Elif Batuman on Vladimir Nabokov's "The Perfect Past"

Eleven chapters of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, “Speak, Memory,” initially appeared, out of order, in The New Yorker.

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“Portrait of My Uncle,” one of his first prose pieces in the magazine, became Chapter 3. Chapter 1, originally titled “The Perfect Past,” came out last. Its opening line—“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”—has, by now, been seared into numberless brains.

The most interesting texts often include tips about how to read them. Midway through “The Perfect Past,” we find an instructive anecdote. Part 1: in 1904, a family friend, General Kuropatkin, is entertaining young Nabokov with a trick involving matches when he is suddenly called away to the Russo-Japanese War. Part 2: fifteen years later, while fleeing Petrograd, Nabokov’s father is accosted on a bridge by a gray-bearded peasant, who asks for a light and proves to be Kuropatkin in disguise. Nabokov alerts readers to “the evolution of the match theme: Those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through”—just like the toy trains he had moved over frozen puddles the following winter, imagining them crossing Lake Baikal.

The “true purpose of autobiography,” Nabokov continues, is “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life.”