The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Vladimir Nabokov · Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited · an autobiography in fifteen chapters with a foreword · Putnam, New York, 1966, the author’s revision of the book first published in 1951 · scored on the 1966 text in Nabokov’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Autobiography built by theme rather than chronology; elegy, comedy, natural history and puzzle in one remembering voice, the last chapter addressed to “you”
Mythos
The lost paradise of a childhood on the estates, and its return through memory under the title’s summons; the father risen and fallen; the butterfly as soul; the spiral
Phase
From the first awakening of consciousness, about 1903, to the departure from France for America in May 1940, the chronology running forward overall while each chapter follows a theme
Presentation
Non-fiction in fifteen numbered chapters with a foreword, each chapter a self-standing essay of broadly even length; first person throughout, turned in the last chapter to the second person, addressed to the author’s wife
Register
From the exact visual noun and the long period that holds a scene still to comedy, lepidopteral nomenclature, pun and elegy, with a narrator’s irony and hauteur held over all
Scale
One consciousness, a family over three generations, a gentry estate and its household, and the Europe of the Russian exile
Governing Proposition
Fifteen chapters, each set on one theme, carry a life from its first awakening of consciousness on a Russian estate, about 1903, through a gentry childhood of governesses, tutors and butterflies, a first love and a first poem, the Revolution, Cambridge and the father’s murder in exile, to a ship waiting among the trees at Saint-Nazaire in May 1940. The wager of the book is that a life robbed of country, father and fortune can be held whole by a memory disciplined enough to find the designs in it; that those designs show only when the parts of a life are laid one over another; and that an autobiography built by theme, as a novelist or a composer of chess problems builds, can hold a truer life than one built by dates.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The book opens on its largest sentence, and the sentence is a summit reached at once: a life set between two darknesses, the one before birth and the one after death, and common sense invoked only to be refused. The first chapter makes the terror concrete in a chronophobiac who sees a home film made before his birth and finds in it an empty pram on the porch, waiting for someone who does not yet exist. The darkness before is as real as the darkness after.
Against that abyss the book sets a consciousness. Its first chapter is the first awakening of consciousness itself, about 1903, and the life that follows is told as the work of that consciousness on the world it found. The book is in fifteen numbered chapters with a foreword, and each chapter is an essay complete in itself, of broadly even length, set on one theme: the mother, the governesses, the butterflies, a first love. The chronology runs forward overall, from the cradle to the departure from France for America in May 1940, but no chapter follows a period. Each follows a subject, and the subjects are laid side by side.
The text scored is the one dated 1966 in its foreword, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Behind it stand the first English book, Conclusive Evidence, published in New York in 1951 and in London the same year as Speak, Memory; the author’s Russian reworking, Drugie berega (“Other Shores”, 1954); and the revision itself, which, the foreword says, drew on the Russian book and on family recollection to correct and enlarge the English. The book was made three times across two languages. The revising is part of its claim: a memory that checks itself, and is checked, and will not let the remembered stand uncorrected.
Movement II
Early in the first chapter the book gives its first design and names its method. General Kuropatkin lays out matches for the child to show a calm sea and then a stormy one. Years later the same general, fleeing in peasant disguise, asks the father for a light. The matches return as a match. “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.” This is the program of the whole: a life searched not for its causes but for its rhymes, and a book that exists to find them.
The father carries the first chapter’s other height. Grateful peasants toss him in the air, and the child, through the window, sees him at the top of his rise, lying on the air like one of the “paradisiac personages” on a church ceiling. The lines that hold him there carry, under their lightness, a foreshadowing of his coffin, and the reader who knows how the father dies reads the levitation as an elegy written before the death. His career runs through a later chapter: the liberal politics, the Duma, and the Tenishev School. His murder in a Berlin hall, in 1922, is given almost in passing, and its brevity is part of its weight.
The second chapter belongs to the mother and to colored hearing, the sense of each letter of the alphabet as a colour, set out letter by letter with its hues. The third gives the family and the uncle, Vasiliy Rukavishnikov, and his estate. The estates at Vyra and Rozhdestveno are the ground of the whole book: a childhood told as a paradise, and the paradise as what history will take. The book will not say this as a complaint. It says it as a fact of the pattern, and it answers it by the only means it trusts: the exact recovery of what was there.
