Speak, Memory
First UK edition
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| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
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| Language | English |
| Publisher | Victor Gollancz (1951 UK) |
Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The book includes individual short stories published between 1936 and 1951 to create the first edition in 1951. Nabokov's revised and extended edition appeared in 1966.
The book is dedicated to his wife, Vera, and covers his life from 1903 until his emigration to America in 1940. The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in an aristocratic family living in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg and at their country estate Vyra, near Siverskaya. The three remaining chapters recall his years at Cambridge and as part of the Russian émigré community in Berlin and Paris. Through memory Nabokov is able to possess the past.
Nabokov published "Mademoiselle O", which became Chapter Five of the book, in French in 1936, and in English in the Atlantic Monthly in 1943, without indicating that it was non-fiction. Subsequent pieces of the autobiography were published as individual or collected stories, and each chapter can stand on its own. Andrew Field observed that while Nabokov evoked the past through “puppets of memory” (in the characterizations of his educators, Colette, or Tamara, for example), his intimate family life with Véra and Dmitri remained "untouched". Field indicated that the chapter on butterflies is an interesting example how the author deploys the fictional with the factual. It recounts, for example, how his first butterfly escapes at Vyra, in Russia, and is "overtaken and captured" forty years later on a butterfly hunt in Colorado.
Nabokov writes in the text that he was dissuaded from titling the book Speak, Mnemosyne by his publisher, who feared that readers would not buy a "book whose title they could not pronounce". It was first published in a single volume in 1951 as Speak, Memory in the United Kingdom and as Conclusive Evidence in the United States. The Russian version was published in 1954 and called Drugie berega (Other Shores). An extended edition including several photographs was published in 1966 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. In 1999 Alfred A. Knopf issued a new edition with the addition of a previously unpublished section named "Chapter 16".
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