Top Topics
-
Sleep
852 recent check-ins -
LAK at NJD 05/30/2012
468 recent check-ins -
NBA Playoffs
365 recent check-ins -
Boston Celtics
346 recent check-ins -
Coffee
255 recent check-ins
-
Your Review
Loading - Loading
0 people checked-in to Speak, Memory on GetGlue
Check-in to entertainment with GetGlue. Connect with friends, discover new favorites, and unlock FREE stickers and discounts.
Speak, Memory (ISBN 0375405534) is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. 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 émigré 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.
Nabokov writes in the text that he was dissuaded from titling the book Speak, Mnemosyne by his publisher, who feared that readers would not buy a "book whose title they could not pronounce". It was first published in a single volume in 1951 as Speak, Memory in the United Kingdom and as Conclusive Evidence in the United States. The Russian version was published in 1954 and called Drugie berega (Other Shores).
An extended edition including several photographs was published in 1966 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.
Similar to 0 things you like:
Sleep
LAK at NJD 05/30/2012
NBA Playoffs
Boston Celtics
Coffee
Check-in to entertainment with GetGlue. Connect with friends, discover new favorites, and unlock FREE stickers and discounts.
You can edit this page because you have earned special privileges on Glue.
Only make changes if you are certain that they are correct.
Made in New York City | Copyright 2009-2012, AdaptiveBlue, Inc