Speak, Memory

"I reread this last night, and I still think it’s one of the most beautiful memoirs ever written. Although it’s not about the Russian revolution as such, it is permeated with a sense of loss and exile, as are all of Nabokov’s books. He evokes gorgeous countryside scenes of pre-revolutionary Russia, but at the same time has some distance from it – he recognises the awfulness of what he at one point calls his “rather appalling country” at the same time. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Nabokov writes a great deal about his father, who was a liberal Russian politician – assassinated in 1922 in Germany – and had to leave when the Bolsheviks took over. It’s a different view of Russia than the one we usually read about. Nabokov’s milieu was neither the Czar’s inner circle nor the Bolshevik revolutionaries, but rather the Russian upper-middle classes who might have become a liberal intelligentsia but never got the chance. There are clearly stories in Speak, Memory which seem as if they may have been invented. He even half admits this himself – Nabokov sometimes asks the reader, “do I really remember this or am I making it up?” I once read a passage of the book aloud to my husband – about Nabokov’s childhood memory of playing with his mother’s jewels – and my husband laughed at me, and said “you can’t possibly believe this is true.” But this is one of the central themes: the tricks that memory plays, and how, in the course of writing, things come back to you. While this is a book about a childhood in Russia, it’s also a book about how time changes what we think about things. You should certainly read it with a grain of salt. Communism was an ideology which defeated itself: it promised so much, and it delivered so little that at least in Eastern Europe, it became very obvious very fast that it wasn’t what it said it was. It also contained its own internal contradictions. It’s leaders said “we will bring prosperity to the workers,” and we will do so because Marxism is a science, not just a philosophy. But by the late 1940s, Western Europe had already pulled away from Eastern Europe, and was rapidly becoming more prosperous. Although East European communism took another 40 years to fall, it was almost immediately clear that it had not succeeded, according to its own definition. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . These were also regimes which set out to control everything – the arts, sports, education, politics. But that mania for control also had a fatal flaw: Any problem or dispute in any area suddenly became politicized. Workers going on strike were by definition striking against the system. If an artist painted a forbidden picture it was an act of dissidence. Communism’s vast ambition made it a curiously weak political order. They’re all around us, already. We are witnessing mass ethnic murder in Syria right now. Ethnic, tribal and religious wars are raging in Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Congo and Afghanistan. North Korea is a very sick and unstable society. Worse may follow. We’ve learned a few things, but not enough. At least if you read books like these five you can empathize, a little bit, with what some people are experiencing today."

"I can see how publishers would say that. This was written in fragments, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker . It is a memoir which emerged from exile. Nabokov was forced into exile after the Russian revolution . In 1920 he moved to Berlin, then to Paris and finally to America in 1940. The memoir is a reconstruction of his own life, but also of his lost world. He grew up in the most privileged circumstances imaginable, in a palatial house in St Petersburg, part of a very prosperous and aristocratic family. His father was a liberal statesman, and was assassinated in 1922 by a stray bullet meant for someone else at a political conference. But Nabakov had a very happy childhood. He was convincingly loved by both of his parents, what I think of as the “Oedipal winner”. He was nurtured, nourished and loved. Then, exile – and all of this was utterly lost. His mother lived in very meagre circumstances in Prague. He was reduced to impoverishment himself, and had to give tennis and language lessons to support himself. Fortunately, he was good at tennis. His wife was Jewish, and as World War II approached there was an increasing sense of threat. That is why they eventually went to America. The memoir takes them up to the point of emigration, but really is about the old world. He claims the rights to his bit of ecological territory – I mean the human ecology. And the memoir constitutes an almost palpable reconstruction of that ecology, of a lost world, through the powers of language and memory. I reread it as I was writing my memoir, and I love it for several reasons. First, it made me feel that it is possible to give written form to nostalgia. The lyrical affirmation of that was quite important to me. Secondly, his preoccupation with language. I kept looking for books which talk about language, and at the end of the book Nabokov has a dedication to the Russian language, or an invocation of it and his incredibly poignant loss of it. That gave me the courage to think that this was a subject I could write about. His memoir was mostly written in English, although I believe some parts were written in Russian first. He was brought up in English as much as in Russian. It was practically his first language. He came from a part of the Russian aristocracy that was very Anglophile. Nabokov was important to me because in a sense he was a counterpart to my own situation, and perhaps even to my response to exile. He responded to exile with largesse. It’s triumphant. He always felt that he could assert his absolute originality. He didn’t need to belong to any group, even though he came from a certain background. And he didn’t need to define himself by larger circumstances. At one point he mentions the Russian revolution by the by, as if a terrible event but below the notice of his attention. So in a sense it was the opposite of the vexed struggle that I had with the condition of exile, and I loved it for that. To me it was absolutely crucial. And what was crucial was not the particularities of Polish or English, but my relationship to the language. The relationship to your first language is very different to your relationships to subsequent languages, no matter how well you speak them. You learn the first language unconsciously, and it seems to stand for the things that it names. There is no distinction between the word and the thing. It has a kind of absoluteness that seems to emerge from yourself. It is very difficult to recreate that in subsequent languages, especially if one learns them later in life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But this was very much what I wanted to recreate in English for myself. That was my project for quite a few years – for English to drop into my psyche, so that I didn’t feel a distance from it. Initially, for quite a long time, I felt it was a different self when I spoke English. I sympathise with Sartre’s self-creation through words, and the element of falseness and bad faith that it necessarily involves. I made the decision to write my diary in English when I still hardly knew English. It involves a very wilful self-creation."