Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited [Conclusive Evidence]

316 pp. An autobiographical work by the author of the controversial novel Lolita, originally published as Conclusive Evidence. "The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in a quasi-aristocratic family living in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg and their country estate Vyra near Siverskaya. The final three chapters recall his years at Cambridge and as part of the Russian emigre community in Berlin and Paris. The book is dedicated to his wife Vera and covers his life from 1903 until his emigration to America in 1940. Nabokov published "Mademoiselle O", which became Chapter Five of the book, in French in 1936, and in English in the Atlantic Monthly in 1943, not indicating that it actually was not fiction. Subsequent pieces of the autobiography were published as individual or collected stories, and each chapter can stand on its own. Andrew Field observed that while Nabokov evoked the past through "puppets of memory", like his educators, Colette, or Tamara, his intimate family life with Vera and Dmitri remained "untouched". Field indicated that the chapter on butterflies is an interesting example how the author deploys the fictional with the factual. It recounts, for example, how his first butterfly escapes at Vyra, in Russia, and is "overtaken and captured" forty years later on a butterfly hunt in Colorado."