BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Last Enchantments
Speak, Memory: A Memoir. By Vladimir Nabokov. (Gollancz. 16s.) tr is always agreeable to read about the childhood of the rich. A childhood of the middle-class, being like one's own, lacks novelty ; and in reading of the poor the pleasure is too often diluted by compassion. Mr. Vladimir Nabokov, though now an American, is the son of .a Russian nobleman, and he has applied himself with wit and gusto to recapture in this book the last enchantments of the Czarist empire. It is a cheerful story. There is no old-fashioned Russian soulfulness nor fashionable masochism ; nothing sensation- ally sexual. Looking back in the light of Freudian confessions (" which involve tiny tots mating like mad ") Mr. Nabokov says: " Our innocence seems almost monstrous."
His father was a leading liberal, and, having issued a manifesto urging the Russian people to rise against the Czarist tyranny in 1906, he was imprisoned. This meant, the son explains, that he spent a restful if somewhat lonesome three months in solitary con- finement, with his books, his collapsible bathtub, and his copy of J. P. Muller's manual of home gymnastics." It seemed like persecu- tion at the time. In the light of what has happened since, how tolerant and civilised the Czarist tyranny appears ! Mr. Nabokov's home was more than merely civilised ; it was Anglophil. Nurses and governesses were imported from several European countries, but the ideas were English and Whig. Mr. Nabokov could speak English before he could speak Russian. He said English prayers in front of a Greek Orthodox ikon, and his mother, he remembers, " bought all sorts of snug mellow things from the English shop on Nevski Avenue in St. Petersburg: fruit cakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers and tennis balls." When he was six (in 1905), Mr. Nabokov's most memorable governess came into his life. " Mademoiselle " was tall, stout, asthmatic, Swiss and deaf. She was unreal and sentimental ; her remarks (because she could not hear) were often absurdly irrelevant and she used to smile at' nothing. "Excusez moi," she would say, " je souriais a mes tristes pensdes." Nevertheless, Mr. Nabokov confesses he learned the beauty of the French language from her. And literature has remained the chief interest of his life. When he was a little older he found a second interest he has never lost —in butterflies. One day he discovered in his father's attic (and what a singular attic it must have been) dusty copies of Esper's Die Schmetterlinge (1777), Boisduval's Lipidopteres Nouveaux (1832), Scudder's Butterflies of New England and Newman's British Butterflies and Moths. Since that day he has never gone on holiday without a net.
When he was a child, his parents took him for holidays to Biarritz, which meant a journey in the chocolate-coloured wagons-lit and pullman cars of the old Nord Express, which went all the way from St. Petersburg to Paris. It is hardly surprising that Mr. Nabokov found the railway journeys of later years unexciting in comparison. When be was eleven, he was sent to school, to a progressive school, where his fellow students thought it odd that a liberal leader's son should arrive in a chauffeur-driven limousine. But his prestige rose when the father challenged the editor of a reactionary paper to a duel, and received in return an abject apology. At sixteen Mr. Nabokov fell in love. Tamara and he spent idyllic hours of a whole summer in the country, but when winter brought them back to St. Petersburg, their romance had to be conducted rather sadly in public places. They wandered hand in hand from museum to museum, from picture house to picture house. Mr. Nabokov wrote endless verses to his Tamara, but their love did not survive the Bolshevik revolution, which dispatched Tamara to the Ukraine and Mr. Nabokov to Yalta. From Yalta the Nabokovs escaped, in a Greek ship under Soviet fire, to England. In England, Mr. Nabokov was sent to Cambridge, to Trinity, which he seems to have liked not unreservedly. Even after St. Petersburg Cambridge felt unbearably cold. " There was ice on the water of the washstand jug," he writes, " but it was easily broken by means of one's toothbrush into tinkling bits." Football warmed him, and Mr. Nabokov admits that Cambridge " supplied not only the casual frame, but also the very colours and inner rhythms of my very special Russian thoughts." Inevitably Mr. Nabokov found the English non-Communist pro- gressives very trying when they persisted in thinking that Lenin was the liberator of the Russian people. He could not make them understand that similar Russian non-Communist progressives were either exiled or shot. Whbn realisation came, and the progressives said it was Stalinism not Leninism that was wrong, the exasperated Mr. Nabokov was really quite glad to be away from the intelligentsia in a philistine America. There he now is, feeling no desire to return to the Europe of his birth, but still able to recapture, as in this entertaining book, bright scenes and stories from a world irrecover-
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