Pieldner, Judit. The Self as Myth, Mask and Construct in Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. 2008

In my paper I study the strategies of constructing the self in Nabokov’s revisited autobiography, which constitutes a focal point in the net of his life work. The memoir does not only reconstruct the identity from a temporal and mnemonic perspective and in an intercultural context, but it also offers a self-portrait as a literary construct, worth being remembered by posterity. In my hypothesis, Nabokov’s text makes use of the “rhetoric of fiction” at least to the same extent in which he manipulates fiction by considering it a “shelter” for autobiographical elements. Fiction and autobiography become terms reflecting each other in his life work, as a specific sort of “specular structure”. Nabokov’s fiction as well as his autobiography requires the same type of reading: that of solving puzzles