Movement III
The household fills the middle chapters: English governesses and English things, tutors, a magic lantern. These are the comic chapters of the book, and the comedy is a form of tenderness held at a distance. Mademoiselle O, in the fifth chapter, which bears her name, is the book’s great comic figure: her bulk, and her progress through a Russian winter like a steamship’s. The chapter was first written in French and published in Mesures in 1936, and only later made English.
The tutors of the eighth chapter come and go, and the magic-lantern slides they project are drawn with the precision the book gives everything it sees. The tenth chapter brings Mayne Reid and the games made of his books, a journey abroad, and the foreshadowing of a first love. The seventh is Colette, at Biarritz in 1909. These chapters show the book’s weakness and its strength at once. Each could be lifted out and the book would close over the gap; yet each lays down a thread, a colour, a glass, a light, that another chapter will take up.
That is the book’s discipline. The reader is not told that the threads are there; the reader is set to find them, as in a puzzle, and the finding is the experience. The pencils and their shades of colour, the colored glass, the matches, the funnel: they run under the comic surface and surface again where they are not expected. The governesses and tutors are people, rendered with exact sympathy and an irony that never quite releases them; they are also places where the pattern passes, and the comedy carries it without strain.
Movement IV
The sixth chapter is given to butterflies, and it is the book’s centre of feeling. The precise lepidopteral names, the food plants, the forests and bogs are given with a naturalist’s exactness and a lover’s attention. Here the book reaches transport: the man standing among rare butterflies and the plants they feed on, in a timelessness the chapter does not explain and cannot quite name. The butterfly is the book’s own figure of the soul, and the chapter does not need to say so.
In this chapter the book states its faith. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.” The sentence is the book’s account of its form. A life is a carpet; laid flat in its years it shows a sequence; folded, it shows designs, a figure from one place lying exactly upon a figure from another. The book is the folding. That is why it is built by theme and not by period, and why the reader is asked to lay one chapter over another and look for what coincides.
The first poem comes in the eleventh chapter, and in the twelfth comes Tamara, the first love the tenth chapter foreshadowed. They belong together: the poem is the first making, and the love is what the making will be about for the rest of the life. Neither is given at length beyond what the theme requires. The Revolution itself is offstage weather in these chapters. It is the thing that ends the paradise, and the book declines to look at it directly; what it looks at is what the paradise held, so that the loss is measured in the exactness of what was lost.
Movement V
Exile follows. The thirteenth chapter is Cambridge, its football and its rooms, comic rather than lifted; the fourteenth is the émigré Europe of the interwar years, Berlin, the émigré press, the émigré writer Sirin, and the composition of chess problems, an art the book sets beside its own. There the book names its master figure: “The spiral is a spiritualized circle.” A circle closes on itself; a spiral returns and goes on, each turn above the last. The life is a spiral: the paradise lost and found again at a higher turn, in memory and in art, and the book turning outward as it goes.
The last chapter turns the book outward in fact. It is addressed to “you”, the author’s wife, and its subject is their son: the parks of the exile’s Europe and the child in them. The memory that has held the past now holds the next life, and the autobiography ends not with its author but with his child. The second person is the book’s last turn of form. A record of what was becomes an address to someone present, and the pattern the book has found in one life is handed on to the reader and to the next.
