Nabokov composed and published early versions of most of the chapters in Speak, Memory as selfcontained essays in various magazines and journals over a fourteen-year period beginning in Paris in 1936 and ending in 1950 in Ithaca, New York, while he was teaching at Cornell University. Responding to the outbreak of World War II in Europe, he moved with his immediate family to the United States and established himself, at middle age, as an important English language writer during this same interval. Nabokov's survival instinct, plus the instrumental assistance of his wife Véra, helped him negotiate the complex and changing American cultural and political climate without losing his bearings. An avid anticommunist, Nabokov had to tread carefully during the first years of U.S. participation in World War II. Wartime propaganda initially presented the Soviets in a.....
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