How far is it possible to separate memory from fiction, autobiography from the narrative techniques of the novel? This question lies at the heart of Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s famously stylized memoir, reissued in 2010 by Penguin Classics.  We tend to approach a conventional autobiography – say, Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far, or My Bookie Wook – as a confession, self-critique or perhaps a self-justification. However, those who go to Speak, Memory for biographical ballast to prop up readings of Nabokov’s novels are likely to be disappointed. The real Nabokov is kept firmly behind the scenes in Speak, Memory, which instead uses the author’s recollections as a canvass for a purely stylistic exercise in fusing memory with the elegant narrative patterning so beloved of the modern novel’s most staunch and unapologetic aesthete.

We follow the author through a series of snapshots of his opulent youth as an aristocratic scion in Tsarist Russia, through the family’s flight following the rise to power of the spoil-sport Bolsheviks and on to the author’s days as a student at Cambridge and an aspiring author in Berlin. However, despite the exquisiteness of the prose in which it is rendered, due to Nabokov’s refusal to do anything with his memories other than lavishly aestheticise them, the exercise at times feels rather hollow and cold. The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko once complained that you could hear the clatter of surgical tools in Nabokov’s prose, and it is ironic that this critical detachment is most glaring in the book that convention dictates should be his most personal.

Part of this approach is undoubtedly down to Nabokov’s hard-line aestheticism, which denies outright the novel’s ability to depict the world as it really is. I may record a perception or memory in the form of a sentence, but the resultant sentence is something entirely other from the real-world stimulus that inspired it. Literature is therefore in a sense locked into its own aesthetic form, endlessly mirroring its own artificial shapes and patterns rather than those of the real world. Hence the inward-facing, enclosed strucutures Nabokov is so fond of employing in his novels: like turning a novel into its own blurb in Ada, or constructing a narrative out of a set of footnotes to a poem in Pale Fire.

However, in Speak, Memory – partly stemming from Nabokov’s overbearing self-satisfaction – we don’t find many of the conflicts that animate his greatest art: the virtuosic unreliability of Humbert Humbert, the pathos of Pnin, the comic insanity of Kinbote. Rather, we are lavished with an often sickly-sweet celebration of prelapsarian Tsarist Russia in which the Nabokovs were free to enjoy their life of inconceivable luxury (his father used to send his shirts from St Petersburg to London to be laundered) in oblivious abandon. Sometimes Speak, Memory reads like a sort of designer advert for wealth, and Nabokov’s convenient artistic assumpton of political PH neutrality is undermined by the uncomplicated role in which he casts the Bolshevik revolutionaries as the villains of the piece. The point is not that he is necessarily wrong in doing so, but one can’t help but feel he could have afforded the subject more serious scrutiny.

However, for all its occasional frustrations, the prose in parts of Speak, Memory reaches almost absurdly poetic heights. Despite being a novelistic exercise, Speak, Memory reads less like a continuous narrative than a collection of virtuosic set-pieces (three of which were later published separately as short stories) in which the original stimulus of memory is aesthetically patterned and cadenced in an attempt to reach artistic equilibrium:

“There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”

While his attempts to find this artistic G-spot are often breathtaking, I couldn’t help but be left with the sense that autobiography has a tendancy to bring out the worst in Nabokov. Like Humbert Humbert, he hides behind the mask of his virtuosity, teasing us and never quite letting us in. ‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style’, says Humbert Humbert in one of Lolita’s most memorable lines. In Speak, Memory we have the fancy prose style without the irony, the ingenious overall design or the emotional range. For all of its lavish pyrotechnics, Speak, Memory ultimately feels like a relatively low-stakes exercise – albeit an extremely impressive one.

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