Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
To call this incandescent work an autobiography is like calling a Russian icon a religious picture. Subtitled “An Autobiography Revisited,” Speak, Memory covers only 37 years of Nabokov’s life, a selective rambling that follows the author from Russia to various cities in Europe. He begins with a juvenile memory of hiding behind a divan, resolutely refusing to accept any theories that Freud (the “Viennese quack” [300]) might have suggested about how this play in a dark, enclosed space might signify a young boy’s desire to return to the womb.
“Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap” (25).
With such characteristically plangent sentences, Nabokov shows his reverence for the mystery of identity and the power of memory. His remembrances of his childhood are shaped by the language and culture of pre-Revolutionary Russia in a household that was affluent but not aristocratic. Nabokov’s mother, Elena Ivanovna, was a prim beauty whose love and endearing indulgence shaped her son’s sensibility. They would walk about their country estate and she would point to a lark in the sky, heat lightning at night, or a bird’s footprint, saying “Vot zapomni, now remember” (40). His father was a statesman with a liberal bent who paid for his views with his life: he was assassinated in Berlin in the 1920s by Russian fascists.
Nabokov’s various tutors and governesses are masterfully sketched with a rational eye and a fondness for these individuals’ many foibles. One such, Mademoiselle, became increasingly eccentric, but her command of French has a lasting effect: “And, really, her French was so lovely! 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 her purled and scintillated, as innocent of sense as the alliterative sins of Racine’s pious verse?” (113).
It is well known that Nabokov was a dedicated lepidopterist. His love of hunting and studying butterflies and moths—“Let me also evoke the hawkmoths, the jets of my boyhood!” (134)—began with his father. Observing butterflies, watching them develop from caterpillars to winged insects honed Nabokov’s eye for tiny detail and unexpected transformations. In Mademoiselle, for example, he watched a similarly inexplicable change as she progressed from a lovely girl captured in an ornately-framed photograph to an obese, deaf, susceptible old woman.
Nabokov does not spare himself, ruefully recalling his first poem, a work that resulted from weeks of mooning about the family estate, communing with nature, and borrowing from the great poets in his father’s library. He proudly declaimed the results to his mother in the family parlor. She cried with maternal indulgence, calling it wonderful and beautiful. Then she passed her son a hand mirror, so he could see the smudge of blood on his cheek where he had killed a gorged mosquito. “But I saw more than that. Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass” (227).
Nabokov recounts his first love with charm and a decided lack of Turgenyevian romanticism. Later at Cambridge, he is bored and dissipated. His impressions of his fellow émigrés shows how cultured the Russians were, especially in contrast to the British men who seemed content to lapse into “the most astonishing drivel” (261) where Russian politics were concerned. He quickly dispenses with politics and concentrates on literature and love affairs. He even and announces, rather surprisingly, that not once in his time at university did he visit the library or even learn its location.
His jobs in Berlin and Paris included the inevitable positions as a teacher of English and translator. He also taught tennis. He insinuates that even though they had a wealth of creative opportunities, the Russian émigrés could seldom be bothered to delve into them. Snobbery, boredom, the fatalism of the Russian character, all might account for this lack of curiosity. Of course, how much could an author learn whose first novel was about solving a thorny chess problem?
In Paris, Nabokov’s love of literature moves him to seek out Ivan Bunin who has just won the Nobel Prize. Nabokov had first become aware of Bunin when he encountered in his father's library a poem about a tortoiseshell butterfly. Bunin, it seems, was one of only two major Russian poets to have used lepidopteral imagery. Years later, when they meet for dinner at a Parisian cafe, Bunin is an old man obsessed with aging. He opens the conversation by bragging that his posture is better than young Vladimir’s. Things go from bad to worse. Nabokov is ill at ease in restaurants, prefers to eat in a recumbent position, and hates confessional conversations. Bunin is baffled by the young man’s unresponsiveness. By the end of the meal, they have come to hate each other, and Bunin predicts “‘you will die in dreadful pain and in complete isolation’” (286).
Nabokov’s attitude toward his wife Véra is touching. He occasionally addresses her directly in the book, or in the first person plural when the subject is their son Dmitri. Véra is the understood collaborator, the implied audience, and the “tender nucleus of a personal matter” (296). When Nabokov comes to write of his years as a husband and father, the book takes on an increasingly personal tone, much more impressionistic. In the 1930s, the Nabokovs moved restlessly about Europe, and the author recalls the uneasy enervation of that time: “As time went on and the shadow of fool-made history vitiated even the exactitude of sundials” (306).
The books ends in 1940 as the family are preparing to sail to New York. Nabokov recalls seeing, in a “hush of pure memory” (309), a certain French garden. He and Véra think about all the memories they have stored up while their son plays at their feet, his mind waiting to receive impressions and ideas yet to come. Speak, Memory advocates for memory’s role in cognition and identity, but doesn't insist on the connections. Which came first, Nabokov’s love of butterflies or his love of language? Did he gravitate toward Bunin because of the lepidopteral image or did the study of butterflies crystallize, so to speak, poetic metaphor into reality?
Nabokov is unsentimental and unstinting in giving himself up in words. Bracingly free of sticky confessions, the book builds a character in prose that is lyrical, rhythmic, and unafraid of the often brutish sounds of English. The slides that he projects are flickering colors across an unstable background subject to the elusiveness of language. No matter how many languages Nabokov mastered or how inadequate we as readers are to his many form of self-expression, the imprint of the author remains. The “watermark” of his life leaves its impression on our minds only when we shine memory’s light across its pages.
© Leann Davis Alspaugh. All rights reserved.
Photographs: (top) A 1940 passport photograph of Véra Nabokov and Dmitri, age 5; (bottom) Véra and Nabokov play chess later in life. Photographers unknown.
