I expect even more miracles. Get Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited from Amazon.com. The pencil notes on the margins affirmed that the reader looked for the connections with everything American, was interested in Russian cultural traditions, and was confused by Nabokov’s playing with words. In this autobiography, Nabokov explains the mechanics of these faculties by investigating his remembrances of youth. Nabokov reveals his vision of Russia and makes a reader avoid stereotypes and develop his or her own view. I suspect that what interests him, what has most impressed itself upon his memory, is not events per se but other aspects of lived experience, more complicated and harder to characterize: colors, and pictures, and puzzles, and the relations among things. Nabokov shows the best part of Russian society: educated, broadminded, bearing rich cultural traditions.
Regarding the use of “you” (about which I was unsure of your opinion), which appears only occasionally until the 15th chapter, I eventually grasped, as you did, to whom it refers. I love the way that Nabokov captures the Russia of his time. Dear Mr. Gilbert, I came across your review just when I had finished writing my “Reflections on Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory by a Russian native speaker recently immigrated to the USA” and could not help posting it although it is probably too long. everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Speak, Memory. There are certainly events in his tale–the doings of some of Nabokov’s tutors, for instance, or the uncanny episode in which he sees as if in a dream his mother emerging from a shop with a large pencil, which she then enters his room carrying, or the outline, precise as a silhouette, of the dark, rainy evenings in which he would bicycle to meet Tamara at his uncle’s shuttered house–but there are also, as he sometimes admits, lapses in his recollection when he does try to recount a scene, and as you and others have pointed out the book is less a straight narrative than an episodic and thematic excursion. Nabokov bravely distills his own cruel, childish role in shaping this victim, but he doesn’t pretend to guilt he doesn’t feel. For me, with my freshly learned English, Nabokov’s prose seemed kind of staged: stylish and exquisite as his unique Russian but a little tied up in the limits of English grammar. He enjoys his simple life with his wife and his small son, but he always longs for the Russia of his childhood.
Another critical detail that needs treatment is Nabokov's bone-chilling severity as an author. . Olga, Thank you for posting and for including your lovely essay. That “wide ripple” and “gluey” “dark swell” are pretty darn good, too. will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. Russian landscapes, as Nabokov pictures them, give a key to the Russian spirituality. I even wrote down the new words first but gave up shortly as it became clear that I would unlikely ever use them. The search for the adequate translation haunted me even in a night dream where I could easily reach the book, turn the pages quickly but still could not find the corresponding page. 2.0 | NARRATIVE. “Speak, Memory” works as a magic lantern switching the reader from the narration to his or her own or even ancestral reminiscences. In it he explains his overlooking his siblings as stemming from “the powerful concentration on one’s own personality, the act of an artist’s indefatigable and invincible will.”. Interesting! While reading the book, I caught myself several times feeling as if I was looking through the eyes of my Great-Grandmother whose namesake I am and whose youth coincided with the beginning of 20th century. Thank you. The message in Speak, Memory is in the words themselves, in the nature of memory, and in the meaning given to life by aesthetic passions. […] Review: Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory' « NARRATIVE Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak Memory with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface details of what he loved as a boy (especially butterflies, on which he became a . The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Memory and Trauma appears in each chapter of Speak. What’s more, I had chosen to read the book because of a short, extraordinary passage employing that “you,” which I had found quoted in a Mary Karr memoir: “They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years–to use a soul-rending Horatian inflection. This perhaps helps explain the book’s sparing dramatization. No doubt, “Speak, Memory” may be interesting to an American reader as an exotic butterfly for its unusual and mysterious beauty. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”, Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak, Memory, with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface details of what he loved as a boy (especially butterflies, on which he became a renowned expert) while skimming over the particulars of major events, such as the exile from Russia of his liberal, reformist family.
Nabokov’s vocabulary is enormous and peculiar. I borrowed the book in the library, and it had some notes and a library receipt which told me about the previous reader. . He must leave behind the city manse and country estate that he loves so much because of his father’s liberal politics during the Russian Civil War. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis. As one of the most eloquent authors ever to have written in any language, Vladimir Nabokov's decision to share with the public his more intimate life constitutes a kind of "behind the scenes." Knopf’s “Everyman’s Library” edition of Speak, Memory is suitably elegant but features a criminally tight, dense design. It’s telling that he came from a family in which such things were known, and that he remembered them, and that he was able to distinguish and describe the physical features of various antecedents (such as the difference in noses and eyebrows between the Nabokovs and the Korffs). There’s the easy alliteration that Nabokov loved—so do I: how that “lone light dimly diluted the darkness”—and the pleasing rhyme of “visible drizzle.” But also there’s his use of “uncouth” to describe the swan, which nails the malevolent stupidity that sets apart swans from their cousin ducks and geese. The book relies on your knowing about Nabokov. If I found the result less charming than he intended, I take instruction from the depth of this mandarin’s effort to honor and to link elemental experiences. It was funny that sometimes, when the American reader put a bold question mark having not found the word in the dictionary, I could easily guess the meaning based on the rules of word building in Russian. She is his Mnemosyne. At one spot a lone light dimly diluted the darkness and transformed the mist into a visible drizzle. I read Lolita quickly, liked it partially because of the romantic flavor of forbidden reading, and forgot about Nabokov for years. My grandfather lived in St. Petersburg around the time that Nabokov did, so perhaps for me reading the book was partly a way to get to know my family’s past. The memoir embodies the writer’s conviction that “this world is not as bad as it seems.”, Published first as a series of essays over many years in The New Yorker, and compiled as a book in 1947 after “more or less thorough rewriting,” in Nabokov’s phrase, Speak, Memory seems less cohesive than the great novelist’s fiction.
Though I own it, I checked out an older, more readable version from the library. The last third of the autobiography takes place after Nabokov’s family’s exile from Russia. Anyway, I would join the same book club as that unknown reader and we would definitely find what to speak about despite obvious cultural difference. Anonymous "Speak, Memory Study Guide: Analysis". GradeSaver, 2 October 2018 Web. Why? I read famous “Lolita” by V. Nabokov in mid-1980s. I know exactly where it is: on the right side, between Dostoevsky and Brodsky. But there’s a lot of beauty there, too.
It is when he leaves Russia for England, and then later Berlin and Paris, that he realizes he loves Russia. But my initial pique can’t hurt a genius like Nabokov—the idea is laughable—so I’ll probably let it stand.
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