Mademoiselle Microcosm: A consideration of the embedded themes in Chapter five of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (original) (raw)

Early on in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1999), 1 Nabokov states that '[t]he following of … thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.' (16) Yet with such a luminously sensual and vividly flowing work, the first-time reader might be forgiven for coming away with only a partial awareness of its richly thematic undercurrents. Similar to his novels, 2 Nabokov's autobiography is filled with allusions, metaphors, symbols, recapitulations and doubles. And while each chapter marks a new, sequential period of the author's life, once having set a chapter's temporal frame, Nabokov rarely adheres to strict chronology. So, within the tender portraits of individuals and beloved environments, or the poignantly comic (albeit sometimes rebarbative) interludes on childhood, authority and exile, Nabokov ranges freely (even into the American period not strictly covered in Speak, Memory) through reveries on consciousness, time, love, loss, and art. Yet this temporal free-form and the bright and shimmering epiphanies, concluding almost every chapter and tending to transport the reader into a crescendo of timeless ecstasy, 3 rarely seem to overwhelm but rather to dilate one's 1 Here after referred to simply as Speak, Memory.