Speak, Memory

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 Fifteen (“Gardens and Parks,” June 17, 1950), all written in Ithaca, N.Y.

Of the remaining three chapters, Chapters Eleven and Fourteen appeared in the Partisan Review (“First Poem,” September, 1949, and “Exile,” January-February, 1951), while Chapter Thirteen went to Harper’s Magazine (“Lodgings in Trinity Lane,” January, 1951).

The English version of “Mademoiselle O” has been republished in Nine Stories (New Directions, 1947), and Nabokov’s Dozen (Doubleday, 1958; Heinemann, 1959; Popular Library, 1959; and Penguin Books, 1960); in the latter collection, I also included “First Love,” which became the darling of anthologists.

Although I had been composing these chapters in the erratic sequence reflected by the dates of first publication given above, they had been neatly filling numbered gaps in my mind which followed the present order of chapters. That order had been established in 1936, at the placing of the cornerstone which already held in its hidden hollow various maps, timetables, a collection of matchboxes, a chip of ruby glass, and even—as I now realize—the view from my balcony of Geneva lake, of its ripples and glades of light, black-dotted today, at teatime, with coots and tufted ducks. I had no trouble therefore in assembling a volume which Harper & Bros. of New York brought out in 1951, under the title Conclusive Evidence; conclusive evidence of my having existed. Unfortunately, the phrase suggested a mystery story, and I planned to entitle the British edition Speak, Mnemosyne but was told that “little old ladies would not want to ask for a book whose title they could not pronounce.” I also toyed with The Anthemion which is the name of a honeysuckle ornament, consisting of elaborate interlacements and expanding clusters, but nobody liked it; so we finally settled for Speak, Memory (Gollancz, 1951, and The Universal Library, N.Y., 1960). Its translations are: Russian, by the author (Drugie Berega, The Chekhov Publishing House, N.Y., 1954), French, by Yvonne Davet (Autres Rivages, Gallimard, 1961), Italian, by Bruno Oddera (Parla, Ricordo, Mondadori, 1962), Spanish, by Jaime Piñeiro Gonzáles (¡Habla, memoria!, 1963) and German, by Dieter E. Zimmer (Rowohlt, 1964). This exhausts the necessary amount of bibliographic information, which jittery critics who were annoyed by the note at the end of Nabokov’s Dozen will be, I hope, hypnotized into accepting at the beginning of the present work.