Word: nabokovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
SPEAK, MEMORY, by Vladimir Nabokov. Robbed of his Russian youth by the revolution, Novelist Nabokov has tirelessly caressed his memories of it in this autobiography, now published in its final form -a hymn to childhood...
...dictates all autobiographies, the good and the bad; the truly modest man keeps silent, letting his life speak for itself. The literary world can be grateful that Novelist Vladimir Nabokov is not all that modest a man. He is, in fact, a compulsive autobiographer. For the past 30 years he has been disbursing fragments of this book to an international assortment of periodicals, obsessively revising, editing and amplifying. Now in its final polish, Speak, Memory deserves to stand as a rare and precious specimen of the autobiographical...
...book takes Nabokov only to the May morning in 1940, when he and his wife Vera and their only child Dmitri, then 6, embarked for New York from the French port of Saint-Nazaire. Behind him lay two distinct and finished lifetimes. The nearer one was his 20 years as an emigre Russian in Western Europe, teaching tennis and English, writing more or less autobiographical novels in his native tongue. But the farther distance stood closer to his soul, and it stands there still. That was Nabokov's Russian youth, destroyed after 1917 by the Revolution, and constituting...
Cloud Castles. Nabokov's recall seems total. Across his greedy, adoring memory float the cloud castles of a childhood that vanished with the czars: a winter residence in St. Petersburg, a summer estate with five bathrooms and 50 servants, "a bewildering succession of English nurses and governesses" and tutors, long bicycle rides along the Luga highway with his beloved father, "mighty-calved, knickerbockered, tweed-coated, checker-capped," holidays in European seaside resorts and spas-all of it heightened now by the awareness of irretrievable loss. "A sense of security, of wellbeing, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust...
...setting exclusively for the young Nabokov, "lent an ember to my bicycle bell." Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned, the "wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits" encountered in the English grammars that he mastered before Russian, "now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of my memory." On the Nord-Express, "I saw a city, with its toylike trams, linden trees and brick walls, enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side." A telephone number rises from the welter of years: "What would happen...