Speak, Memory

I just finished reading the autobiography Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov. It’s the only piece of writing of his that I’ve ever read, and I’ve decided not to read any of his fiction, nor the extensive biography by Brian Boyd. I want to enjoy this book simply as a beautifully crafted autobiographical work, apart from the larger context of his life. It stands on its own as the expression of a complex and highly educated mind—a person who lived through the upheavals and horrors of the twentieth century.

What passages have stayed with me the most? There are many sections. 

One, chapter six, that I just now opened at random, reads, "After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of the morass under my foot, than i knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, non-illustrated descriptions I had worshiped for several seasons....I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness, in a landscape selected at random, is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thill of gratitude to whom it may concern, to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

In his precise and poetic descriptions, I can feel the ecstasy and love he felt for the natural world—a world he knew in Russia as a child and that never left his memory or heart.

Nabokov was a scholarly and passionate lepidopterist. This is my drawing of a butterfly that he discovered and that was named after him.