Nabokov's memoir of his first forty years, and one of the most stylistically dazzling autobiographies in English. The book covers his childhood in an aristocratic St. Petersburg family, the flight from the Bolshevik revolution, the Cambridge years, and the emigre decades in Berlin and Paris before he sailed for America in 1940. But Nabokov is uninterested in the conventional autobiographical project of self-explanation. He writes instead about the operation of memory itself, treating consciousness as a narrow band of light between two eternities of darkness and setting out to demonstrate what can be recovered from it. The result is a book organized by pattern rather than chronology: the butterflies he chased as a boy and continued chasing as a lepidopterist, the recurring figures of tutors and governesses, the synesthetic colors he assigned to letters of the alphabet, the mushroom-hunting mother, the liberal politician father who would be assassinated in Berlin. Individual chapters are among the finest prose he wrote, particularly the account of first love with Tamara and the closing sequence in which he watches his own son and folds three generations into a single image. The emotional force is all the greater for Nabokov's refusal to state it directly. Loss is everywhere in the book and named almost nowhere, present instead in the intensity with which he reconstructs a vanished house, a particular light, a specific summer that no revolution can be permitted to take.