Nabokov's palette: The role of the painter in 'Speak, Memory'

Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov's "Autobiography Revisited," reveals that its author thought deeply about the complex symbiosis between painters and writers. In this, he was influenced by the modernist era's dialogues between genres and media and by its efforts to redefine the human experience of space and time. Nabokov reproduces his past with urgent fidelity to detail using painterly language that becomes a mnemonic device designed both to recapture the past and render it into material for artistic recreation. This thesis explores the aesthetic and moral effects and limits of Nabokov's identification with the painter's craft by comparing elements in his memoir with works by Monet, Chagall, and Picasso. Central themes include Monet's Impressionist transcriptions of the material world's "instantaneity;" Chagall's storytelling return, from exile, to a mythologized Russian childhood; and Picasso's exploitation of artistic illusion and the radical subordination of time to space in his Cubist records of "simultaneity."...