Fiction and Truth in “Speak, Memory”

Abstract

This paper focuses on the merging of imagination and truth in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”. As an aristocrat of imagination, Nabokov inds genuine art in the ordinary. For this writer, imagination is a form of memory and he uses a constructive perspective of memory. At irst sight, his autobiography seems to follow a chronological low of events but in fact every now and then we ind references from previous and following events, which make possible the moves backwards and forward in time. Nabokov gives no explanation but he invites us to travel in vain, letting us notice how the chapters share with each other similar structures in both form and content. “Speak, Memory” deals with the life of a great man but at the same time the aim of this autobiography is universal in the sense that it endeavors to discover the fate and construction of human consciousness. No other writer might have felt so much nostalgia for his childhood; no other one has recollected his memories with such precision, inding art even in the most useless details that for a supericial eye might have been meaningless. “Speak, Memory” might be considered a met autobiography because it relects about the way of writing an autobiography. Nabokov recreates facts imbuing them with an artistic veil. “Speak. Memory” as an autobiography challenges its own genre as it is the best cohabitation of poetical perspective and the truth.