NABOKOV, Vladimir. Speak Memory. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. 1951.
8vo. Original turquoise cloth lettered in black to spine, in the dustwrapper showing a nineteenth-century illustration of the Mariinsky Palace, St Isaac's Cathedral and the Blue Bridge in St Petersburg; pp. 237, [3]; lightly pushed and rubbed to spine tips, light bump to lower outer corner of front panel, neat contemporary gift inscription to upper portion of front free endpaper, wrapper nicked to corners and spine tips, with minor loss to upper tip and one corner, front flap neatly price-clipped; a near fine copy, in like wrapper.
A bright first UK edition of Nabokov’s memoir of childhood and adolescence in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, in an uncommonly well-preserved example of the first issue jacket (without the “Daily Mail Book of the Month” insignia).
This original version of Speak Memory was substantially revised in light of the author's 1954 translation of the work into Russian from the original English (the first US edition was issued the same year as Conclusive Evidence: A Memoir). In the foreword to the revised edition, Nabokov explained that “[w]hile writing the first version in America I was handicapped by an almost complete lack of data in regard to family history, and, consequently, by the impossibility of checking my memory when I felt it might be at fault. […] What I still have not been able to rework through want of specific documentation, I have now preferred to delete for the sake of over-all truth.” Earlier versions of the fifteen discrete autobiographical essays (intricately woven with patterns and correspondences) had previously appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine.
Field 1096.
SKU: 2124014