Speak, Memory

Speak, Memory is a memoir by the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and assembled from individual autobiographical essays he published between 1936 and 1951, first appearing as a complete book in 1951. Nabokov had initially wanted to title the work Speak, Mnemosyne, but his publisher discouraged the choice for fear readers would not know how to pronounce it; the book appeared in Britain as Speak, Memory and in the United States under the title Conclusive Evidence, and Nabokov later produced a Russian-language version, Drugie berega, in 1954, followed by a revised and expanded English edition, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, in 1966. The memoir covers Nabokov's life from 1903 to his 1940 emigration to the United States, recounting his privileged upbringing in pre-revolutionary Russia, his education, and the years he spent among Russian emigre communities in Western Europe after the Bolshevik Revolution forced his family into exile. Written in a densely lyrical, image-driven style, the book is regarded as one of the finest autobiographies of the twentieth century and a key to the personal preoccupations, especially memory, exile and time, that run through Nabokov's fiction.