![]() ![]() ![]() Nabokov wrote the book in English (indeed it is in my view a repository of some of the most shimmering, transcendent sentences in the language, maybe the greatest achievement of this master stylist ), but later expressed regret that he had not written it in Russian. ![]() The first American edition, released concurrently, was titled Conclusive Evidence. Nabokov had submitted it as Speak, Mnemosyne, but the English publishers rejected this title as too arcane. ![]() The original title of the first published (UK) edition of this memoir, as pictured in the post, was Speak, Memory. Put Pnin and Humbert Humbert together and maybe you get a sort of cracked composite of what he might have actually been like, at Cornell. The living proof of his birthright as a rare surviving member of a vanquished aristocrasy. The emancipation from an impossible past, living in it, the evocation of imaginary worlds a repudiation of the nightmare of Modernity. A world vanished, along with his youth, the years of exile. I loved Nabokov in those days, his arch and somewhat pompous English style as titillating as anything in Proust or Beerbohm to my ear. I read Speak, Memory (originally titled Conclusive Evidence-"conclusive evidence that I existed") when I was, I think, 18. ![]()
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