'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a
host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his
rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-
on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-
Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread
together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art.
Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and
Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.
