Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Vladimir Nabokov
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0679723390
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
feeling that one is looking in the right direction. 3 1 AN inexperienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration. Thus, in the first version of this chapter, when describing the Nabokovs’ coat of arms (carelessly glimpsed among some familial trivia many years before), I somehow managed to twist it into the fireside
first stomach. My recent introductions to the English translations of Zashchita Luzhina, 1930 (The Defense, Putnam, 1964), Otchayanie, 1936 (Despair, Putnam, 1966), Priglashenie na kazn’, 1938 (Invitation to a Beheading, Putnam, 1959), Dar, 1952, serialized 1937–38 (The Gift, Putnam, 1963) and Soglyadatay, 1938 (The Eye, Phaedra, 1965) give a sufficiently detailed, and racy, account of the creative part of my European past. For those who would like a fuller list of my publications, there is the
fetch me that day, and during the cold, dreary, incredibly slow drive home in a hired sleigh I had ample time to think matters over. Now I understood why, the day before, my mother had been so little with me and had not come down to dinner. I also understood what special coaching Thernant, a still finer maître d’armes than Loustalot, had of late been giving my father. What would his adversary choose, I kept asking myself—the blade or the bullet? Or had the choice already been made? Carefully, I
Martïnovich Zhernosekov had a fuzzy brown beard, a balding head, and china-blue eyes, one of which bore a fascinating excrescence on the upper lid. The first day he came he brought a boxful of tremendously appetizing blocks with a different letter painted on each side; these cubes he would manipulate as if they were infinitely precious things, which for that matter, they were (besides forming splendid tunnels for toy trains). He revered my father who had recently rebuilt and modernized the
floorboard at my feet a dead horsefly lay on its back near the brown remains of a birch ament. And the patches of disintegrating whitewash on the inside of the door had been used by various trespassers for such jottings as: “Dasha, Tamara and Lena have been here” or “Down with Austria!” The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long