In the following essay excerpt, Stuart shows how Speak, Memory is a fiction in how Nabokov chooses to mold facts.
I am tempted to say that Speak, Memory is the book on which Vladimir Nabokov has spent his most painstaking care, but that is not so; there are no degrees of attention in his works—no Homais, no nods—and each has been nurtured as thoroughly as possible. But Speak, Memory is the book he has most frequently written, or rewritten, or, as he characterized his last venture into its composition, revisited. No less than all his other books, it is a construction, in his words "a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections." It is an autobiography, but it is not a record, or account, of "facts" (that troublesome curbing one keeps stumbling over). It is imaginative narration.....
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