The centrality of memory within Nabokov's art has long since been acknowledged. From his early poetry and first novel Mary, perhaps his most nostalgic narrative, through to his final, the playful and parodic Look at the Harlequins!, Nabokov simultaneously interrogates and champions the power of memory. Memory is the artery which runs throughout the body of his work, imbuing his texts with that intricate watermark. Of course, much scholarship has already been dedicated to Nabokov's treatment of the subject (see, for example, Marina Grishakova's The Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov's Fiction (2012), Hana Píchová's The Art of Memory in Exile (2001), or John Burt Foster Jr.'s Nabokov's Art of Memory and European Modernism (1993)), and yet this collection marks a valuable and necessary contribution to Nabokov studies.
The essays within this volume, which emerged from a 2015 conference of the same name – organized by the coeditors – address crucial features of Nabokov's artistic and autobiographical conceptions of memory, nostalgia and temporality. It is not only the power of memory in a conventional sense, as an accurate recollection of the past, which is dealt with in these chapters; they are more concerned with the ways in which the mnemonic merges with the creative. For Nabokov, the truth of the past cannot be understood merely by transcribing previous dates and events. Rather, it necessitates the artistic rewriting, reinvention and re-creation of the past. The desire to relive the past is apparent in almost all of Nabokov's texts: Ganin attempts a mnemonic re-creation of his lost home and lover in Mary, while Lolita's Humbert seeks to resurrect Annabel Lee, and “the impossible past,” in the figure of Dolores (282). So, too, is the need to reinvent: Speak, Memory describes Mademoiselle O's nostalgia for Russia, despite it being a country “which [she] had never really known” and in which she was never really content (83). The act of writing remembrance as the rewriting of the past is discussed in essays by Gerard de Vries, who considers the tension between memory and invention in Nabokov's work in relation to Proust and Wordsworth, and by Carlo Comanducci, who explores fiction and remembrance in Transparent Things.
The function of biography and autobiography, as both a quest for and an obfuscation of the truth, is another topic addressed through various perspectives in this collection, with Leona Toker's “Nabokov's Factography” providing an account of the distinction between Speak, Memory and the traditional pseudo-autobiography of the Russian gentry. In exploring the tension between Nabokov's denial of fictionalization, and the “performative,” curated nature of factual autobiographical information, Toker draws attention to the impossibility of portraying the past without also invoking the needs of the present. Questions surrounding the inherent unreliability of biography are dealt with by Andrzej Księżopolski, whose reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight emphasizes the role of the biographer as intruder, a figure which threatens to subsume personal memory within the fictive. This theme is then further explored by Księżopolska in her essay “Biographer as Imposter: Banville and Nabokov,” in which the biographer again appears as a figure of suspicion, one who impersonates his subject and ultimately deforms memory. Each of these essays contributes to the volume's overall depiction of memory as a source of both comfort and anxiety, with Nabokov's deification of memory belying a fervent fear of loss – for what happens to a past which is no longer remembered?
Given their explicit engagement with themes of memory and biography, certain of Nabokov's texts appear in this volume with greater persistence than others, with Speak, Memory, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and Transparent Things, in particular, being foregrounded. Whilst these texts are clearly relevant, and are treated in great depth, others are entirely absent. Mary, Nabokov's first novelistic foray into the realm of insistent, nostalgic memory, is a notable example of a text which could have provoked valuable discussion here, given that it establishes Nabokov's distinct brand of nostalgia as a wellspring of creativity and growth, as opposed to an inert, regressive sentimentalism. Likewise, Look at the Harlequins!, with its pseudo-autobiographical, metafictive elements, may have proved an interesting addition to the volume's investigations into the merging of invention and fact within autobiography. However, the collection does include explorations of a number of Nabokov's short stories – often neglected in critical studies – with Stephen Blackwell offering fascinating new perspectives on “Sounds” and “The Circle” in his essay “Nabokov's Cryptic Triptych: Grief and Joy in ‘Sounds’, ‘The Circle’, and ‘Lantern Slides’.” Also particularly exciting is Péter Tamás's reading of the short story “A Forgotten Poet,” a work which has thus far received little critical attention. Tamás explores public remembrance's vulnerability to manipulation, particularly when the historic is recounted by an unreliable narrator. In doing so, he highlights the distortion of the “reality” of the past when refracted through multiple frames of interpretation, an especially pertinent topic in our current age of “fake news” and digital disinformation.
Another great strength of this volume is its inclusion of psychoanalytic perspectives. Owing in part to Nabokov's well-documented disdain for Freud (“the Viennese witch-doctor”), there has traditionally been a reluctance amongst Nabokovians to apply a Freudian lens to his works.Footnote 1 This tendency to reverentially defer to Nabokov's personal stance has had the effect of limiting the number of published psychoanalytic readings of his texts, ultimately restricting the scope of Nabokov scholarship. This collection, however, includes a provocative essay by Adam Lipszyc (“Memory, Image, and Compassion: Nabokov and Benjamin on Childhood”), in which he utilizes Freud's thinking on the structure of memory and life narratives to illuminate concordances and tensions between the fragmentary autobiographical narratives of Nabokov and Walter Benjamin. In doing so, Lipszyc offers a compelling exegesis of Nabokov's epistemology of memory, illustrating the ways in which Speak, Memory reveals the failure of memory, no matter how factually accurate, to produce any more than simulacra, a phantasmagoric re-approximation of the “reality” of the past.
Similarly, Vyatcheslav Bart's essay “Vladimir Nabokov's Ontological Aestheticism from the Renaissance to Transhumanism” covers new ground, considering Nabokov's “mystical aestheticism” through the lens of transhumanism, and exploring his conception of memory, art and spirituality in relation to his portrayals of scientific and technological advances. In doing so, Bart provides us with an innovative, contemporary and highly original response to the questions of consciousness and creation within Nabokov's art, signalling new directions for further research. David Potter's essay also offers a novel perspective, along with new ways of reading Ada. Drawing upon Gennady Barabtarlo's study of Nabokov's dream experiments and John Burt Foster Jr.'s work on “anticipatory memory,” Potter uses ideas of paramnesia to suggest that Van's epileptic illness is tied to the text's nonlinear, unstable temporality, adding to the complex conceptions of memory addressed throughout this volume.Footnote 2
There are, however, pressing questions which this collection fails to address. In the volume's introduction, Księżopolska and Wiśniewski ask whether Nabokov is really interested in objectively recalling the past, or would it “be more apt to say that he artfully constructs remembrance in order to deal with trauma, loss and disappointment?” (12). The position of trauma within Nabokov's writing is one which, with the exception of scholarship on Lolita, has largely been ignored by critics, and this collection presented a perfect opportunity to interrogate the ways in which traumatic memory, specifically, is depicted in his literary portraits of exile and loss. But, despite this, Vladimir Nabokov and the Fictions of Memory represents a meaningful and productive addition to the current body of literature on temporality, consciousness and memory within Nabokov's narratives, offering new pathways in the study of this significant subject.
