The Art of Memory and Time Fiona Lu College

In Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Nabokov takes on a highly aesthetic approach documenting his past to bring faded memories back to life. Although memory is seemingly regarded as an involuntary recollection of history, Nabokov challenges this notion by presenting his autobiography as a conscious act of artistry that reconstructs the truth. He achieves this through visual embellishments of memories while still maintaining their structural integrity. Nabokov’s fascination with the senses, specifically color and light, allows him to escape what he denotes as the “spherical… prison of time” (1.1.3) by distorting reality through a reorganization of memories by visual patterns rather than chronology. This paper will first define the limitations that time imposes on autobiography, and then analyze how Nabokov’s earliest memories merge his past self with his present imaginative faculties in a timeless recreation.

Nabokov sees time as a restriction to autobiography because it limits the significance of memories to the proportional length and time of their occurrence.*The first lines of the book present birth as “the cradle [that] rocks above an abyss” and asserts that “existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of...