Speak, Memory

First Vintage International Edition, August 1989

Copyright 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, © 1967 by Vladimir Nabokov

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in different form, by Harper & Bros., New York, in 1951. This edition published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977.

   Speak, memory: an autobiography revisited / by

     Vladimir Nabokov.

     p.   cm.—(Vintage international)

   Rev. ed. of: Conclusive evidence. 1951.

   eISBN: 978-0-307-78773-6

   1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977—Biography.

2. Authors, Russian—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899–1977. Conclusive evidence. II. Title.

   PG3476.N3Z477   1989

   813’.54—dc 19

   [B]                                                                                          88-40528

Cover art by Michael Bierut

Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

v3.1

To Vera

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

About the Author

Books by Vladimir Nabokov

Foreword

THE present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time. The essay that initiated the series corresponds to what is now Chapter Five. I wrote it in French, under the title of “Mademoiselle O,” thirty years ago in Paris, where Jean Paulhan published it in the second issue of Mesures, 1936. A photograph (published recently in Gisele Freund’s James Joyce in Paris) commemorates this event, except that I am wrongly identified (in the Mesures group relaxing around a garden table of stone) as “Audiberti.”

In America, whither I migrated on May 28, 1940, “Mademoiselle O” was translated by the late Hilda Ward into English, revised by me, and published by Edward Weeks in the January, 1943, issue of The Atlantic Monthly (which was also the first magazine to print my stories written in America). My association with The New Yorker had begun (through Edmund Wilson) with a short poem in April 1942, followed by other fugitive pieces; but my first prose composition appeared there only on January 3, 1948: this was “Portrait of My Uncle” (Chapter Three of the complete work), written in June 1947 at Columbine Lodge, Estes Park, Colo., where my wife, child, and I could not have stayed much longer had not Harold Ross hit it off so well with the ghost of my past. The same magazine also published Chapter Four (“My English Education,” March 27, 1948), Chapter Six (“Butterflies,” June 12, 1948), Chapter Seven (“Colette,” July 31, 1948) and Chapter Nine (“My Russian Education,” September 18, 1948), all written in Cambridge, Mass., at a time of great mental and physical stress, as well as Chapter Ten (“Curtain-Raiser,” January 1, 1949), Chapter Two (“Portrait of My Mother,” April 9, 1949), Chapter Twelve (“Tamara,” December 10, 1949), Chapter Eight (“Lantern Slides,” February 11, 1950; H. R.’s query: “Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”), Chapter One (“Perfect Past,” April 15, 1950), and Chapter