Speak, Memory Themes

"Memory" in "Speak, Memory " isn't just half of the title: it's the obsession on which the whole book is built. For Nabokov, memory is a constantly shifting set of impressions and images, and he's...

The way we communicate is often just as important as what we say. In "Speak, Memory," most of the characters are fluent in at least two languages, and those that aren't feel left out. In the Naboko...

"Speak, Memory" covers the first forty years of Vladimir Nabokov life, but it's especially front-loaded to give readers the fullest sense of his life in Russia before and during a series of major p...

The Nabokov family tree is gnarled, gigantic, and far-reaching. It's chock full of wealthy hunters, opera singers, petty criminals, and government lackeys. But "Speak, Memory" isn't about just abou...

A writer writing about writing may seem like a case of insider baseball, but reading about Nabokov's early days as a scribe in "Speak, Memory" is actually a novel way to witness the evolution of a...

For the large herd of themes in this book, "exile" might be the one at the head of the pack. In "Speak, Memory," the family's exile sits at the emotional core of the book. In 1917, when Vladimir's...

Not to oversimplify it, but most of Russia's upheavals in the early twentieth century had something to do with society, class, wealth, and its distribution. You had the ritzy Tsar and his supporter...

During his life, Nabokov was a voracious learner, a terrible student, and a celebrated teacher, so it's no wonder that his life story has a lot of different things to say about the theme of educati...

This book has more wormholes than a sci-fi film fest. With all of the back-and-forth in Nabokov's autobiography, it's easy to see why time could be construed as a major theme in "Speak, Memory." Th...