The swoon-worthy descriptions of his verdant surroundings helped me see my own with new eyes. For much of his boyhood the family summered at an estate 50 miles outside St Petersburg, roughly half the distance of my Hudson Valley home from New York City. And for writers experiencing self-doubt, remember that Nabokov’s first book was so maligned his teacher set aside class time to sarcastically quote it at length.Īs one might expect the most salutary bits are Nabokov’s writings on nature. An aside on Heinrich von Kleist’s infatuation with a prepubescent ancestor of Nabokov’s – which, of course – sent me to Kleist’s 1810 novella Michael Kohlhaas (recently translated by Michael Hofmann) and its timely satire of state corruption and vigilantism. There’s jingoistic cousin Yuri, whose callow opinions of Tolstoy echo the isolationism of Fox News-addicted relatives. Martin Amis, making his pilgrimage in 1981, called Montreux a “suspended playground … I thought of the lost and innocuous parklands of an idealised boyhood.”Īs for the autobiography itself, nearly every chapter resonates in 2020. For the introverts, his daily schedule, outlined in a 1975 profile by James Salter for People magazine(!), sounds downright heavenly. The Nabokovs entertained no friends, never went to the movies, tipped everyone well, and rarely left town. Montreux was self-isolation par excellence. Nabokov stayed at the hotel from 1961 until his death in 1977. (Literary greats: they’re just like us!) The book was revised at Lake Geneva’s Montreux Palace, where Vladimir and Véra lived after Lolita’s success provided a comfortable sinecure. Speak, Memory collects magazine pieces originally written for Harper’s and the New Yorker, when Nabokov needed cash to supplement his meager teaching income.

In my defense, literary propriety felt especially flexible after bleach-wiping groceries.

The last thing old Vladimir desired was anyone drawing lifestyle advice from his work. I first read it 10 years ago and quickly saw the wisdom in the author’s oft-quoted line, “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it.” Nabokov’s remembrances granted reprieve from the new abnormal and – crucially – guidance on how to navigate it. My listlessness ended after I pulled Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory from my bookshelf, more or less at random.

Nabokov speak memory