Speak Memory
Vladimir Nabokov(1951)
Extract
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
A butterfly trembles in a Russian garden, and a boy catches it with a net whose shadow he will carry across three continents and half a century of exile. Published in 1951, this memoir composes in English what had been lived in Russian and French, and the result is a work of remembrance so precise that it seems to defeat time itself. Each chapter recovers a fragment of the lost world before the revolution: a governess, a train compartment, the coloured tiles of a hallway in St. Petersburg. The prose moves with the patient ardour of a lepidopterist examining wing scales, finding in every detail a pattern that only memory can complete. This is not nostalgia but something fiercer: an insistence that what has been loved cannot be taken.
If you loved this
Proust built the cathedral of memory that Nabokov furnishes with butterflies and Russian snowdrifts.
Nabokov's novel draws on the same lost paradise of pre-revolutionary Russia, but gives the nostalgia a monstrous face.
Pessoa records the same exile from a vanished world, but in fragments instead of Nabokov's jewelled chapters.