The close is at Saint-Nazaire in May 1940, before the passage to America. Among the trees stands the funnel of the ship that will carry them, hidden like the sailor in a puzzle picture: “Find What the Sailor Has Hidden”. Once seen, it cannot be unseen. The image is a quiet height, and it names the method of the whole book: a pattern that the finder, having found, cannot lose. The cradle rocked above an abyss; the book ends on the far edge of it, with a design found in the trees.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is harder for this book than its finish suggests. The chapters were made as separate magazine pieces, each complete in itself; the tutors of chapter 8 or the Mayne Reid games of chapter 10 could go, and the book would close over the gap with little scar. That is what holds the axis at 8.2. What resists the test is the weaving the book names as its purpose: “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography”. The threads it lays (the matches, the colored glass, the father, the butterflies) bind the chapters more tightly than their origins promise, so that most are required by the design. A long book compelled in parts, permitted in others: between a collection and a novel.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a life lived in exile, robbed of country, father and fortune, can be held whole by a disciplined memory, and that memory, attending with total precision, finds pattern in what seemed chance, so that consciousness outruns loss and perhaps time. It is a meaning, not a mood: the book shows the practice by which the émigré turned dispossession into possession, and it is honest about the cost, the father’s murder in Berlin in 1922 given almost in passing, the brother Sergey barely present. Held below the high band because its truth is one man’s and partly a claim of temperament: exile as a shared condition, the Revolution and the peasantry seen from the manor are disclosed at a slant.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Elevation is high and frequent. The opening sentence is a summit: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”, and the chronophobiac who sees a home film from before his birth, with an empty pram on the porch, makes the terror concrete. The father tossed in the air by grateful peasants, seen through the window at the top of his rise like one of the “paradisiac personages” on a church ceiling, carries in its lines a foreshadowing of his coffin. The butterfly chapter reaches transport, a timelessness among rare butterflies and their food plants, and the ship’s funnel among the trees is a quiet height. It falls in the comic chapters of tutors and Cambridge.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The archetype is the lost paradise: a childhood on the estates at Vyra and Rozhdestveno told as an Eden from which history expels the family, and remade by Mnemosyne, whom the title summons. The pattern is load-bearing: the book is the return. The father’s levitation and death, the butterfly as soul, the spiral (“The spiral is a spiritualized circle”) are built, not dropped in. What holds the axis below the gate is that the myth stays private, the myth of one gifted consciousness, and that the book refuses the collective myth its material offered, the Revolution and the exile as a people’s fate, out of its narrator’s disdain for general ideas. The archetypal is reached in the father and the paradise and evoked elsewhere.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is plain: Tolstoy’s Childhood and Aksakov’s family chronicle, the Russian gentry memoir, Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts for exile, and Proust above all for memory and the redemption of time. The turn is an autobiography built by the methods of the novelist and the chess-problem composer, by theme rather than chronology, with the reader set to find designs as in a puzzle; memory made deliberate, sought and checked, against Proust’s involuntary kind; a last chapter turned to “you”; and the book remade across two languages, revision made part of its claim to truth. The stake was real, since a memoir that refuses confession, politics and psychology risks preciousness. But the path was proven, and the book refines what Proust and Tolstoy opened more than it turns against them.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Substitute a chronological life for this form and the book loses its knowledge: that a life has designs, visible only when its parts are laid over one another. “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another”: the sentence is the form’s own account of itself. Each chapter is a lens set on one theme, and the forward drift of the whole carries the reader from the cradle to the son, the spiral turning outward. The close names the method of the whole: a funnel hidden among trees like the sailor in a puzzle picture. Held below the high band because the magazine origin shows in repeated scene-setting and an even, essay-length cut.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The book yields on return, and the yield is of two kinds: the details themselves, which hold more at each reading, since the threads that run from chapter to chapter are noticed late; and the question how far the remembered life is made. Scholarship has kept returning to it: Brian Boyd’s biography reads it against the record, and its relation to the novels, The Gift, Pnin, Ada and Look at the Harlequins!, is a standing field of study. The variants between the English book of 1951, the Russian of 1954 and the revision of 1966 are themselves a source. Held below the novels’ depth because its surface is designed to be wholly mastered: it answers its own puzzles, and much of what a reader finds the second time was placed for finding.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is autobiography and memoir in the twentieth century, in English and in Russian. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that a memoir could be built with all the means of the art novel and stand level with it, and it gave English its most exact prose of remembered sensation. What holds the axis at 8.2, level with The Inevitable as the lowest of the twelve, is reach: named in few places, and much of Nabokov’s pressure on the field ran through Lolita and Pale Fire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: W. G. Sebald set a figure of Nabokov, the butterfly man with his net, through The Emigrants (1992), and its method of memory and exile runs through his books; the Modern Library’s list of the century’s nonfiction put it high; and it is a standard model where the literary memoir is taught.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole, in the author’s own final form, and has been in print continuously since 1951 and in the revised text since 1966: seventy-five years for the book, sixty for the text scored. Form and fabric take no charge. Presence is wide and continuous: the book is kept in print, translated, read beside the novels, taught in courses on the memoir, and quoted far beyond them, the opening sentence above all. Its surface is not fixed to a moment; its world, the Russian estate before 1917 and the Berlin of the émigrés, is the past it sets out to hold, not a dated present. The charge is presence narrower than that of Lolita, leaning on its author’s fame.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence, the exact visual noun and the long period that holds a scene still: the colored alphabet of chapter 2, set out letter by letter with its hues; the magic-lantern slides; the precise lepidopteral names; the cadence of the opening and of the father’s rise. The construction answers it: threads laid in one chapter and taken up chapters later (the matches, the pencils and shades of colour, the funnel), and transitions that turn on a word or an image. The faults are of excess: some sentences overwrought, some puns preening, and the narrator’s hauteur at times standing between the reader and the scene. Level with the best English prose of its century, and held a step below the summit by those excesses.
