Why Nabokov’s Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us

Earlier this year, when the New York Times asked novelist and essayist Roger Rosenblatt to name the best memoir he’d read recently, he was unequivocal in his reply. “Speak, Memory, recently or ever,” Rosenblatt told the Times.

He was referring to the classic account by Vladimir Nabokov
(1899–1977) of his idyllic Russian childhood in a family of colorful
aristocrats, the 1917 Bolshevik revolution that banished him to exile,
and the path that would eventually lead him to live in the United
States.