Nabokov wrote about his tutors, his girlfriends, and his other interests, including a fascination with butterflies. There are no exciting events in the book. But we get to know Nabokov, a craftsman with language, both in English and Russian. He was a likeable and brilliant man.

As for why this book is considered the greatest autobiography ever written, or one of the very finest works of the 20th Century, you got me. It has a style. Is that enough for you?
Rating: 3 / 5

If you open the book to any page, you are likely to recognize his rich writing style:

“This final dachshund followed us into exile, and as late as 1930, in a suburb of Prague (where my widowed mother spent her last years on a small pension provided by the Czech government), he could still be seen going for reluctant walks with his mistress, waddling far behind in a huff, tremendously old and furious with his long Czech muzzle of wire – an émigré dog in a patched and ill-fitting coat.”

But you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Two stars for effort.

Rating: 2 / 5

“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.”

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is about the struggle against time for immortality. This struggle is against non-existence. Nabokov tries to preserve as much of his existence as he can through his memories. The “darkness,” Time, devours every scrap of a person, throwing him into a sort of an exile from living that is completely without hope-Oblivion. There is no glimmer in this darkness; no path of escape. Nabokov fears this darkness. He weaves a cocoon for himself through his writing. His autobiography is his solution to the darkness. It is to be the salvation of his essence, since his physical form cannot endure for eternity.
Nabokov starts by addressing the theme of his autobiography-existence-by telling a story about a chronophobiac he once knew. This is when he takes his stand and defies the later “eternit[y] of darkness” (19).

“The cradle rocks above an abyss…our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading…a young chronophobiac…caught glimpse…of a brand-new baby carriage…his very bones had disintegrated…Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between…I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature” (19, 20).

This passage clearly shows that Nabokov will not be the chronophobiac, who simply panics and does nothing. Nabokov fears the dark, but he is going to do everything to defend himself against it He knows that once he dies, he falls prey to the later of the “two eternities of darkness” (19). He knows that death is inevitable, but he will resist the darkness by beginning to build his fortress for immortality. He is going to combat the darkness, not go softly into the cold, silent night.
Nabokov, in fighting against the darkness, realizes that he must do so alone. To keep from vanishing, Nabokov rigorously keeps watch over darkness by himself. He trusts only himself. He left a rare pupae with a local doctor once. The doctor lost the pupae. From this, Nabokov’s distrust in relying upon others increases. Nabokov trusts nobody with his biography, because he believes nobody but he can write it correctly. He wants his memories to be his and not that which others twist it into, as Mademoiselle often tries to do. He is afraid that the moment he turns his back he will vanish like a comet-leaving nothing but a vague feeling behind.
Nabokov sees the “…horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought with a finite existence” (297). Consciousness and the ability to think is something which Nabokov holds dear. To make sure that he is alive, he takes inventory of his life. He checks to make sure that he is awake and experiencing Life. Once sure he is sure that he is alive, he realizes Life’s fragility and vigilantly guards it against the darkness; afraid that eternal night will steal all that he is. He has had many cherished things vanish. So, he is distrustful because he knows that a moment is all it takes for anything to be destroyed. When Nabokov left his gynandromorphy butterfly and his series of Large Whites on a chair, for example, it took but a moment for his nurse to sit and crush them. In an instant, the collection that had taken him days perhaps weeks to put together is ruined. In a moment too, Colette vanishes from his life. Colette, who was so animated and beautiful, turns into nothing but a “whisp of iridescence” that exists now only in Nabokov’s memories. Many of Nabokov’s tutors and friends die abruptly in the war, and the war forces Nabokov to hastily leave Russia. Nabokov’s family do not have time to take everything with them because of how fast they had to leave. What took his family generations to build up, their feelings of security, their wealth, and their status, are gone. Nabokov has had many bad experiences, most of which occurred within a very short time period. One of the best illustrations of this is the death of his heroic father not by a duel, but by assassination.
Though iridescence vanishes, Nabokov is able to reap something from the memory he has of Colette. When Nabokov remembers Colette, he sees a swirl of color. This is similar to the color found inside the glass marble-the swirl of color that is frozen and constant. It is animated even though the swirls no longer move because the swirls were caught mid-action. Nabokov cannot rewind time and have his life play and repeat forever. Nabokov cannot prevent physical death. What he can do is not “have not existed.” He can pause himself like the swirls in the marble. He defines his essence and gives it a name the same way he does Eupithecia nabokovi. He classifies himself, his life, by describing every memory and thought that he can, and calls it “that [which] the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen” (310).
Describing his life gives him a more fluid form than were he to list facts about himself. Both rubrics cube and the swirled marble hold colors and both are more than just a simple box or sphere. It is the marble only, which contains frozen movement. Nabokov describes his life using prose and nature. He could have written the entire book as he did Chapter Three, but that kind of a writing style would not appeal as much to as wide of an audience as nature and rich prose do.
“Now and then, shed by a blossoming tree, a petal would come own, down, down, and with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshiper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly-more swiftly than the petal fell-rose to meet it; and, for the fraction of a second, one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float away alone, but every time the delicate union did take place, with the magic precision of a poet’s word meeting halfway his, or a reader’s recollection” (271).

Nabokov wants to make sure that his audience departs with what he is trying to convey-his ideas, himself. The petal is Nabokov, the “float down” is similar to death (the petals die after falling), the reflection is the water is the audience, and the reflection is the reflection of Nabokov’s essence. Nabokov wants the world, his audience, to catch him as he falls, to preserve him and reflect exactly what he sees himself as being. He worries that when he finishes falling, that the trick will not work. He is afraid that the petal will float away alone, the reflection lost somewhere in the stream. The “magic” connection is vital to Nabokov’s preservation. He wants to immortalize his memories, his thoughts, himself. To accomplish this, other people must remember him as he sees himself. He must be able to clearly convey what’s in his mind. The more people who remember him, understand him, and relate to him, the longer he will last. Writing about his life while using imagery from everyday life and nature is part of what Nabokov uses to ensure his preservation. The reason for this being that most people have seen some of nature and can imagine the feeling he is expressing through his imagery. Nabokov’s autobiography stays alive when it is preserved in nature because nature is living. The butterflies drifting amongst a sea of grass, the caterpillar stretching to see where its leaf went, all of these are in action. Writing about nature and life in prose serves to further add to this living feeling because prose is melodious and varies. So rather than kill his life by turning it into a list of facts and dates, Nabokov is able to seal it in a sort of biosphere, keeping everything inside his autobiography alive.
The last sentence of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is the summary of why he wrote his autobiography the way he did. He does not necessarily want the reader to remember the chess compositions, his huge family tree, nor his every butterfly and moth catch. He wants them to remember him. He does not write his life like a shopping list, but tells it. He forms a scene with different memories, but the thing that he wants his audience to remember is essence.
“There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all orts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking along a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture-Find What the Sailor Has Hidden-that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen” (309, 310).

Nabokov is the Sailor. Page 121 is the only other page in Speak, Memory during which t
Rating: 4 / 5