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PARTISAN REVIEW
stylistic analysis of the autobiography. But I think we can get a fair sense
of what happens in the prose by concentrating on the means employed
to realize one of the most salient aspects of the mnemonic process in the
book - the special quality of
illumination
of the remembered scene.
The equation between light and life - or rather, far more specifi–
cally, between life and a crack of light, a limited band of illumination
against a large background of darkness - is announced in the very first
sentence of
Speak, Memory,
at the beginning of that extraordinary prelu–
dic evocation of "chronophobia": "common sense tells us that our exis–
tence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
This image becomes an organizing motif for the whole autobiography.
Having been introduced as a metaphor, it later resurfaces as literal fact
in
the opening paragraphs of the butterfly chapter:
On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boy–
hood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the
white inner shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not
open them at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for
its picture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a
line of dull light, the leaden sky, the sodden sand, the gruel-like mess
of broken brown blossoms under the lilacs - and that £lat, fallow leaf
(the first casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench!
But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then I
made haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow, the
room would be cleft into light and shade. The foliage of birches
moving in the sun had the translucent green tone of grapes, and in
contrast to this there was the dark velvet of fir trees against a blue of
extraordinary intensity, the like of which I rediscovered only many
years later, in the montane zone of Colorado.
The paired scenes - rainy day and sunny day - are actual recollec–
tions of repeated experiences, memory in an iterative tense, but they
also
offer themselves as a kind of allegory of perception and, by implication,
of memory. The window (as often in fiction) is the transparent marker
between inner and outer, between perceiver and scene; and the natural
scene as a whole can be visually reconstructed from the bar of light ema–
nating from it in through the shutters. Nabokov's temporal and spatial
distance from the lost past is defined by that initial phrase, "the legendary
Russia of my boyhood," but the virtuosity of the prose, moving from
the chink of light to the nuanced illumination of the landscape, proceeds
to abolish the distance. The "watery pallor" of the chink of light in the
first paragraph leads the imagination of the observer to a witty image
that summarizes the scene he prefers not to behold: "a sullen day sitting
