In the course of its development it guides the author into new regions of life. Once found, this or that theme is followed up through the years. Nabokov’s method is to explore the remotest regions of his past life for what may be termed thematic trails or currents. It would seem to the reviewer that the permanent importance “Conclusive Evidence” has lies in its being the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story. Emphatically, it is not the popular slick kind of reminiscence where the author keys himself up to the lofty level of Grade-C fiction, and with quiet impudence sets down reams and reams of dialogue (Maw and the neighbor, Maw and the children, Bill and Paw, Bill and Picasso) which no human brain could have preserved in anything approaching that particular form. Nor is it a professional writer’s kitchen, with bits of unused material floating in a tepid brew of literary and personal stuff.

It is not, for instance, one of those garrulous, formless, and rambling affairs, heavily relying on a diarist’s notes, that experts in other arts or the administrators of our public existence are apt to produce (“Wednesday night, around 11:40, General So-and-So telephoned.

Nabokov’s book is easier to define in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is. If its originality is not quite as attractive as the deep human glow that suffuses every page of Miss Braun’s “When Lilacs Last,” it contains, on the other hand, special sources of pleasure that no intelligent reader should miss.Ī unique freak as autobiographies go, Mr. Although to subtitle it “memoirs” seems an obvious step, there are certain features-not necessarily virtues-about “Conclusive Evidence” that set it completely apart from extant autobiographies, true, more or less true, or deliberately fictitious. Nabokov’s admirers will be not unreasonably elated by the publication of his new work. It is seldom that two such accomplishments reach a reviewer’s desk practically on the same day. The two books of memoirs before me, one by a Russian-born author, now a citizen of this country, the other by the granddaughter of a great American educationalist, are extremely elaborate affairs.

Nabokov speak memory