'Speak, Memory: An autobiography revisited' by Vladimir Nabokov

Wonderfully written, as one would expect from one of the greatest prose stylists of the twentieth century, but this memoir is unusual in that it is made up of fifteen individual essays that were originally published separately in American literary magazines in the 1940s and early 1950s before Nabokov published his great novels.

It is not, therefore, a conventional, full or fullish account of his life. It is a series of vignettes or impressions of different aspects, finishing before he became celebrated and garlanded. But it is absolutely worth reading with all these caveats, partly because of the prose, but also simply because Valdimir Nabokov had the most extraordinarily interesting life.

Born in 1899 in St Petersburg, Nabokov was born into a wealthy landowning Russian family with plenty of land and money as well as a host of literary, artistic and political connections. His father was a liberal in his politics who thus made himself unpopular both under the Tsarist and later the Leninist regimes. He was a member of the Duma for a time, and thus high profile.

The family headed into exile following the Russian Revolution in 1917, Nobokov's father soon being assassinated. Nabokov himself them moved around, first studying at Cambridge, then after marrying, residing for periods in France and Germany, before heading to the USA in 1939 where he would live for the next twenty years before returning to settle in Europe in late middle age. This memoir ends with him getting on the boat to New York, so it covers episodes from the first forty years of his life.

The most interesting passages I think are those concerning his very privileged childhood, living partly in the city and partly on the family estate, Vyra, near St Petersburg - a life that was swiftly abandoned when he was 18 but which he naturally remembered in great detail.

He writes affectionately, on the whole, about his extended family and the succession of tutors and governesses who educated him, many of whom were English, German or French, which explains his multi-lingual abilities and, particularly, his extraordinary capacity to write so beautifully and cleverly in English. He also explains the origins of his love of butterfly and moth collecting, which would remain a major hobby all his life.

A very enjoyable and interesting piece of writing.