an essay on Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory
With a similar potential for misapprehension as Nabokov’s “inclination to equate in retrospect [his] age with that of the century” (13), the reader is inclined to equate his novel Speak, Memory with that of an account of Russia at the turn of the century. The book appears also to be about Nabokov’s life. But what Nabokov has cleverly disguised as a personal memoir is actually an aesthetic exploration of the nature of beauty, especially as it relates to memory. Each chapter is a kind of butterfly hunt (indiscriminate of season or species) for a rare and beautiful specimen worthy of induction into Nabokov’s elaborate collection. In his collection are the moments of aesthetic appreciation that retain a certain significance through the process of memory. The hunt for these is the eager occupation of each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence. Nabokov hunts with the net of memory, and pins his Lepidoptera with elegant style. That is not to say that Nabokov’s prose is dead, for even on the corkboard, his moments of aesthetic beauty come to life. Speak, Memory is Nabokov’s eloquent recollection of those “momentary vacuum[s] into which rushes all that [he] love[s]” (139). For Nabokov memory, beauty and aesthetics are intrinsically linked and arriving at their junction becomes the project of his autobiography.
Nabokov skillfully uses the aesthetic technique of relating the memories of a (however prodigious) child through the lens of a mature adult artist. Nabokov confesses to this technique: “I like to fold my magic carpet [of time], after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another” (139). He superimposes the experience of half a century upon a child’s appreciation of such trivial moments as hiding behind a divan: “it was the primordial cave…that lay behind the games I played when I was four” (23). This technique accomplishes a retrospective significance and attaches a psychological depth to each memory he relates.
Episodes in his earliest years, like the one with Kuropatkin’s matches, provide symbolic and thematic material that a child of such an age could not have understood, but that Nabokov claims to have sensed. And now he articulates the thematic material through his autobiography. Seemingly trivial moments of the past retain a beauty and weight that unfolds later with the end of the thematic strand. Sometimes, as in the case of Nabokov’s first captured (and escaped) butterfly, the strand “dip[s] and dodg[es] and soar[s]” (120) for forty years before it is caught. Nabokov claims that the true purpose of autobiography should be “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life” (27). And if the thematic design of matches (rather than Kuropatkin’s evasion of Soviet imprisonment) is indeed “the point”, then the reader has early been warned of Nabokov’s intended emphasis: the autobiography will focus on rectangles of framed sunlight (119), meerschaum penholders (151), and unprojected film slides (162). These visual metaphors illumine the autobiography’s emphasis on the beautiful particulars. The small, detailed things provide a perspective into something grand and beautiful, which is exactly his desire for Speak, Memory. In the beautiful particulars we find the “intrinsically artistic…meeting place between imagination and knowledge” (167), where Nabokov dwells with reverence.
The first of these perspectival images is the rectangle of framed sunlight in the window which had disclosed the day’s weather and, therefore, its suitability for a butterfly hunt. Nabokov could deduce by that strip of light whether the day would be sullen or brilliant. The next symbolic object is a souvenir Nabokov acquired at
However in Speak, Memory Nabokov does not often explain the beauty and meaning of the detailed particulars and thematic strands. He even confesses occasional ignorance; he admits that with one “marble” of aesthetic appreciation, he “still seem[s] to be holding that wisp of iridescence, not knowing exactly where to fit it” (152). Instead he relates the moment with a crafted style that both installs the reader into Nabokov’s childhood and awakens his or her own catalogue of memories. Thus, part of Nabokov’s project is to appeal to the very human (and specifically childlike) apprehension of the beautiful particulars and to mourn the “astounding” fact of “how little the ordinary person notices butterflies” (129). These are the real treasures of human memory and history, which “as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast” (130) are so easily overshadowed by generalities (Russia, Soviet literature). In awakening these treasures in the reader he implicitly asks him or her to consider the significance of (and relationship between) memory, beauty, and aesthetics. He does not overburden with explanations; nor is he nostalgic and sentimental during his childhood reminiscences. For Nabokov the apprehension of the beautiful particulars is a serious endeavor; the moment of significant memory is the very seed of art, out of which grows everything beautiful and full of life.
Nabokov’s autobiography attempts to diminish the generalities to particulars, and to peer into the beautiful particulars where there are wonderlands of meaning and significance. At their meeting place is the point of aesthetic beauty which is Nabokov’s intended destination. And he will travel land and sea, across
