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Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight / Bend Sinister / Speak, Memory
After a brilliant literary career writing in Russian, Vladimir Nabokov immigrated to the United States in 1940 and went on to an even more brilliant one in English. Between 1939 and 1974 he wrote the autobiography and eight novels now collected by the Library of America in an authoritative three-volume set, earning a place as one of the greatest writers of America, his beloved adopted home.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, published a year after he settled in the U. S., is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of a famous author. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, this novel was published in 1941.
Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of Adam Krug, a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic bungling of a totalitarian police state. “I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer,” Nabokov affirms in his introduction to the novel, but goes on to state: “There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass caused by idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.”
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; revised 1966), Nabokov’s dazzling memoir of his childhood in imperial Russia and exile in Europe, is central to an understanding of his art. With its balance of inner and outer worlds—of family chronicle and private fantasy, revolutions and butterflies, the games of childhood and the disasters of politics—the work that Nabokov called “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections” is a haunting transmutation of life into art. “I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe…I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love,” he writes toward the end of the book, “so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”
The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov’s penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, published a year after he settled in the U. S., is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of a famous author. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, this novel was published in 1941.
Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s most explicitly political novel, is the haunting, dreamlike story of Adam Krug, a quiet philosophy professor caught up in the bureaucratic bungling of a totalitarian police state. “I am neither a didacticist nor an allegorizer,” Nabokov affirms in his introduction to the novel, but goes on to state: “There can be distinguished, no doubt, certain reflections in the glass caused by idiotic and despicable regimes that we all know and that have brushed against me in the course of my life: worlds of tyranny and torture, of Fascists and Bolshevists, of Philistine thinkers and jack-booted baboons.”
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951; revised 1966), Nabokov’s dazzling memoir of his childhood in imperial Russia and exile in Europe, is central to an understanding of his art. With its balance of inner and outer worlds—of family chronicle and private fantasy, revolutions and butterflies, the games of childhood and the disasters of politics—the work that Nabokov called “a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections” is a haunting transmutation of life into art. “I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe…I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love,” he writes toward the end of the book, “so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.”
The texts of this volume incorporate Nabokov’s penciled corrections in his own copies of his works and correct long-standing errors. They are the most authoritative versions available and have been prepared with the assistance of Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son.
710 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1996
10 people are currently reading
336 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Nabokov
863 books15.1k followersVladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 14, 2012
Taken together, Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory paint a remarkable picture of the life of the small sliver of the Russian population who lived in wealth and privilege during the last years of Tsarist Russia, and the exile life of the lucky ones who escaped a far bleaker existence after the 1917 Russian Revolution. (In fairness, Nabokov's father was never a monachist, but a staunch liberal who condemned the tsar and his policies, and even served a brief time in prison for his open criticism.)
These book also portray one of the most remarkable literary minds of the 20th century. The brilliant prose is here, of course, but also an unmistakable intellectual arrogance that, far from denying, Nabokov appears to revel in. But we make allowances as Yeats observed of another writer ... "pardon him for writing well."
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight glitters, but no a lot happens, and although our narrator suggests that a great mystery surrounded Sebastian’s life as an émigré Russian writer of distinction if not popular success, very little happens that is genuinely surprising.
(A fictional sample of Sebastian's fiction: "The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition" ... "Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul.") Not lines that would make me want to run out and buy his books.
Sebastian, as related by his half-brother narrator, is an enervated figure with a heart condition. He is educated at Cambridge and lives restlessly on the continent, where he conducts a desultory love affair, and then dies before the narrator can reach his side. At the end, the brother tracks down Sebastian's mysterious and seductive last lover, but rejects the opportunity to sleep with her, for no discernable reason except to establish his moral superiority, and inadvertently, the author's callowness.
Bend Sinister, set in a fictional East European totalitarian state, is Nabokov's only political novel. The bright sheen from the dazzling language initially makes it hard to engage the story, that of Krug, a celebrated academic, who is raising a young son while devastated by the death of wife. Krug, with the signature intellectual arrogance of the Nabokovian protagonists, runs afoul of the country's "Dear Leader," who happens to have been Krug's hapless and unprepossessing schoolmate, known as "Toad," whom everyone liked to pick on.
The story finally kicks in with the brilliant depiction of the casual, laughing, and utterly terrifying manner in which Krug's friends disappear into the gulag before Krug himself is arrested. But the most horrifying moments occur offstage, when it becomes clear that Krug's son has been abducted and presumably tortured and killed with a kind casual depraved indifference. Those killers are, in turn, killed by the dictator (much as Stalin's infamous executioners, Yagoda and Yezhov were themselves tortured and shot). At the end, Krug is led to the firing squad in a scene of surreal violence that underscores the dictator's own cowardice and corruption.
