Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Speak, Memory

After reading a bit about how excellent and unusual this book is as an autobiography, I was surprised to find it more traditional than I expected --- still excellent, but traditional. It covers the first half of Nabokov’s life (1899-1977) until 1940, when at age 41 he moved the United States. Many of the chapters were published as short stories or memoirs in American magazines such as The New Yorker and the Atlantic.

The chapter about his nanny was published as “Mademoiselle O” in the Atlantic in 1943. Another chapter is about his father and there is one about his uncle. His uncle left him a valuable Russian estate but when it was nationalized by the Russian government, as was his family home in St. Petersburg, Nabokov lost his inheritance except for some hidden jewels that his family smuggled out of the country. Did his mansion in St. Petersburg really have 50 servants?



There are chapters about puppy love – a girl he roller skated and ice skated with and then a more serious love and his first sexual experience when he was 17 and she was 16.

Nabokov talks about having synesthesia through “colored hearing” in associating colors with vowel sounds.

Nabokov had a younger brother who was killed in a concentration camp. This was not because he was Jewish, although the family had some minor, distant Jewish ancestry, but because his brother held a minor government position and spoke out against some German bureaucratic policy. He was then accused of being a spy.

In one chapter and in several other places he talks about his love – perhaps obsession – with butterfly collecting. He went far beyond amateur collecting by writing articles in scientific journals describing new species, having his specimens displayed in museum collections, and even having some species named after him. He also was a chess fanatic, even creating chess puzzles.

There is a very traditional chapter about his distant ancestors that can be skimmed --- mostly educators, government and military officials

There are chapters about his first attempts at writing poetry to please his mother and about his time at Cambridge. He writes about how, when he uses a real-life person as a model for someone he wrote about, he ‘loses’ that person in his memory to the story!



All in all a good story and a good autobiography although it does not give us a lot of insight into Nabokov’s writing since many of his most famous works were published after this book ends (1940) such as Lolita 1955 and Pale Fire 1962.

Photo of the Nabokov family home is St. Petersburg from wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons
Photo of the author from s3.amazonaws.com/media.wbur.org/wordp...