Speak, Memory

Vladimir Nabokov's dazzling autobiography, published in 1966, is a dense and enchanting flood of recollections--of his comfortable bourgeois childhood and adolescence, his obsession with lepidoptery, his rich and liberal-minded father, his beautiful and compassionate mother, an army of relations and hangers-on, and St. Petersburg in pre-revolutionary Russia. It's a world that was snatched away from him at age 18, when the Russian Revolution compelled the family to flee. The events of the book cover a span of 37 years, from 1903 to 1940, when Nabokov (1899-1977) immigrated to America. In his foreword to the original edition, he explains how he reconstructed his past, corrects a couple of chronological blunders ("Mnemosyne...has shown herself to be a very careless girl"), and provides some information on the chess problems in the book.