Nabokov's childhood memoir, Speak, Memory, belies Tolstoy's famous adage that all happy families are alike. It reads like an old fashioned magic-lantern show -- a succession of vivid and indelible images -- presumably remembered, half-remembered, and imagined -- of the lost world of life on prerevolutionary country estates and European travel. Nabokov's sensibility is overwhelmingly visual here; he admits to having no ear or interest in music whatsoever. He describes the minute details of home interiors, butterflies, and the Russian countryside as if viewed through a magnifying glass or the wrong end of the telescope.
Here is a typical passage, recalling one of his uncle's estates: "I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere."
By the end, it is hard to avoid sharing Nabokov's perception that he and his family lost something close to a paradise of culture, love, learning, and, yes, affluence, with the coming of the Bolshevik revolution.
These book also portray one of the most remarkable literary minds of the 20th century. The brilliant prose is here, of course, but also an unmistakable intellectual arrogance that, far from denying, Nabokov appears to revel in. But we make allowances as Yeats observed of another writer ... "pardon him for writing well."
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight glitters, but no a lot happens, and although our narrator suggests that a great mystery surrounded Sebastian’s life as an émigré Russian writer of distinction if not popular success, very little happens that is genuinely surprising.
(A fictional sample of Sebastian's fiction: "The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition" ... "Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul.") Not lines that would make me want to run out and buy his books.
Sebastian, as related by his half-brother narrator, is an enervated figure with a heart condition. He is educated at Cambridge and lives restlessly on the continent, where he conducts a desultory love affair, and then dies before the narrator can reach his side. At the end, the brother tracks down Sebastian's mysterious and seductive last lover, but rejects the opportunity to sleep with her, for no discernable reason except to establish his moral superiority, and inadvertently, the author's callowness.
Bend Sinister, set in a fictional East European totalitarian state, is Nabokov's only political novel. The bright sheen from the dazzling language initially makes it hard to engage the story, that of Krug, a celebrated academic, who is raising a young son while devastated by the death of wife. Krug, with the signature intellectual arrogance of the Nabokovian protagonists, runs afoul of the country's "Dear Leader," who happens to have been Krug's hapless and unprepossessing schoolmate, known as "Toad," whom everyone liked to pick on.
The story finally kicks in with the brilliant depiction of the casual, laughing, and utterly terrifying manner in which Krug's friends disappear into the gulag before Krug himself is arrested. But the most horrifying moments occur offstage, when it becomes clear that Krug's son has been abducted and presumably tortured and killed with a kind casual depraved indifference. Those killers are, in turn, killed by the dictator (much as Stalin's infamous executioners, Yagoda and Yezhov were themselves tortured and shot). At the end, Krug is led to the firing squad in a scene of surreal violence that underscores the dictator's own cowardice and corruption.
Nabokov's childhood memoir, Speak, Memory, belies Tolstoy's famous adage that all happy families are alike. It reads like an old fashioned magic-lantern show -- a succession of vivid and indelible images -- presumably remembered, half-remembered, and imagined -- of the lost world of life on prerevolutionary country estates and European travel. Nabokov's sensibility is overwhelmingly visual here; he admits to having no ear or interest in music whatsoever. He describes the minute details of home interiors, butterflies, and the Russian countryside as if viewed through a magnifying glass or the wrong end of the telescope.
Here is a typical passage, recalling one of his uncle's estates: "I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere."
By the end, it is hard to avoid sharing Nabokov's perception that he and his family lost something close to a paradise of culture, love, learning, and, yes, affluence, with the coming of the Bolshevik revolution.
January 9, 2021
This anthology consists of two short novels by Vladimir Nabokov, his partial autobiography, and a summary year-by-year chronology.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1946) represent Nabokov's earliest writing in English. Both are black comedies with fictional characters and plots enlivened by frankly autobiographical situations and motivations. The reader would understand them better after reading the autobiography. It should be noted that English was not really a second language for Nabokov; it was a preferred language in his family circle.
