a volume called "Conclusive Evidence." It was an autobiography and yet it wasn't altogether so. Would Mr. Nabokov talk a bit about it? He would.

"It is a memoir," he said, "and true. There is a good deal of selection in it, of course. What interested me is the thematic lines of my life that resembles fiction. The memoir became the meeting point of an impersonal art form and a very personal life story."

Was there any precedent for the memoir that is to some extent manipulated or constructed or conceived as a novel? Mr. Nabokov didn't think too long. "There isn't any precedent that I know of," he said. "It is a literary approach to my own past. There is some precedent for it in the novel, in Proust, say, but not in the memoir. With me," Mr. Nabokov said, "it is a kind of composition. I am a composer of chess problems. Nobody," he said, "has yet solved the chess problem in 'Conclusive Evidence.'" What about a professional, a Reuben Fine, a Reshevsky, or someone like that? "I'm waiting for one to come along," Mr. Nabokov said in a voice that could have been as ambivalent as Joyce's when people were starting to guess at the title of what turned out to be "Finnegans Wake."