawyers of their day. The book got me thinking about class and relatability in literature. I had an epiphany about one reason why the middle classes may be held responsible for idealising the aristocracy as characters.

Even if a lot of middle-class contemporary literature is about other middle-class people and a lot of popular entertainment focuses on rich celebrities. I say literature because on film and TV, the surroundings remind the well-off middle-class kid how different the aristocracy still are, whereas in a book that can seem less emphatic at times.

And whilst in a British memoir of this vintage there would be that great divide of boarding school, that appears not to have been a phenomenon in early 20th century Russia; the Nabokov boys get driven to a day school, which makes it seem a little closer to modern life. I can only assume that this book, with its tales of the Nabokov family's many governesses and tutors, many of whom only stayed for a few months each, was why my mother thought it so amusing and interesting that nannies never stayed long, and she saw it as a sort of adventure and anecdote-fodder, rather than a negative reflection on herself and on me, as would be the usual modern middle class perspective.

Anyway, I hope I've adequately warned readers who may be disgusted by the Nabokovs' pre-revolutionary wealth and staff. Many people love this memoir, but not everyone would. Stories of fallen Imperial Russian aristocracy often have a sense of shock and personal calamity to them. Under every pretty reminiscence lurks the writer's darkness of trauma and loss.

Not so here; it doesn't feel anywhere near so seismic, so unprocessed; no wailing and rending of garments. Of course there was a huge change to the Nabokovs' livesbut in tone it feels much closer to a memoir of England before the First World War. As if not quite so much was lost; that the writer is fully able to appreciate and feel how excessively lucky they were and fully inhabit the idyllic stories of the old days; and just not as emotional.

Nabokov grew up speaking English, with an admiration for the British that was common for rich people of his day - and one could read into Speak Memory a certain amount of traditionally British diffidence in his character, whether learned or inherent, who knows. And it's as if his psyche absorbed all the luck and good parenting of his upbringing, and the resilience one is supposed to get from that is playing out in the way he writes about what happened.

He doesn't sound traumatised. There are some unpleasant things that happened to him and his family, but they never feel like the centre of his mental world. Rather, one is left with vignettes of that glittering veneer of old Russian-ness which Christmas productions of The Nutcracker trade on. When I was younger I loved stories about being at the centre of things, which often meant, unironically, areas of London like Hampstead; often now I scoff and think that's all terribly overrated and tiring.

But Nabokov's tales of the days when his father was a liberal government minister under Kerensky, and there were "meetings of national importance" in their house, made me feel that rush again. His father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokovand mother, Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov Nabokovboth wealthy members of the Russian aristocratic elite, took great care and pride in educating and promoting self-confidence in him and his siblings.

Young Nabokov had two brothers and two sisters and an extended family to provide ample social interaction. There were also large numbers of servants at hand, a succession of governesses and tutors, family trips abroad, substantial libraries to draw upon, and two large estates to explore. In addition to his love for languages particularly English, French, and Russian and literature, he early on developed a keen interest in chess and lepidoptera butterflies and moths.

World War Ithe Russian Revolutionsand the Russian Civil War shattered the Russian aristocracy and dispersed its survivors all over Europe. The confiscation of the Nabokov estates and general repression by the Bolsheviks forced the Nabokov family to flee for their lives, first to Crimea and then to Western Europe. Vladimir was awarded a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge Englandwhich he began attending in the fall of and graduated from in He moved to Berlin shortly after his father, a liberal Constitutional Democrat, was assassinated by right wing assailants.

Their son, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov —upon reaching adulthood, began participating in the family's ongoing translating and editing projects. Once in North AmericaNabokov fully developed his talents as an English language writer. In the previous twenty years, he had devoted much of his time to writing Russian language works; to a lesser extent, he had also worked in French.

Nabokov also now made a reputation in U. Nabokov became a world famous author and celebrity with the publication of Lolita. This controversial novel has since sold over fifty million copies worldwide. After LolitaNabokov also completed a handful of other novels, published short story collections, poetry, and essays, and translated earlier Russian works into English.

In this section of Speak, MemoryNabokov provides the atmosphere for his vision and remembrances of time, of space, and of his family and attachments. Like the French novelist Marcel Prousthe searches and wanders through lost time; also like Proust, he recovers pockets of personal lost time and presents images of a now gone era, of now altered spaces, and of long dead family members and acquaintances.

Nabokov tells the reader that he has often tried to transcend the limits of mortality by reaching back to a time before his birth. The closest he can come to doing so, he says, is childhood. He describes his childhood as one of unspoiled privilege, a happy one. The principal members of his family are introduced, its elder members aristocratic and educated, pampered with western luxuries.

They are fond of speaking in French and English. His parents are liberal and support constitutional reform and a moderate political climate of tolerance, without the excesses of czarist control. Nabokov as self-remembered boy is allowed to roam the large family estates in St. Petersburg province. He is well educated and attended to by tutors and servants, and he is permitted to meet famous personages who are often friends of his parents or distant relatives.

