In Nabokov's notoriously restricted private canon of great twentieth-century novelists—he admitted only Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Biely—it is Proust who often seems most intimately allied with his own aims and sensibility. A pursuit of time past is undertaken directly or obliquely in many of his novels, and most centrally in what are probably his two finest books—Lolita and Speak, Memory. The autobiography is as Proustian as anything Nabokov wrote, and it even includes a little homage to Proust: Nabokov's last vision of Colette, his Riviera childhood sweetheart, rolling a hoop glinting in the autumnal sun through dead leaves in a Parisian park, is a citation, a transposition of pattern from fiction to autobiography, of the scene at the end of Swann's Way in which the child Marcel beholds the adored figure of Gilberte Swann playing among the leaves in the Champs Elysées.

The special sense of euphoria associated with the recovery of the sensuous fullness of past experience is equally Nabokov's goal and Proust's, but the routes they follow toward this end notably diverge. The key concept for Proust is of course involuntary memory. The return of the past is vouchsafed by adventitious circumstances as a moment of grace, an unanticipated epiphany. Some otherwise trivial datum of experience, like the wobbling of uneven pavingstones in a Venetian piazza, jogs slumbering memory, flooding consciousness with a complex of seemingly forgotten, perhaps repressed, perceptions from the past. (The articulation of this experience, to be sure, becomes possible only through the finely attuned artistic discipline of the experiencer.) Nabokov, on the other hand, conceives his relation to the past much more exclusively in volitional terms. He is grateful for the occasional mnemonic clues that circumstances may cast his way, but for him the ability to revisit the past is chiefly a consequence of the imaginative concentration afforded by artful prose. It is only a little overstated to say that for Nabokov the apt manipulation of language makes the past come back.

A seemingly self-indulgent fantasy in the penultimate paragraph of Speak, Memory actually provides a nice definition of the book's project. Nabokov recalls how his four-year-old son, playing on a French Riviera beach not long before their departure for America, would gather tide-tossed treasures from the sea: “candy-like blobs of sea-licked glass—lemon, cherry, peppermint” and “sometimes small bits of pottery, still beautiful in glaze and color.” He then reflects on this collection of fragments:

I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze.

The meticulous fitting together of fragments into patterns, as Nabokov announces in the opening pages of the book, is what his autobiography is all about. It is at once a task excitingly imaginable and hopelessly impossible, as the language he chooses to evoke the broken bowl suggests. The crucial verbs are in the conditional tense (“if all had been preserved, might have been put together”), implying a condition obviously contrary to fact. The well-wrought urn of the past is, after all, irrevocably shattered; only a few of its shards can be gathered by the patient memoirist; and that is what is ultimately so wrenching about this remarkably happy autobiography. The “rivets of bronze” that might mend the assembled fragments are of course the fine linkages of Nabokov's polished prose. (The association of bronze with poetic art is confirmed earlier in the book in an explicit reference to Horace's exegi monumentum, “I have built a monument more lasting than bronze.”) The image of bronze rivets represents precisely the paradoxical character of Nabokov's undertaking. A majolica bowl put back together with rivets is no longer what it once was, yet it has a new, if patently composite, wholeness, and the bronze that makes this possible, though superimposed on the original substance of the pottery, is itself a burnished material that contributes to an aesthetic effect. The Horatian background of the bronze metaphor also suggests perdurable strength, a quality that, as we shall see, is repeatedly manifested in the stylistic assurance of Nabokov's willed recuperation of the past.

Humbert Humbert at the beginning of his sad narrative cries out to a forever absent Lolita that he has only words to play with. That is also the desperate situation vis-à-vis his Russian past of the narrator of Speak, Memory, but he is able to overcome absence, to surprise himself with febcity, by fashioning the words into intricate configurations that bring back to him a substantial measure of what he has irrevocably lost. A full explanation of how he achieves this end would involve a comprehensive stylistic analysis of the autobiography. But I think we can get a fair sense of what happens in the prose by concentrating on the means employed to realize one of the most salient aspects of the mnemonic process in the book—the special quality of illumination of the remembered scene.

The equation between light and life—or rather, far more specifically, between life and a crack of light, a limited band of illumination against a large background of darkness—is announced in the very first sentence of Speak, Memory, at the beginning of that extraordinary preludic evocation of “chronophobia”: “common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” This image becomes an organizing motif for the whole autobiography. Having been introduced as a metaphor, it later resurfaces as literal fact in the opening paragraphs of the butterfly chapter:

On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a line of dull light, the leaden sky, the sodden sand, the gruel-like mess of broken brown blossoms under the lilacs—and that flat, fallow leaf (the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!

But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I made haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow, the room would be cleft into light and shade. The foliage of birches moving in the sun had the translucent green tone of grapes, and in contrast to this there was the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of extraordinary intensity, the like of which I rediscovered only many years later, in the montane zone of Colorado.

