Novels Memoirs 1941–1951: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight / Bend Sinister / Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

Novels Memoirs 1941–1951: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight / Bend Sinister / Speak, Memory Reviews

• 
  Howard Cincotta

  Taken together, Sebastian Knight, Bend Sinister, and Speak, Memory paint a remarkable picture of the life of the small sliver of the Russian population who lived in wealth and privilege during the last years of Tsarist Russia, and the exile life of the lucky ones who escaped a far bleaker existence after the 1917 Russian Revolution. (In fairness, Nabokov's father was never a monachist, but a staunch liberal who condemned the tsar and his policies, and even served a brief time in prison for his open criticism.)
  
  These book also portray one of the most remarkable literary minds of the 20th century. The brilliant prose is here, of course, but also an unmistakable intellectual arrogance that, far from denying, Nabokov appears to revel in. But we make allowances as Yeats observed of another writer ... "pardon him for writing well."
  
  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight glitters, but no a lot happens, and although our narrator suggests that a great mystery surrounded Sebastian’s life as an émigré Russian writer of distinction if not popular success, very little happens that is genuinely surprising.
  
  (A fictional sample of Sebastian's fiction: "The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition" ... "Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul.") Not lines that would make me want to run out and buy his books.
  
  Sebastian, as related by his half-brother narrator, is an enervated figure with a heart condition. He is educated at Cambridge and lives restlessly on the continent, where he conducts a desultory love affair, and then dies before the narrator can reach his side. At the end, the brother tracks down Sebastian's mysterious and seductive last lover, but rejects the opportunity to sleep with her, for no discernable reason except to establish his moral superiority, and inadvertently, the author's callowness.
  
  Bend Sinister, set in a fictional East European totalitarian state, is Nabokov's only political novel. The bright sheen from the dazzling language initially makes it hard to engage the story, that of Krug, a celebrated academic, who is raising a young son while devastated by the death of wife. Krug, with the signature intellectual arrogance of the Nabokovian protagonists, runs afoul of the country's "Dear Leader," who happens to have been Krug's hapless and unprepossessing schoolmate, known as "Toad," whom everyone liked to pick on.
  
  The story finally kicks in with the brilliant depiction of the casual, laughing, and utterly terrifying manner in which Krug's friends disappear into the gulag before Krug himself is arrested. But the most horrifying moments occur offstage, when it becomes clear that Krug's son has been abducted and presumably tortured and killed with a kind casual depraved indifference. Those killers are, in turn, killed by the dictator (much as Stalin's infamous executioners, Yagoda and Yezhov were themselves tortured and shot). At the end, Krug is led to the firing squad in a scene of surreal violence that underscores the dictator's own cowardice and corruption.
  
  Nabokov's childhood memoir, Speak, Memory, belies Tolstoy's famous adage that all happy families are alike. It reads like an old fashioned magic-lantern show -- a succession of vivid and indelible images -- presumably remembered, half-remembered, and imagined -- of the lost world of life on prerevolutionary country estates and European travel. Nabokov's sensibility is overwhelmingly visual here; he admits to having no ear or interest in music whatsoever. He describes the minute details of home interiors, butterflies, and the Russian countryside as if viewed through a magnifying glass or the wrong end of the telescope.
  
  Here is a typical passage, recalling one of his uncle's estates: "I particularly remember the cool and sonorous quality of the of the place, the checkerboard flagstones of the hall, ten porcelain cats on a shelf, a sarcophophagus and an organ, the skylights and the upper galleries, the colored dusk of mysterious rooms, and carnations and crucifixes everywhere."
  
  By the end, it is hard to avoid sharing Nabokov's perception that he and his family lost something close to a paradise of culture, love, learning, and, yes, affluence, with the coming of the Bolshevik revolution.
  
• 
  Alan Marchant

  This anthology consists of two short novels by Vladimir Nabokov, his partial autobiography, and a summary year-by-year chronology.
  
