How to write a review of this  beautifully written and fascinating account  of the years between 1903 and 1940, from St. Petersburg, Russia to St. Nazaire, France, from a life of aristocratic, inherited wealth and status to one of hounded emigration by one of my favorite authors???  Nabokov wrote this book while in the U.S. primarily while living in Wellesley where he taught Russian and in Cambridge where he was the de facto head of Lepidoptery at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.  He and his Jewish wife, Vera, had fled Paris as the Nazis closed in, as he had fled St. Petersburg and the Russian Revolution nearly a quarter century earlier. The book is a remarkably detailed and exquisite journey, initially through a child’s eyes and then those of a married man,the father of a young son, and a writer on his way to an illustrious career, though the latter seemed far distant at the time.

It’s remarkable that a man in his 40’s could recall so many specifics of peoples’ appearances and the details of rooms, villages, and parks as he describes his ‘own private footpath parallel to the road of a troubled decade’. I think this ability stems from two unusual talents. The first is his hyper-acute powers of observation enhanced by a well-developed sense of synesthesia while the second is the unique gift of being able to express those observations in rich and often newly created language. The book is full of words that I had to look up as well as words that are in no dictionary but are the expression of the author’s search for a specific detail.

Time and memory are the primary themes in this wonderful book.  At one point, Nabokov says he does not ‘believe’ in time and at another offers the perfect metaphor for time, a spherical prison with no exits.  The adjectives he applies to time include defining  consciousness as a journey of a sense of time, a radiant and mobile mechanism, the present as a ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, and a watermill as an endless stem of time itself.

Memory also is deeply explored for its idiosyncratic mystery and is described as an anonymous roller, an intricate watermark of unique design, terra incognita of gaps in maps, harmonious from tonalities of the past.

And then there are the fascinating details of his family’s background, a rich history of service to the Tsarist state on his father’s side and distinguished physicians on his mother’s.  The wealth and richness of the noble class in Tsarist Russia are not dwelt upon but appear in subtle ways. For example, Nabokov tosses off in one sentence how the inheritance of 2000 acres and the equivalent of $1million from his uncle Ruka had little impact on his 18 year old self!

But for all that, perhaps my favorite part of the book are its very first lines, possibly the most perfect description of the reality of man’s finite mortality within the infinity of time:  The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for”.

Nabokov is, in my opinion, the biggest omission in the list of Nobel Prize winners in literature in the 20th C, an oversight that remains painful for me.  This butterfly-collecting specialist spent six years at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology where there are several butterflies bearing his name in the collection and lived on Craigie Street three blocks from our home in Cambridge.  He died in 1977 in Switzerland where he and his wife, Vera, had lived in a hotel for 16 years.  One of those wonderful ‘connections’ that arise in widely reading came in last week’s NYT Sunday Book Review where the By the Book interview was with Bette Midler. When asked what three people she would invite to a literary dinner party, she responded “Charles Dickens, Fran Lebowitz, and Vladimir Nabokov.”  Would that I could attend as well!!!!