The paired scenes—rainy day and sunny day—are actual recollections of repeated experiences, memory in an iterative tense, but they also offer themselves as a kind of allegory of perception and, by implication, of memory. The window (as often in fiction) is the transparent marker between inner and outer, between perceiver and scene; and the natural scene as a whole can be visually reconstructed from the bar of light emanating from it in through the shutters. Nabokov's temporal and spacial distance from the lost past is defined by that initial phrase, “the legendary Russia of my boyhood,” but the virtuosity of the prose, moving from the chink of light to the nuanced illumination of the landscape, proceeds to abolish the distance. The “watery pallor” of the chink of light in the first paragraph leads the imagination of the observer to a witty image that summarizes the scene he prefers not to behold: “a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle.” The wit says a good deal about observation and representation in Nabokov's imaginative world. It is not merely that the rain-puddle reflecting the gloomy sky is a synecdoche for the whole dreary scene but that framing and mirroring are the means of capturing the fleeting moment. It sometimes seems in Nabokov as though the data of experience were no more than the raw material of artistic representation, the majolica shards awaiting the expert hand that will assemble them in the wholeness of a pattern, and this sense is caught in the image of the rainy day posing for its picture in the puddle. The idea of a careful photographic composition in grays and dingy browns is then carried forward in the patently composed quality of the prose (quite unlike the next paragraph on the sunny day), which locks all the descriptive terms into a network of alliterated l's and s's and d's—“line of dull light,” “leaden sky,” “sodden sand,” “gruel-like/lilacs”—complemented by two subseries of b's and f's—“broken brown blossoms,” “flat, fallow leaf.” None of this can properly be described as onomatopoeic, but the effect is to proffer an illusion of all the words somehow being contaminated by the bleak light of the scene to which they belong, dissolving into one another in a gray impasto, a “gruel-like mess.” One begins to see why Nabokov can imagine his prose as bronze rivets, holding pieces firmly together.

The paragraph on the bright day puts aside these artifices of phonetic orchestration partly for contrapuntal reasons, in order not to overdo a single device, and partly because, in this full frontal vision of the illuminated scene, the writer now wants to concentrate on the precise visual texture of what the light reveals, stressing painterly words instead of mood-evoking sound-clusters. The suddenness of the invasion of sunlight when the shutters are flung open is realized in a theatrical gesture, the metaphorical blow that cleaves the room into light and shade. Then we are invited by the chromatic specification of the language to look out the window with the young Vladimir on a visual composition—the delicately defined “translucent green tone of grapes” of the birch leaves set against “the dark velvet” of the fir and the intense blue of the sky. The last of these color-values is given neither a tone nor a texture but an emotive label (“extraordinary intensity”), perhaps because its location on the spectrum is to be inferred from its relation to the translucent green and the velvet darkness, perhaps because the intensity, confirmed by the rediscovery in Colorado, is the main point. One might note that the Proustian moment of involuntary memory, the unlooked-for recurrence of the sky over Vyra years later in the Sierras, is not the object of representation but an element in the rhetorical structure that fixes the vividness of the primary memory. Nabokov's cunning strangeness with English plays a strategic part in putting this final effect into place. An American would not say “the montane zone” but rather something like “mountain region.” The locution, both perfectly correct and oddly foreign, acts to assimilate the mountains of Colorado with the Alps and with Russian topography, just as Nabokov's English in general flaunts its interlinguistic character, makes itself felt as a vehicle that can cross both geographical and temporal boundaries.

Where does the light come from that informs these scenes of memory? The example we have just considered might tempt us into a facile response, namely, that the distinctive quality of light was simply present in the original experience, to be recalled in its peculiar vividness by the lexically fortunate memoirist. Such recollection might follow the Proustian path of consciousness suddenly and happily invaded by the past. For Nabokov, however, the real light that once shone leaves only shadowy traces in the storehouse of memory. It can be recovered not through some spontaneous resurgence but through a careful formal reconstitution in another medium, that of art. It is instructive that light in Speak, Memory should be not only a defining presence in remembered scenes but also a recurrent image for art. In the first chapter, Nabokov, puzzling over the enigma of his own identity, speaks of “a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life's foolscap.” This image of art as the illuminator of otherwise hidden patterns dovetails with the repeated representation of memory in the figure of the magic-lantern, as when Nabokov notes that the sundry tutors of his boyhood “appear within memory's luminous disc as so many magic-lantern projections.” A magic-lantern, by putting light behind a colored transparency, transforms it into a larger illuminated image that, even in its necessary two-dimensionality, may seem enchantingly lifelike. Let us look briefly at a few selected slides from Speak, Memory to see how Nabokov performs this trick by a delicate positioning of the lamp of his art.

