How Nabokov preserved his lost childhood like a butterfly in "Speak, Memory"
Anna Moss looks at a remarkable autobiography, by one of the most distinctive and complicated authors of the 20th century
Vladimir Nabokov, in what he assures us was a candid snapshot… All images © The Vladimir Nabokov Literary Foundation
“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”
‘This re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place, proved to be a diabolical task, but some consolation was given me by the thought that such multiple metamorphosis, familiar to butterflies, had not been tried by any human before’
One of the twentieth century’s most eminent writers, Vladimir Nabokov’s life rivals his fiction in its intrigue. Born in St. Petersburg to an aristocratic family, the young Nabokov lived through the Russian Revolution, studied at Cambridge University and later emigrated to the United States. He was also a keen butterfly collector, composer of chess problems, and polyglot. In 1951, the writer published the first edition of his autobiography, Speak, Memory. Though he had not yet reached the meteoric success Lolita (1955) would bring him, the memoir was quickly regarded as an outstanding work of non-fiction.
Speak, Memory is a truly distinctive memoir. Its title alludes to the Goddess Mnemosyne, who in Greek mythology preserved history before the invention of writing by power of memory and oration. The way Nabokov seeks to preserve his own history is not dissimilar to the construction of his novels. In poetic prose Nabokov explores parts of his life thematically, rather than linearly. Nabokov self-identifies as a ‘chronophobiac’ (one who fears time), fitting as the reflections upon his youth are imbued with nostalgia. His childhood world is one populated by butterflies, eccentric governesses and tutors, and friends of the Nabokovs who form the Russian intelligentsia (Léon Bakst and Alexander Benois, among others).
From childhood, Nabokov was a keen lepidopterist.
Nabokov studied at Cambridge from 1919-22.
Against this backdrop of pre-revolutionary Russia, one can glean Nabokov’s intuitive and creative genius from an early age. He recalls his first experience of synaesthesia, or ‘coloured hearing’: ‘The long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony’. Few writers could fixate at length on the delights of an Emperor moth or a Faber pencil and elicit intrigue, but that is precisely what Speak, Memory achieves. Nabokov’s aptitude for language and its complexity are unmatched: readers learn that to his father’s disappointment, he could write in English before Russian. No doubt this ability contributed to his success as a writer as well as a translator, both of his own work (notably Lolita) and the likes of Alexander Pushkin.
Vladimir Nabokov (R), with Mademoiselle.
It is undeniable that Nabokov lived through extraordinary times. His father being a liberal statesman, later assassinated, he was privy to political events more than most. Yet Nabokov is concerned with personal, impressionistic history rather than the political. An army General visiting his family draws a picture of stormy seas for the young Vladimir with matches. His father is imprisoned for demonstrating against the government, but what he remembers most is the countryside on the day of his liberty – ‘under archivolts of fir needles and crowns of bluebottles, my father’s favourite flower’. The Nabokovs’ exile to Western Europe in 1919 brings a decade of opulence to a sharp end, but Nabokov’s contempt for Soviet dictatorship is bound up in ‘a hyper-trophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes’.
Though this unconventional autobiography deserves to be appreciated in its own right, it nevertheless offers valuable insight into his other works. Nabokov had written a short story, Mademoiselle O, published in the French journal Mesures, which is reworked into Speak Memory, published several years later. Chapter five is dedicated to a portrait of Nabokov’s Swiss governess, whose idiosyncrasies are described in molecular detail. As Nabokov meditates on Mademoiselle’s death, he feels something of his real memory has been lost since she inspired a character for his writing. The author somewhat audaciously asks: ‘Have I really salvaged her from fiction?’
There is a certain commitment to artifice and ambiguity in Speak, Memory that is typically Nabokovian. Thomas Karshan has highlighted that at the center of Nabokov’s work is the theme of ‘play’. A keen gamesman in real life, Nabokov sought to incorporate games into his stories too. Memory itself is treated as a kind of game, in which the writer can be seen to play hide-and-seek with time, often finding commonality between past and events that occur decades later. The appendix of Speak, Memory also features a review of the work, calling it ‘a unique freak as far as autobiographies go, easier to define in terms of what it is not than what it is’. The reviewer is none other than Nabokov himself.
Sources:
With Thanks to Thomas Karshan and Anna Maslenova
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography (Penguin, 2016)
Thomas Karshan, Nabokov and the Art of Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Anna Moss is an MA student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, specialising in Russian 20th Century art. Prior to that she studied English literature and philosophy, and is particularly interested in aesthetics.