Because you can’t critique a memoir for its themes and structures like you can a piece of fiction, I’ll be brief.
Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is everything that they say it is – a luxuriant time spent in his always stylistically provocative and dense voice, a beautiful meditation on the act of remembering, an insightful portrait at turns into the collapse of the Russian bourgeois with the rise of Communism, and a handful of bright insights into the writing process, which gather speed as his subject comes to intellectual maturity.
***
A few choice quotes –
On his butterflies:
“And the highest enjoyment of timelessness – in a landscape selected at random – is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern – to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
And the study of them:
“ … what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light – translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little world of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. 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.”
On his first literary attempt:
“A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief – the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say ‘patter’ intentionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.”
On his chess problems:
“It is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and when the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a level adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often I have struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world) …. ”
***
One note, on suspicious omissions that say more than the author may intend.
Sergey Nabokov, his brother nearest in age, receives two pages in the text (paling beside certain arousing leaves, sunsets, butterflies, or literary critics), which begins with a half-apology (“for various reasons I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother”), a careless excuse about their lack of shared interests growing up, the peculiar anecdote that Sergey was obsessed with Napoleon as a child and took a bust of the French leader to bed with him, followed by a very discreet allusion to his homosexuality (“a page from his diary that … provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part”), a factual relation on how they later lived near to each other in Paris, on amiable terms, but how Vladimir did not tell him he was moving to America until he had disappeared, sometime after which Sergey died in a Nazi concentration camp.
It is two pages of such dense avoidance and double-speak that Nabokov could not have designed it better were he writing a character.
It is no wonder that Vladimir’s admirers go on to speculate that Sergey played an outsized role in the writer’s subconscious, attributing an obsessive shame and avoidance of the brother that undergirded Vladimir’s sexual imagination – disputed by Vladimir’s children, argued for the cheap thrill of a Freudian interpretation by scholars (and did you notice how often Nabokov scorns Freud, particularly, in this text? Out of no convenient context? The writer doth protest too much, methinks!), even inspiring a novelization.
The introverted, myopic genius is on full-flowering display, and it seems generous to call it fully self-aware – not just with Sergey, but in the avoidance of any mention of his wife (which absence he only listlessly accounts for in addressing the book to her), who is an assumed figure taking his child for walks or boarding the boat with him for America. Vera herself cries for a voice, which biographers and historians have been trying to give her ever since, too.
It does make one wonder at the depth of voiceless that must be paved over to grant the writer his own.