Speak, Memory is presented as Nabokov's autobiography up to his second wartime evacuation (France to the U.S. in 1940). But actually this account only covers Nabokov's beloved family (Russian aristocracy), happy childhood, and youth/education with (non-sequential) interjections about literary figures of his acquaintance. Speak, Memory satisfies with a gorgeously creative flow of words and ideas. But as an autobiography it is weakened by all that it leaves out: any and all adult experiences, foibles, beliefs, griefs, etc. I gauge literary autobiography by comparison with Anthony Burgess (Little Wilson, Big God and You've Had Your Time) - Nabokov's does not approach this standard of excellence.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1946) represent Nabokov's earliest writing in English. Both are black comedies with fictional characters and plots enlivened by frankly autobiographical situations and motivations. The reader would understand them better after reading the autobiography. It should be noted that English was not really a second language for Nabokov; it was a preferred language in his family circle.
Speak, Memory is presented as Nabokov's autobiography up to his second wartime evacuation (France to the U.S. in 1940). But actually this account only covers Nabokov's beloved family (Russian aristocracy), happy childhood, and youth/education with (non-sequential) interjections about literary figures of his acquaintance. Speak, Memory satisfies with a gorgeously creative flow of words and ideas. But as an autobiography it is weakened by all that it leaves out: any and all adult experiences, foibles, beliefs, griefs, etc. I gauge literary autobiography by comparison with Anthony Burgess (Little Wilson, Big God and You've Had Your Time) - Nabokov's does not approach this standard of excellence.
Want to read
March 25, 2016Starting with Sebastian Knight.
October 1, 2019
Be sure to read the Chronology at the end. It is an entertaining mini-novel propelled by the turbulence of the early 20th century. My favorite line from it: Takes job in bank but leaves after three hours.
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Bend Sinister
[From the Introduction] There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.
Speak, Memory
In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature.
I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of tel-egraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped ar-rangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stra-tus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.
The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds—heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray […]
The tennis court was a region of great lakes.
Beyond the park, above steaming fields, a rainbow slipped into view; the fields ended in the notched dark border of a remote fir wood; part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drawn before it: a tenderness and glory that made poor relatives of the rhomboidal, colored reflections which the return of the sun had brought forth on the pavilion floor.
A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief—the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say “patter” inten-tionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.
[…] The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to strips of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe em-braced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better.
---------------------------------------------
Bend Sinister
[From the Introduction] There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.
Speak, Memory
In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature.
I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of tel-egraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped ar-rangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stra-tus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.
The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds—heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray […]
The tennis court was a region of great lakes.
Beyond the park, above steaming fields, a rainbow slipped into view; the fields ended in the notched dark border of a remote fir wood; part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drawn before it: a tenderness and glory that made poor relatives of the rhomboidal, colored reflections which the return of the sun had brought forth on the pavilion floor.
A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief—the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say “patter” inten-tionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.
[…] The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to strips of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe em-braced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better.
October 5, 2024
Of the three novels in this volume, i read only "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." In this work, the narrator "V." records his efforts to research and understand the life of his deceased half-brother, who was a Russian-borne English novelist (Sebastian Knight). He tracks down people who were part of Sebastian's life, going to huge efforts to do so. I found it rather challenging because of Nabokov's ornate writing style (although I love "Lolita," and found it completely accessible), the use of French sprinkled throughout, and the inclusion of several stories (plots of books written by Sebastian) within the story. On the more enjoyable side was the narrator's cynical humor, and I was completely drawn into V's efforts to solve the mystery of the identity of Sebastian's last lover.
June 24, 2017
Speak, Memory, for its stylist evocation of place and sense, is an outstanding example of memoir and must be read before one ventures to document one's own dance through the calendar. Style also covers author's shyness about his marriage. I've since read short, impish Pnin and am soon to challenge Ada or Ardor in my Nabokov project.
April 19, 2022
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is my favorite Nabokov novel, and having read most of his novels it's the only one I really recommend to friends.
Read
August 1, 2012Just finished Speak, Memory. Nabokov is a fabulous writer. He led a very interesting life and came from a most accomplished family in Russia. Even though his memoir covers his birth in St. Petersburg in 1899 to his leaving France for the US in 1940 it is worth a read. His use of language and grasp of history and culture is breathtaking.
November 1, 2016
Nabokov's world draws you in...you almost view it through his own synesthesia...his own hesitation and slight embarassment at writing in English doesn't diminish the power of these (unfairly) lesser known works. 'Bend, Sinister', still darkly humorous and still as relevant today as ever. Handsome edition too from the Library of America.
October 11, 2009
This rates only "Speak, Memory."
March 15, 2010
Speak, Memory contains some of the best writing I have ever grokked.
August 27, 2011
Good beyond my wildest expectations! 'Speak, Memory' is a lesson in writing memoirs
July 2, 2013
Bend Sinister is great.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews