Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die

Browse all of the exceptional memoirs that made our list.

When Nabokov first went to publish this stunning collection of words, he wanted to call it Speak, Mnemosyne in homage to the Greek goddess of memory. Although his publisher convinced him to change it to something simpler, the mark of this divine call still lingers.Speak, Memory is a dizzying descent into Nabokov's mind, spinning through the opulent senses spilling from his childhood memories to the political upheaval that would finally drive him to become an immigrant. Nabokov's dance with this strange and amorphous goddess is something everyone should have the chance to delight in. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com

Vladimir Nabokov once described Speak, Memory as “a new type of autobiography, a scientific attempt to unravel and trace back all the tangled threads of one's personality.” But the book, which Time magazine deemed one of the “ALL-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books,” is much more: a beautifully articulated account of the times he lived in, the history-rich days before and after the Russian Revolution. There are so many reasons to love Speak, Memory: its scope, its insights, its poetry, the nonlinear, almost impressionistic approach that so beautifully evokes the feeling of memory, but what I love the most is pure Nabokov: the entertaining frankness of his ego and the audacity of his language. Recommended By Gigi L., Powells.com

From one of the 20th century’s great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman’s Library edition includes, for the first time, the previously unpublished “Chapter 16″–the most significant unpublished piece of writing by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate–which provided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory.

Nabokov’s memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilized family, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror, education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. The Nabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a life immersed in politics and literature on splendid country estates until their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when the author was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evokes a vanished past in the inimitable prose of Nabokov at his best.

"Scintillating…One finds here amazing glimpses into the life of a world that has vanished forever." New York Times

"[Nabokov] has fleshed the bare bones of historical data with hilarious anecdotes and with a felicity of style that makes Speak, Memory a constant pleasure to read. Confirmed Nabokovians will relish the further clues and references to his fictional works that shine like nuggets in the silver stream of his prose." Harper’s

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.

The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.

Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

From the Hardcover edition.