Word: nabokovs
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...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...
SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov. 316 pages. Putnam...
...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...
...porcupine-quilled social comment. The third playlet is simple and startling. A huge papier-mache Mother Hubbard doll intones a litany of all the beauties of the motel room that she owns, conjuring up memories of the garish comic horrors of the journey through a Sahara of motels in Nabokov's Lolita. Into this room tromp a man (Conrad Fowkes) and a woman (James Barbosa) looking like plaster casts with comic-strip blow-up heads. They proceed to demolish everything in he room, and at the height of the carnage they scrawl foot-high obscenities on the walls, some...