Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

BOOKS BY Vladimir Nabokov

NOVELS
Mary
King, Queen, Knave
The Defense
The Eye
Glory
Laughter in the Dark
Despair
Invitation to a Beheading
The Gift
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
Bend Sinister
Lolita
Pnin
Pale Fire
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Transparent Things
Look at the Harlequins!

SHORT FICTION
Nabokovs Dozen
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories
Details of a Sunset and Other Stories
The Enchanter

DRAMA
The Waltz Invention
Lolita: A Screenplay
The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited
Strong Opinions

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM
Nikolai Gogol
Lectures on Literature
Lectures on Russian Literature
Lectures on Don Quixote

TRANSLATIONS
Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin,
Lermontov, and Tiutchev
A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)
The Song of Igors Campaign (Anon.)
Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977

MISCELLANEOUS
Poems and Problems
The Annotated Lolita

First Vintage International Edition, August 1989

Copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1967 by Vladimir Nabokov

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in different form, by Harper & Bros., New York, in 1951. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 18991977.
Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited / by
Vladimir Nabokov.
p. cm.(Vintage international)
Rev. ed. of: Conclusive evidence. 1951.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78773-6
1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 18991977Biography.
2. Authors, Russian20th centuryBiography. 3. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. I. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 18991977. Conclusive evidence. II. Title.
PG3476.N3Z477 1989
813.54dc 19
[B] 88-40528

Cover art by Michael Bierut
Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

v3.1

To Vra

T HE present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time. The essay that initiated the series corresponds to what is now Chapter Five. I wrote it in French, under the title of Mademoiselle O, thirty years ago in Paris, where Jean Paulhan published it in the second issue of Mesures, 1936. A photograph (published recently in Gisle Freunds James Joyce in Paris) commemorates this event, except that I am wrongly identified (in the Mesures group relaxing around a garden table of stone) as Audiberti.

In America, whither I migrated on May 28, 1940, Mademoiselle O was translated by the late Hilda Ward into English, revised by me, and published by Edward Weeks in the January, 1943, issue of The Atlantic Monthly (which was also the first magazine to print my stories written in America). My association with The New Yorker had begun (through Edmund Wilson) with a short poem in April 1942, followed by other fugitive pieces; but my first prose composition appeared there only on January 3, 1948: this was Portrait of (Gardens and Parks, June 17, 1950), all written in Ithaca, N.Y.

Of the remaining three chapters, went to Harpers Magazine (Lodgings in Trinity Lane, January, 1951).

The English version of Mademoiselle O has been republished in Nine Stories (New Directions, 1947), and Nabokovs Dozen (Doubleday, 1958; Heinemann, 1959; Popular Library, 1959; and Penguin Books, 1960); in the latter collection, I also included First Love, which became the darling of anthologists.

Although I had been composing these chapters in the erratic sequence reflected by the dates of first publication given above, they had been neatly filling numbered gaps in my mind which followed the present order of chapters. That order had been established in 1936, at the placing of the cornerstone which already held in its hidden hollow various maps, timetables, a collection of matchboxes, a chip of ruby glass, and evenas I now realizethe view from my balcony of Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, black-dotted today, at teatime, with coots and tufted ducks. I had no trouble therefore in assembling a volume which Harper & Bros. of New York brought out in 1951, under the title Conclusive Evidence; conclusive evidence of my having existed. Unfortunately, the phrase suggested a mystery story, and I planned to entitle the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce. I also toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it; so we finally settled for Speak, Memory (Gollancz, 1951, and The Universal Library, N.Y., 1960). Its translations are: Russian, by the author (Drugie Berega, The Chekhov Publishing House, N.Y., 1954), French, by Yvonne Davet (Autres Rivages, Gallimard, 1961), Italian, by Bruno Oddera (Parla, Ricordo, Mondadori, 1962), Spanish, by Jaime Pieiro Gonzles (Habla, memoria!, 1963) and German, by Dieter E. Zimmer (Rowohlt, 1964). This exhausts the necessary amount of bibliographic information, which jittery critics who were annoyed by the note at the end of Nabokovs Dozen will be, I hope, hypnotized into accepting at the beginning of the present work.

While writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault. My fathers biography has been amplified now, and revised. Numerous other revisions and additions have been made, especially in the earlier chapters. Certain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents. Or else an object, which had been a mere dummy chosen at random and of no factual significance in the account of an important event, kept bothering me every time I reread that passage in the course of correcting the proofs of various editions, until finally I made a great effort, and the arbitrary spectacles (which Mnemosyne must have needed more than anybody else) were metamorphosed into a clearly recalled oystershell-shaped cigarette case, gleaming in the wet grass at the foot of an aspen on the Chemin du Pendu, where I found on that June day in 1907 a hawkmoth rarely met with so far west, and where a quarter of a century earlier, my father had netted a Peacock butterfly very scarce in our northern woodlands.