In chapter five, Nabokov renders a description of Mademoiselle, the French-speaking governess from Switzerland who leaves the strongest and most lasting impressions on him. This chapter provides lengthy details that help the reader, with a little imagination, vicariously experience the daily regime of a growing boy who must move about under the guidance of a highly opinionated but well-meaning governess.

To some extent, she provides comic relief. In the middle chapters of Speak, MemoryNabokov takes the reader through a variety of mini-tours of his life prior to and during World War I. Much of chapter six he devotes to the enduring passion he develops for butterfly and moth collecting. In the next chapter, he follows his younger self on train trips with his family, dwelling on an extended two-month stay at Biarritz, France, inwhere he develops a passion for the little girl who grows up to use the pseudonym Colette.

Chapter eight delivers a catalogue of governesses and tutors that indicates the variety in Nabokov's education and upbringing. Chapter nine constitutes a tribute to his father, while tracking his own attendance at the Tenishev School in St. Petersburg in the years just prior to the overthrow of the czar. Nabokov's father is presented as a good man, a well-meaning and well-educated writer, lawyer, and moderate politician who becomes caught between the violent extremes of conservatism and the radical left.

Chapter ten takes the reader through Nabokov's obsession with literature of many varieties, starting with the illustrated adventure novels of Mayne Reid and the young Nabokov's romantic obsession with Polenka. The subsequent chapter develops Nabokov's obsession and passion for crafting and developing his own literature, starting with Russian language poetry.

The middle section of Speak, Memory ends with chapter twelve. In it Nabokov returns to his romantic obsessions, dwelling now on an affair with Tamara during World War I and writing poetry devoted to her. In chapter thirteen, Nabokov and his brother Sergey are awarded scholarships to Cambridge Universityin England, where they study literature, play tennis and soccer, and adjust to a life that precludes their returning to their native home.

Already exiled from Russia, Nabokov and his new family are exiled from Europe altogether. They are on their way to success in America but will eventually return to neutral Switzerland. Winner of a Nobel prize for literature inpoet and writer Bunin tries to engage and befriend Nabokov in Paris in the s but attains only superficial success.

As Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd points out in his introduction to the Everyman's Library edition of Speak, Memorythe image of Claude "prefigures and clearly inspires Lolita," the character in the novel of the same name that made Nabokov a celebrity. Dobuzhinski is a painter and art tutor during the period just prior to World War I. Nabokov credits Dobuzhinski with teaching him the basics of memory-based artwork, reinforcing his visual sense and retention of detail in his mind's eye.

Kuropatkin, a veteran Imperial Russian army officer and friend of the Nabokov family, impresses Nabokov on two occasions. Inthe day he was ordered to take command of the Russian forces in Manchuria at the outset of the Russo-Japanese WarKuropatkin shows the five-year-old Nabokov a match trick, and about Nabokov sees Kuropatkin in peasant garb while fleeing from the Bolsheviks.

Chapter five of Speak, Memory is largely devoted to her. The original version of this chapter appeared as an essay in in the Atlantic. Through remembrances of her, Nabokov reveals much about his mordant and scathing sense of humor. Ought one to have minded the shallowness of her culture, the bitterness of her temper, the banality of her mind, when that pearly language of hers purled and scintillated?

Dmitri, the son of Nabokov and his wife Vera, provides much of the background theme for chapter fifteen of Speak, Memory. Dmitri is presented as a sweet boy and the parental excuse for many walks in parks and much train-watching from bridge overpasses. Elena, Nabokov's mother, supports and nurtures him in a healthy manner. She encourages his visual and artistic education, his independent exploration and lepidoptera butterfly and moth collecting, and his gradual development through adolescence and young manhood.

Her cosmopolitan outlook permits him the freedom for roaming and romance, yet she also takes care of him when he is homesick. For a person like Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Elena is the prefect mother; she also seems to be an excellent match for his father. Less than a year younger than Nabokov, Sergey lives in his brother's shadow for most of the memoir.

Occasionally a sidekick in pranks played on servants, governesses, and tutors, he attends different schools and, besides enjoying tennis together and studying literature in England, has different passions from his brother. Sergey has a speech problem described as stammering, which makes discussion difficult. He remains in Europe during World War II and, after criticizing the Nazis, is sent to a Nazi concentration campwhere he dies less than four months before Germany surrenders.

Yet she is very much present. In chapter fifteen, starting immediately after a passport photograph of her and Nabokov's five-year-old son Dmitri, Nabokov addresses her, calling her "my dear" as if in a letter addressed to her. Nabokov's father, an intelligent and compassionate man, remains stubbornly liberal and reformist until assassins cut his life short in in Berlin.

Aristocratic and devoted to both his family and Russia, Vladimir Dmitrievich helps undermine the czar's autocratic power but cannot stop the Bolsheviks from forcefully displacing him and other moderates once the czar is overthrown. Well liked by peasants in the areas around his St. Petersburg estates, he supports local public works, such as schools, while sponsoring a liberal education for each of his children.

In chapter nine of Speak, MemoryNabokov provides a loving tribute to him. Nabokov, the primary figure of his memoir, also serves as the central observer of the many other figures encountered in his memory. Nabokov explores the first forty years of his life from a variety of angles and uses a combination of anecdotes, aesthetic musings, observations, and thematic sequences that are purposely not always in chronological order.

