![]() a short novel about a man who liked little girls - and it's going to be called The Kingdom By The Sea - and 2. Nabokov confided to his friend Edmund Wilson in April 1947: "I am writing two things now 1. But more than these, and any other autobiographies, it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, an acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness. ![]() It lacks the probing self-analysis of St Augustine or Tolstoy, or the overt and the inadvertent self-display of Rousseau, the historical and categorical aplomb of Henry Adams, or the sparkling anecdotal flow of Robert Graves. It has been rated the greatest of autobiographies, but since such judgments depend so much on the criteria we bring to them, I will call it only the most artistic of autobiographies. Speak, Memory is the one Nabokov work outside his finest novels - The Gift, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada - that is a masterpiece on their level. And it seems an eternity since the worlds he calls up in Speak, Memory disappeared. ![]() ![]() It is 50 years since he wrote in his autobiography, "I confess I do not believe in time." It is just under 50 years since he wrote Lolita, which has gone on to sell some 50 million copies. It is 100 years since Vladimir Nabokov was born. ![]()
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