' Speak memory' said Vladimir Nabokov. & immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections
- of his comfortable childhood & adolescence of his rich liberal-minded father his beautiful mother an army of relations & family hangers
- on & of grand old houses in St Petersburg & the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love butterflies tutors & a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography which is itself a work of art.