The Reality of the Past

SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov. 316 pages. Putnam. $6.75.

Ego dictates all autobiographies, the good and the bad; the truly modest man keeps silent, letting his life speak for itself. The literary world can be grateful that Novelist Vladimir Nabokov is not all that modest a man. He is, in fact, a compulsive autobiographer. For the past 30 years he has been disbursing fragments of this book to an international assortment of periodicals, obsessively revising, editing and amplifying. Now in its final polish, Speak, Memory deserves to stand as a rare and precious specimen of the autobiographical art.

The book takes Nabokov only to the May morning in 1940, when he and his wife Vera and their only child Dmitri, then 6, embarked for New York from the French port of Saint-Nazaire. Behind him lay two distinct and finished lifetimes. The nearer one was his 20 years as an emigre Russian in Western Europe, teaching tennis and English, writing more or less autobiographical novels in his native tongue. But the farther distance stood closer to his soul, and it stands there still. That was Nabokov's Russian youth, destroyed after 1917 by the Revolution, and constituting an insistent summons from the past. "I would submit," he writes, "that in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them by giving them more than their share, in view of the total cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known."

Cloud Castles. Nabokov's recall seems total. Across his greedy, adoring memory float the cloud castles of a childhood that vanished with the czars: a winter residence in St. Petersburg, a summer estate with five bathrooms and 50 servants, "a bewildering succession of English nurses and governesses" and tutors, long bicycle rides along the Luga highway with his beloved father, "mighty-calved, knickerbockered, tweed-coated, checker-capped," holidays in European seaside resorts and spas--all of it heightened now by the awareness of irretrievable loss. "A sense of security, of wellbeing, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present." It is of no importance that Russian imperialism underwrote that way of life. Nabokov is concerned only with preserving "the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate"--and he transports the reader with a series of unforgettable images that have nothing to do with ideology or geography.

The sun, setting exclusively for the young Nabokov, "lent an ember to my bicycle bell." Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned, the "wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits" encountered in the English grammars that he mastered before Russian, "now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of my memory." On the Nord-Express, "I saw a city, with its toylike trams, linden trees and brick walls, enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side." A telephone number rises from the welter of years: "What would happen if I put in a long-distance call from my desk right now? No answer? No such number? No such country?" Highest Rank. No such country. The present has deservedly rewarded Nabokov, now 67, whose novels in English-The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, Pnin, Lolita and Pale Fire--have placed him in the highest rank of contemporary writers. These books stimulated a demand for the au thor's total work, so that most of his earlier Russian novels have now completed the journey into translation.

He has responded to his success by leaving the U.S., where he lived until 1960, to take up a voluntary exile in a hotel in Montreux, Switzerland--as near as he can get to the source of his memories, as near as he wants to get. In a foreword to this splendid hymn to his past, he suggests that one day he will write a sequel, Speak On, Memory, covering the years spent in America.

It is hoped that he will, but he may not. The present, after all, is a ghost of less substance than the unmelting snows that mantle his youth. "The snow is real," he writes, imagining some long-ago blizzard, "and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, 60 years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers."

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