The two books of memoirs before me, one by a Russian-born author, now a citizen of this country, the other by the granddaughter of a great American educationalist, are extremely elaborate affairs. It is seldom that two such accomplishments reach a reviewer’s desk practically on the same day.

The small bunch of Mr. Nabokov’s admirers will be not unreasonably elated by the publication of his new work. Although to subtitle it “memoirs” seems an obvious step, there are certain features—not necessarily virtues—about “Conclusive Evidence” [the original title of “Speak, Memory”] that set it completely apart from extant autobiographies, true, more or less true, or deliberately fictitious. If its originality is not quite as attractive as the deep human glow that suffuses every page of Miss Braun’s “When Lilacs Last,” it contains, on the other hand, special sources of pleasure that no intelligent reader should miss.

A unique freak as autobiographies go, Mr. Nabokov’s book is easier to define in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is. It is not, for instance, one of those garrulous, formless, and rambling affairs, heavily relying on a diarist’s notes, that experts in other arts or the administrators of our public existence are apt to produce (“Wednesday night, around 11:40, General So-and-So telephoned. I said to him—”). Nor is it a professional writer’s kitchen, with bits of unused material floating in a tepid brew of literary and personal stuff. Emphatically, it is not the popular slick kind of reminiscence where the author keys himself up to the lofty level of Grade-C fiction, and with quiet impudence sets down reams and reams of dialogue (Maw and the neighbor, Maw and the children, Bill and Paw, Bill and Picasso) which no human brain could have preserved in anything approaching that particular form.

It would seem to the reviewer that the permanent importance “Conclusive Evidence” has lies in its being the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story. Nabokov’s method is to explore the remotest regions of his past life for what may be termed thematic trails or currents. Once found, this or that theme is followed up through the years. In the course of its development it guides the author into new regions of life. The diamond pattern of art and the muscles of sinuous memory are combined in one strong and supple movement and produce a style that seems to slip through grass and flowers toward the warm flat stone upon which it will richly coil.

The reader will surely enjoy finding for himself the convolutions, the stepping stones, the various smiling disguises of this or that thematic line running through the book. There are some main lines and there are numerous subordinate ones, and all of them are combined in a way recalling chess compositions, riddles of various kinds, but all tending to their chess-apotheosis form, in fact, a theme reappearing in almost every chapter: jigsaw puzzles; an armorial checkerboard; certain “rhythmic patterns”; the contrapuntal nature of fate; life’s “blending of lines of play”; a chess game on board ship while Russia recedes; Sirin’s novels; his interest in chess problems; the “emblemata” on pieces of broken pottery; a final picture puzzle completing the spiral of the theme.

Possibly the most moving theme in the book is the line of exile, to which I shall have to refer again. In a way Nabokov went through all the sorrows and delights of nostalgia long before the Revolution had removed the scenery of his young years. He is out to prove that his childhood contained, on a much reduced scale, the main components of his creative maturity; thus, through the thin sheath of a ripe chrysalis one can see, in its small wing cases, the dawning of color and pattern, a miniature revelation of the butterfly that will soon emerge and let its flushed and diced wings expand to many times their pupal size.

The unravelling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind. All thematic lines mentioned are gradually brought together, are seen to interweave or converge, in a subtle but natural form of contact which is as much a function of art as it is a discoverable process in the evolution of a personal destiny. Thus, toward the end of the book, the theme of mimicry, of the “cryptic disguise” studied by Nabokov in his entomological pursuits, comes to a punctual rendezvous with the riddle theme, with the camouflaged solution of a chess problem, with the piecing together of a design on bits of broken pottery, and with a picture puzzle wherein the eye makes out the contours of a new country. To the same point of convergence other thematic lines arrive in haste, as if consciously yearning for the blissful anastomosis provided jointly by art and fate. The solution of the riddle theme is also the solution of the theme of exile, of the intrinsic loss running through the whole book, and these lines blend, in their turn, with the culmination of the rainbow theme ("a spiral of life in an agate”), and merge, at a most satisfying rond-point, with the many garden paths and park walks and forest trails meandering through the book. One cannot but respect the amount of retrospective acumen and creative concentration that the author had to summon in order to plan his book according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games, and never to swerve from that plan.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899, in St. Petersburg. His father, also Vladimir, was a highly cultured European, a scholarly statesman, a robust and cheerful rebel, whose brothers and brothers-in-law were, at the best, easygoing conservatives and, at the worst, active reactionaries, but who belonged himself to the Liberal Group that opposed, in Parliament and in widely read periodicals, the autocratic trends and iniquities of the Tsar’s regime. American readers of today, whose information concerning Tsarist Russia is thoroughly permeated by Communist propaganda and pro-Soviet accounts that were spread here in the twenties, will be surprised to learn from various passages in “Conclusive Evidence” how freely opinions could be expressed and how much could be done by civilized people in pre-Revolution Russia.

Life in the wealthy, landowning upper stratum to which the Nabokovs belonged had some affinities with Southern opulence in this country and was very similar to manor life in England and France. The summers, spent by the author as a boy in the country, seem to have been especially responsible for shaping him. The region, with its scattered villages among great forests and marshes, was meagrely populated, but numerous ancient footpaths (the mysterious trails that webbed the whole Empire from immemorial times) kept the berry-gatherer, the tramp, the squire’s pretty children from losing themselves in the woods. And, because most of those ways and the wastes they passed by or led to were nameless, landowning families, from generation to generation, designated them by the names that under the influence of French governesses and tutors had naturally come into being during the children’s daily promenades and frequent picnics—Chemin du Pendu, Pont des Vaches, Amerique, and so on.