Reassembled Fragments: Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as Compilation and Collection

This article explores how Nabokov articulates a specific concept of memory as a curated collection of textual and material fragments in the final version of his autobiography. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, Nabokov foregrounds the curatorial nature of recollection, positing remembering and compiling as analogous processes which are predicated on retrieval, selection and arrangement. In the final version of the autobiography, the metaphor of compilation operates beyond a thematic level, shaping the very form of the autobiographical text. Through added intertextual citation, Speak, Memory draws attention to itself as a multi-voiced compilation of intergenerational memory, which draws on and recontextualises external sources. The integration of the added paratextual elements – photographs, map, index – extends the metaphor of compilation further into the book as a material object. The article argues that these editorial gestures complicate notions of a single authorship of memory and of the past. In this context, the metaphor of compilation assumes a critical function, repositioning the author as compiler – one who continuously reorders fragments of the past, striving for but never attaining a stable, permanent structure.