Score: 9.2 / 10
One law governs: a single remembering consciousness, exact, ironic, tender and haughty, and the faith that attention reveals pattern. Take the two most distant elements: Mademoiselle O’s comic bulk, her progress like a steamship’s through a Russian winter, and the father’s murder in a Berlin hall; or the football and rooms of the Cambridge chapter and the parks and the son of the last. They obey the same law: the same eye, the same refusal to state pathos aloud, the grief carried in detail. The range is wide, from comedy to elegy, lepidoptera to politics, Russia to the edge of America, and the tone does not break. Held below the high band because the law is one of temperament more than of structure: the political chapters, 9 and 14, fit the voice but strain the method.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held: consciousness above all, its first awakening and its powers; the family over three generations; class, in the gentry estate and its servants, governesses and tutors; the state, in the father’s liberal politics, the Duma, the Revolution and the émigré press; history, in exile across Europe and two wars approaching; the natural order, butterflies, forests, bogs and seasons given with a naturalist’s exactness; art, in the first poem, the chess problems and the émigré writer Sirin; and a hint of the sacred in a beyond the book glimpses but will not name. They are integrated by the one memory, not listed. Labour is seen from the manor, the peasantry hardly at all, the Revolution is offstage weather, and the brother and the Russia beyond the family are thin.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.2, then The Sublime at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 8.9. A command of the English sentence, the exact noun and the long period, joined to a construction of threads laid and taken up across chapters; an elevation high and frequent, from the opening sentence over the abyss to the father at the top of his rise and the timelessness among the butterflies; and a text whole in its author’s final form, in print since 1951 and quoted far beyond its readers. Beside them The Living Form at 8.8, a form by theme that is the instrument of the book’s knowledge.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2. The chapters began as separate magazine pieces, and a few could go with little scar; and the book’s reach, though real in Sebald and in the memoir as taught, is named in few places, with much of its author’s pressure on the field carried by the novels. Next above them The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.3, because the myth of paradise stays one man’s, and the form refines Proust’s and Tolstoy’s more than it turns from them; and The Encompassed at 8.3, wide for one life, with labour, the peasantry and the Revolution seen from the manor or not at all.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.2, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.6, stands below it as well.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, the revised English text dated 1966 in its foreword and published by Putnam, in fifteen chapters with a foreword, covering the years from the first awakening of consciousness, about 1903, to the departure from France for America in May 1940. The 1966 text is scored because it is Nabokov’s final form and the text read, taught and reprinted. Named as context and not scored: the first English book, Conclusive Evidence (New York, Harper, 1951), issued in London the same year as Speak, Memory (Gollancz); and Nabokov’s Russian reworking, Drugie berega (New York, Chekhov Publishing House, 1954), which the 1966 foreword names among its sources. A further chapter written for the book and left out of it is not part of the work. The chapters were first made as separate magazine pieces; chapter 5 was first written in French and published in Mesures in 1936. Every axis is judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain, cited by chapter: the opening sentence and the sentence on thematic designs (1), the phrase “paradisiac personages” (1), the magic carpet (6), the spiral (14), and the puzzle’s caption (15). Brian Boyd’s biography, Sebald’s The Emigrants and the Modern Library’s list are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the magazine and years of the chapters’ first publication, the later history of the omitted chapter, the title once considered for the book, the word count and page count, and the narrator’s exact terms on Freud, are not given.