Speak, Memory

Once, in 1908 or 1909, Uncle Ruka became engrossed in some French children’s books that he had come upon in our house; with an ecstatic moan, he found a passage he had loved in his childhood, beginning: “Sophie n’était pas jolie …” and many years later, my moan echoed his, when I rediscovered, in a chance nursery, those same “Bibliothèque Rose” volumes, with their stories about boys and girls who led in France an idealized version of the vie de château which my family led in Russia. The stories themselves (all those Les Malheurs de Sophie, Les Petites Filles Modèles, Les Vacances) are, as I see them now, an awful combination of preciosity and vulgarity; but in writing them the sentimental and smug Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchine, was Frenchifying the authentic surroundings of her Russian childhood which preceded mine by exactly one century. In my own case, when I come over Sophie’s troubles again—her lack of eyebrows and love of thick cream—I not only go through the same agony and delight that my uncle did, but have to cope with an additional burden—the recollection I have of him, reliving his childhood with the help of those very books. 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.

Dmitri Nikolaevich Nabokov, the author’s grandfather (1827–1904), Minister of Justice (1878–1885).

The author’s paternal grandmother, Baroness Maria von Korff (1842–1926) in the late eighteen-fifties.

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THE kind of Russian family to which I belonged—a kind now extinct—had, among other virtues, a traditional leaning toward the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Pears’ Soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light between wet fingers, took care of one’s morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. “We could not improve the cream, so we improved the tube,” said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered onto a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English Shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar—Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts—“Who is Ben?” “He is Dan,” “Sam is in bed,” and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ—for the initial lessons, at least—words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (“Ben has an axe”), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician’s chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me.

The schoolroom was drenched with sunlight. In a sweating glass jar, several spiny caterpillars were feeding on nettle leaves (and ejecting interesting, barrel-shaped pellets of olive-green frass). The oilcloth that covered the round table smelled of glue. Miss Clayton smelled of Miss Clayton. Fantastically, gloriously, the blood-colored alcohol of the outside thermometer had risen to 24° Réaumur (86° Fahrenheit) in the shade. Through the window one could see kerchiefed peasant girls weeding a garden path on their hands and knees or gently raking the sun-mottled sand. (The happy days when they would be cleaning streets and digging canals for the State were still beyond the horizon.) Golden orioles in the greenery emitted their four brilliant notes: dee-del-dee-O!