Sunday, May 2, 2010

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov


This is Nabokov's memoir, an impressionistic tale of his youth—or rather, his remembrance of youth—in an aristocratic family living in Saint Petersburg and their country estate before the Russian Revolution. His family escaped from the Bolsheviks in 1918, with the book touching lightly on his European exile during the 1920s and 30s and ending with this departure for the U.S. in 1940.

The inside pages have this great map of the Nabokov estate, with a drawing of a butterfly in the upper left (obscured by the bookplate left on by a former owner).

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