Speak, Memory

BOOKS BY Vladimir Nabokov

NOVELS

Mary

King, Queen, Knave

The Defense

The Eye

Glory

Laughter in the Dark

Despair

Invitation to a Beheading

The Gift

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

Bend Sinister

Lolita

Pnin

Pale Fire

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Transparent Things

Look at the Harlequins!

SHORT FICTION

Nabokov’s Dozen

A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories

Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

The Enchanter

DRAMA

The Waltz Invention

Lolita: A Screenplay

The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Strong Opinions

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

Nikolai Gogol

Lectures on Literature

Lectures on Russian Literature

Lectures on Don Quixote

TRANSLATIONS

Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin,

Lermontov, and Tiutchev

A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Anon.)

Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:

The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971

Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940-1977

MISCELLANEOUS

Poems and Problems

The Annotated Lolita

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 Véra

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 Gisèle 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.”