  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1946) represent Nabokov's earliest writing in English. Both are black comedies with fictional characters and plots enlivened by frankly autobiographical situations and motivations. The reader would understand them better after reading the autobiography. It should be noted that English was not really a second language for Nabokov; it was a preferred language in his family circle.
  
  Speak, Memory is presented as Nabokov's autobiography up to his second wartime evacuation (France to the U.S. in 1940). But actually this account only covers Nabokov's beloved family (Russian aristocracy), happy childhood, and youth/education with (non-sequential) interjections about literary figures of his acquaintance. Speak, Memory satisfies with a gorgeously creative flow of words and ideas. But as an autobiography it is weakened by all that it leaves out: any and all adult experiences, foibles, beliefs, griefs, etc. I gauge literary autobiography by comparison with Anthony Burgess (Little Wilson, Big God and You've Had Your Time) - Nabokov's does not approach this standard of excellence.
• 
  Gary

  Starting with Sebastian Knight.
• 
  Kirk

  Be sure to read the Chronology at the end. It is an entertaining mini-novel propelled by the turbulence of the early 20th century. My favorite line from it: Takes job in bank but leaves after three hours.
  
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  Bend Sinister
  
  [From the Introduction] There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction.
  
  Speak, Memory
  
  In our childhood we know a lot about hands since they live and hover at the level of our stature.
  
  I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of tel-egraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped ar-rangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stra-tus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me.
  
  The storm passed quickly. The rain, which had been a mass of violently descending water wherein the trees writhed and rolled, was reduced all at once to oblique lines of silent gold breaking into short and long dashes against a background of subsiding vegetable agitation. Gulfs of voluptuous blue were expanding between great clouds—heap upon heap of pure white and purplish gray […]
  The tennis court was a region of great lakes.
  Beyond the park, above steaming fields, a rainbow slipped into view; the fields ended in the notched dark border of a remote fir wood; part of the rainbow went across it, and that section of the forest edge shimmered most magically through the pale green and pink of the iridescent veil drawn before it: a tenderness and glory that made poor relatives of the rhomboidal, colored reflections which the return of the sun had brought forth on the pavilion floor.
  A moment later my first poem began. What touched it off? I think I know. Without any wind blowing, the sheer weight of a raindrop, shining in parasitic luxury on a cordate leaf, caused its tip to dip, and what looked like a globule of quicksilver performed a sudden glissando down the center vein, and then, having shed its bright load, the relieved leaf unbent. Tip, leaf, dip, relief—the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes: I say “patter” inten-tionally, for when a gust of wind did come, the trees would briskly start to drip all together in as crude an imitation of the recent downpour as the stanza I was already muttering resembled the shock of wonder I had experienced when for a moment heart and leaf had been one.
  […] The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to strips of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.
  But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe em-braced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better.
  
• 
  David Johnson

  Speak, Memory, for its stylist evocation of place and sense, is an outstanding example of memoir and must be read before one ventures to document one's own dance through the calendar. Style also covers author's shyness about his marriage. I've since read short, impish Pnin and am soon to challenge Ada or Ardor in my Nabokov project.
• 
  Jim Barrett

  Just finished Speak, Memory. Nabokov is a fabulous writer. He led a very interesting life and came from a most accomplished family in Russia. Even though his memoir covers his birth in St. Petersburg in 1899 to his leaving France for the US in 1940 it is worth a read. His use of language and grasp of history and culture is breathtaking.
• 
  Dylan

  Nabokov's world draws you in...you almost view it through his own synesthesia...his own hesitation and slight embarassment at writing in English doesn't diminish the power of these (unfairly) lesser known works. 'Bend, Sinister', still darkly humorous and still as relevant today as ever. Handsome edition too from the Library of America.
• 
  Prasad GR

  Good beyond my wildest expectations! 'Speak, Memory' is a lesson in writing memoirs
• 
  Mk Miller

  Bend Sinister is great.