Autobiography of vladimir nabokov

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Why Nabokov’s Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us

He was referring to the classic account by Vladimir Nabokov (–) of his idyllic Russian childhood in a family of colorful aristocrats, the Bolshevik revolution that banished him to exile, and the path that would eventually lead him to live in the United States.

Rosenblatt is far from alone in hailing Speak, Memory as a gem. “To write superior autobiography one requires not only literary gifts, which are obtainable with effort, but an intrinsically interesting life, which is less frequently available,” literary critic Joseph Epstein once observed. “Those who possess the one are frequently devoid of the other, and vice versa. Only a fortunate few are able to reimagine their lives, to find themes and patterns that explain a life, in the way successful autobiography requires. Vladimir Nabokov was among them.” After closing the pages of Speak, Memory, John Updike, no slouch himself as a prose stylist, was carr

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Speak, Memory

October 29,

To me, this was always the Nabokov book. An old hardback of Speak Memory was on one of the bookcases at home when inom was growing up, probably in the study - on a shelf low enough, as a small child, to become as familiar with the spine's unmistakable heavy block capitals, for them to seem as permanent an installation as any item of furniture that was older than inom was.

Lolita belonged to a later, outside world, of cult books and lists of modern classics that became increasingly familiar through my teens. inom somehow felt as if it were by another author altogether. Lolita wasn't the sort of book that would have been in the house. This early instinct about the difference between the two books as worlds was borne out in the reading far more than I, mittpunkt aged and, finally, about to början Speak Memory, had figured it would be.

Several years after having read Lolita, and familiar with blurbs and reviews of other Nabokov books, there were things inom exp

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Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years

"Mr. Boyd has a remarkable gift for drawing life and literature together. . . .[What he does] in this impressive biography reveals to us a Nabokov who has been far too little known. . . . As a biography [Boyd's] book can hardly be surpassed. It is a definitive life of the man and a superbly documented chronicle of his time."—Sergei Davydov, The New York Times Book Review

"A terrific biography: intelligent, compulsively readable, indispensable. Brian Boyd brings to his work a passionate scholarship comparable to that in Nabokov's own encyclopedic edition of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. You just can't do better than that."—Michael Dirada, the Washington Post Book World

"To the short list of outstanding literary biographies in our time there must now be added another remarkable achievement. . . . Brian Boyd had a great story to tell, and he has told it superbly."—Hilton Kramer, The Wall Street Journal

"Boyd has man