Speak, Memory, subtitled in its final version “An Autobiography Revisited”, appeared in its definitive form in 1967, having undergone a lengthy publishing history. Nabokov's first plans for a memoiristic or autobiographical work, that would have been written in Russian in the 1930s, did not reach fruition. The first edition of the autobiography, then described as a “memoir” and written in English, was completed ten years after his arrival in the United States. It had been conceived in the form of “essays”, or “a new kind of autobiography, or rather a new hybrid between that and a novel”. A series of such “essays” appeared in American magazines from 1948 to 1951, when the whole was

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Published 30 June 2002

Citation: Cornwell, Neil. "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
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