In using anecdotes, he both characterizes himself and other people. For the most nabokov speak memory an autobiography revisited tattoo, the first twelve chapters of the book deal with life, people, and events from the early s through World War I In these chapters, Nabokov remembers and muses upon the family and its estates and an ever-changing cast of servants, governesses, tutors, acquaintances, connections, and attachments.

He recaptures, recreates, and reinvents the world in which he grew up, the special and privileged world of liberal aristocracy that persisted in and around St. Petersburg until the fall of czarist Russia. Within this sphere, Nabokov's imagination, talent, and passion for intricate and finely wrought aesthetics come to life and take hold, guiding his spirit through the difficult years that come next.

Much of the memoir is devoted to probing Nabokov's childhood because recalling that time seems to him like "the next best thing to probing one's eternity. When the Bolsheviks come to power and Russia degenerates into a bitter and vicious civil war, the Nabokovs depart their native land forever. In a series of revelations made while recalling family and place, the celebration of the earlier part of the book becomes clearer.

No subsequent place compares to the earlier joys of a wealthy Russian childhood. Nonetheless, Nabokov painfully matures and develops as a writer, copes with the upheavals of revolution and the rise of fascism, and begins a family that permits him to begin a new cycle of development across the Atlantic. He leaves the reader with the hopeful image of his son, representing a new generation despite surrounding historical calamity.

Boris Okolokulak, called Max, is a Polish medical student who tutors Nabokov from to He impresses himself on Nabokov's memory because of his handling of pistols, because of his bicycling off to engage in a nighttime affair with a married woman who lives some twelve miles from the Nabokovs' Vyra estate, and because he courts the Irish governess of Colette Nabokov's early love at Biarritz.

Max resigns for a hospital job in St. Petersburg and is replaced by Lenski. A peasant girl, daughter of the Nabokovs' head coachman, Polenka is about young Vladimir's age, and they have a memorably visual connection, or "ocular relationship. Their strange connection also underscores class differences, for Nabokov is made to feel intrigued, afraid, and self-conscious all at once, merely by the gaze and demeanor of this pretty peasant girl.

The illustrated books of Irish-born Mayne Reida friend of Edgar Allan Poeserved as a major early literary and visual influence on Nabokov. In Speak, MemoryNabokov vividly nabokov speaks memory an autobiography revisited tattoo from early childhood the "unabridged original" English language plots and physical specifications of Reid's American Western adventures.

Reid provides the young Nabokov with a yearning for danger, romantic adventure, and America. Tamara is staying with her mother at a village dachka a summer cottage when she and Nabokov meet on August 9,after he observes her with friends and hears her name mentioned by others. Most of chapter twelve is dedicated to the ensuing "wreckless romance" between him and this "adorable girl.

Nabokov becomes so enamored of Tamara that he composes and publishes a small book of poetry celebrating their doomed love. They part inshe to find a job, he to write and continue his education. Called Lenski, Filip Zelenski is one of Nabokov's tutors. The eccentric Lenski leaves Nabokov with many images from tomost memorably a magic lantern show.

Lenski accompanies Nabokov and his brother Sergey on two journeys to Germany. He also detests Made-moiselle, the Nabokovs' French governess, and eventually drives her away. Village schoolmaster near the Nabokov estates in the early s, Zhernosekov impresses young Vladimir with his extracurricular teaching methods. Zhernosekov's other noted contribution is that he teaches young Vladimir and Sergey how to spell in Russian, an important feat given that they learned English first.

Speak, Memory explores the way memory and reminiscence provide the author with the artistic power to defy time through his writing. He reconsiders and re-imagines episodes and sequences in his life, reflecting upon certain points in time from different points of time later in his life in a way that challenges the notion of linear chronological passages.

Nabokov celebrates family life, particularly in the years when he lived with his parents in St. Petersburg province before World War I. Speak, Memory ends with another celebration of family life, when he is a husband and father. Throughout Speak, MemoryNabokov indicates his preoccupation with freedom and escape in both positive and negative terms.

Allowed to seek it by his father and encouraged by his mother, the young Nabokov finds freedom to explore, collect butterflies, and pursue romantic attachments. Later, out of necessity, he and his family must escape for their lives. Though they retain their freedom outside Russia, events force them to escape once again, to America.

From there, they escape yet again, to Switzerland. Nabokov reveals—and revels in—numerous often related passions for literature, butterflies, shiny and colorful objects, chess, tennis, females, and freedom. These are intense, recurrent interests in Nabokov, and all of them appear at varying length throughout his autobiography. These passions provide a certain continuity to his life, and the strong feelings they bestir help him remember vividly.

There is a clear awareness of social orderparticularly during the czarist era that disintegrated toward the end of World War I. Nabokov, benefiting from his place in it, sees a certain stability and value in social orderespecially when this social order is contrasted to the upheaval following the overthrow of the czar. While he recognizes certain injustices to those less privileged than he was as a child, he prefers order to chaos and entropy.

Individual figures play important roles in Speak, Memory but not necessarily commensurate to the number of pages devoted to them or to the chronological span they spent with Nabokov.