No finer or more evocative memoir than Nabokov's Speak, Memory has ever been penned. I return to it as a refuge from the lesser-writer's struggle and from the present day.
"On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. . . . But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I made haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow, the room would be cleft into light and shade. The foliage of birches moving in the sun had the translucent green tone of grapes, and in contrast to this there was the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of extraordinary intensity . . ."
I was once a frequent passenger on Europe's trains, and I know of no more vivid recall of the essence of European train travel.
"A change in the speed of the train sometimes interrupted the current of my sleep. Slow lights were stalking by; each, in passing, investigated the same chink, and then a luminous compass measured the shadows. Presently, the train stopped with a long-drawn Westinghousian sigh. . . . Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp. A dismembered newspaper stirred on a bench. Somewhere on the train one could hear muffled voices, somebody’s comfortable cough. There was nothing particularly interesting in the portion of station platform before me, and still I could not tear myself away from it until it departed of its own accord." Brian Boyd, an Irish-born New Zealander, is one of the greatest living Nabokovians, and a fine biographer of VN. I have no reluctance to quote freely from his observations.
"Speak, Memory is
the one Nabokov work outside his finest novels--The
Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada--that is a
masterpiece on
their level. Penelope Lively recently named it her book of the century.
It has
been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgements
depend so
much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most
artistic of
autobiographies. It lacks the probing self-analysis of St Augustine or
Tolstoy
or the overt and the inadvertent self-display of Rousseau, the
historical and
categorical aplomb of Henry Adams or the sparkling anecdotal flow of
Robert
Graves, but more than these and any other autobiographies it fuses truth
to
detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute
awareness
of time with intimations of timelessness."