One of the oddest images conjured up in the autobiography is the view from the dining room at the Vyra manor of Nabokov's father being tossed in a blanket outside by his servants. It is not sufficient to pigeonhole this moment as an instance of the technique of defamiliarization of which Nabokov was pastmaster, because the arabesque movement of the prose also leads to a perception of the intimate and paradoxical liaison between presence and absence, life and death, reality and art.

Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up in this fashion, and the second time he would go higher than the first and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.

Nabokov's prose often has the look of working out carefully calculated effects, but here, one may venture to guess, he seems to have given himself over to the free-associative momentum of metaphor, and with startling consequences. The narration of the father tossed in a blanket by boisterous peasants ends—it is also the chapter-ending—in a kind of freeze-frame that stresses the timeless thereness (“there he would be”) of the horizontal figure “reclining” against the summer sky “as if for good.” Father, day, and year, are all at a lofty stillpoint (it is noon, and close to the summer solstice). Characteristically, Nabokov realizes this moment in part through recourse to a painterly term, “the cobalt blue of the summer noon.” This immediately leads associatively to the elaborate simile of the painted image of the divine or saintly figures on the church ceiling. That simile is “Homeric” not merely in its length but in its power to effect a large movement between two disparate realms. The living image of the father in midair is transposed into painting on plaster, the painted figures linked with a more ecclesiastic paradise than the boy experienced in his childhood world. In a macabre turn of wit, the wonderful suspension on air turns into the “eternal repose” of the priestly chant, and with the rightness of dream-logic, the dead person's face is concealed. As the perspective moves from life to iconography and from outside to inside, the lighting appropriately switches from solar brilliance to flickering wax tapers that cast their faint gleam, as we spiral down through the last clause from ceiling to ground, on an open coffin. This concluding image of a body recumbent in death does not, I think, subvert or cancel the image of a splendidly living body recumbent in air, as one school of contemporary criticism would automatically conclude. What it seems to me to do is to add a dimension of terrible poignancy to the captured timeless moment of the soaring father. As surely as the memoirist is aware that his father was cut down by an assassin's bullet in 1922, he knows, and his figurative language dramatizes visually, that the cobalt blue of the remembered summer sky is drawn against a shadowy background of extinction—precisely like the crack of light at the beginning of the book set between two eternities of darkness.

Memories of a happy, forever lost childhood can easily decline into the cheap coin of nostalgia. What partly makes Speak, Memory one of the most remarkable of modern autobiographies is Nabokov's ability to etch in prose the precious vividness of his past while keeping steadily in mind the necessary fate it shares with every human past of being swallowed up by oblivion. Only the intervention of art grants it the grace of a radiant afterlife, but that is, ineluctably, different in kind from the first life. Instructively, at the end of Chapter Three, Nabokov fleetingly evokes an infinite regress of adults remembering childhood. Rereading the sentimental juvenile fiction of a certain Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, he relives his own boyhood when he first read these books, and in a painful doubling, he remembers his Uncle Ruka reading Mme de Ségur back in 1908 and reliving his boyhood.

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.

Again, a window, light from the outside, and a mirror—this last, a Nabokov trademark—make the scene cohere. As in our previous illustration, the power of the memory is brought out in a play between presence and absence, life and death, but the rhetorical balance here is quite different. The sheer happiness of the remembered experience is explicitly announced, and the memoirist goes as far as to reverse the usual categories of presence and absence: “That robust reality makes a ghost of the present.” The robustness is mysteriously reinforced by the alliterated r's, while the assimilation through near-rhyme of “robust” and “ghost” draws us into a somewhat disorienting semantic shell game: it is the past, after all, that is a ghost, but a robust one that makes what we usually call reality seem spectral. The final focus on the paired images of the sun-flooded mirror and the bumblebee is articulated with a Tennysonian musicality, emphatically clustering m's and b's and r's in a pattern of sound that turns into an onomatopoeic evocation of the buzzing, bumping bumblebee. The more important effect, however, of the phonetic interfusion of words in this penultimate sentence is to convey in the bronze rivets of prose a sense of all the elements of an experienced moment beautifully, timelessly locked together. But the last sentence—“Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die”—is disquietingly double-edged. It hovers precariously between a rapturous proclamation and an anguished cri de coeur. On one level, it is a true declaration—on the level every reader can experience in the stylistic success of an undying memory crystallized in language that makes the wallpaper, the uncle, the book, and the mirror brimming with brightness live on. But both narrator and reader are also acutely aware that the final sentence is flagrantly contrary to existential fact: each of these affirmations is necessarily shadowed by a negation, for nothing remains as it should be, everything always changes, everyone dies.

The more one ponders this enchanting book, the more evident it becomes that Nabokov's conception of memory is profoundly—and appropriately—ambiguous. In the same breath, he intimates that he has recovered or somehow reconstituted the past in his prose, and that he has rather reinvented a past forever lost in the vanishing perspective of time. To affirm merely the former would be to succumb to self-indulgent delusion; to affirm merely the latter would be to concede that autobiography is impossible because it must always turn into fiction. He defines “the supreme achievement of memory” as “the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.” The adjective “innate” here hovers indeterminately. The structure of experience may involve innate harmonies, as Nabokov seems to propose in his sundry remarks on pattern. Alternately, there may be an aesthetic order, distinct from experience as such, which has its intrinsic harmonies—the consonance of images, the pleasing recurrences of sound—and these may be exploited by artful consciousness to pull together the disparate fragments of experience. He tends toward the first alternative, which makes the act of autobiographical recovery a triumphant reality, but he repeatedly allows for the second alternative as well, in which autobiography is perforce an artifice offering a kind of luminous compensation for the unrecoverable past.

Nabokov's evocation of the initial trip of his Swiss governess, “Mademoiselle,” from the rural train station to the family estate vividly illustrates this delicate ambiguity. It contains features shared by most of the examples we have considered—an emphatically defined source of natural illumination, mirror imagery, painterly elements of composition—and provides a nice nocturnal complement to the sunlit scenes we have looked at:

Every now and then, she looks back to make sure that a second sleigh, bearing her trunk and hatbox, is following—always at the same distance, like those companionable phantoms of ships in polar waters which explorers have described. And let me not leave out the moon—for surely there must be a moon, the full, incredibly clear disc that goes so well with Russian lusty frosts. So there it comes, steering out of a flock of small dappled clouds, which it tinges with a vague iridescence; and, as it sails higher, it glazes the runner tracks left on the road, where every sparkling lump of snow is emphasized by a swollen shadow.

Very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passportless spy standing on the blue-white road in his New England snowboots and stormcoat. The vibration in my ears is no longer their receding bells, but only my own blood singing. All is still, spellbound, enthralled by the moon, fancy's rear-vision mirror. The snow is real, though, and as I bend to it and scoop up a handful, sixty years crumble to glittering frost-dust between my fingers.

In this instance, the status of the recalled scene as sheer invention is flaunted from the start. In actuality, the child Vladimir was back at the Vyra manor when this moonlit ride took place, and so Nabokov the memoirist must recreate it as a fiction writer from Mademoiselle's point of view, to a large extent using the clues of literary convention. The following sleigh is wittily represented as a counterpart to those “companionable phantoms of ships” sighted by polar explorers, and the shimmer of oscillation between phantom or hallucination and real thing runs through the whole scene. The moon cannot be left out, the narrator ostentatiously announces, and it is thus introduced with suitable theatricality (“So there it comes”), providing iridescence for the clouds, glitter and melodramatic shadows for the snow.

This magical landscape collapses with the interjection, “Very lovely, very lonesome.” It has all been a “stereoscopic dreamland,” a term that suggests still another guide of artifice for the composition of the scene—the old stereoscopes with their “picturesque” black and white views that were a common home amusement in the world of Nabokov's childhood. The Russia of 1906, in a kind of cinematic faux raccord (the opposite of a Proustian concordance), disappears into a New England winterscape decades later in which the expatriate writer, “a passportless spy” on the remembered Mademoiselle, is equally exiled from his homeland and his past. But even here, the act of imaginative recollection is dialectic. The New England moon is “fancy's rear-vision mirror.” As the chronophobic, chronophiliac imagination looks “back” into it, the moon becomes the moon of 1906, no mere mechanism of faux raccord, and, in the last emblematic gesture, sixty years crumble to frost-dust, dreamworld and real world change places.

The obtruded paradox of this extreme instance is submerged but implicit in most of the evoked scenes of Speak, Memory. The memory of Mademoiselle's sleigh-ride is an invention, directed by the principles of internal coherence and mimetic aptness of literary, painterly, and perhaps photographic artifice. And yet, artifice, whether dealing with past or present, is our principal means of crystallizing experience, making it emotionally and aesthetically assimilable precisely by playing up those “innate harmonies.” The moon is a literary stage-prop and still the real moon seen by a wide-eyed child in the winter sky over Vyra in 1906, just as the chill touch of snow is real, then and now.

Few imaginative writers have been so committed as Nabokov to the ideal of conscious control. In his autobiography he often evinces a sense that he can actually stage a return to the past by a sufficiently deft and resourceful ordering of his prose medium. But there is also an aspect of Proustian involuntarism stalking this project of artful volition. The scene of memory invoked, whether actual recollection or invention or a subtle compound of the two, picks up an experiential charge from the present, sets up a circulation between past and present that is not strictly determined by artistic calculation. This, indeed, is why Speak, Memory is not simply a series of virtuoso tricks in constructing the past but rather a haunting expression of what it means to live in time, circling back on the past, intimately bound to it, yet also forever exiled in another, later world.