I went all that way over unpaved, broken-up mountain roads in specific search of a butterfly that I myself had described in 1948 on the basis of nine museum specimens; I had an overwhelming desire to see it live and discover its unknown female. The altitude of Telluride is 9000 feet (3000 meters), and from there I had to climb on foot every morning to 12,000 feet (4000 meters), and I am fat and heavy, although I still have my soccer calves. It will not be hard for you to understand what a joy it was for me to find at last my exceedingly rare goddaughter, on a sheer mountainside covered with violet lupine, in the sky-high, snow-scented silence. Je fais mon petit Sirine, as you can see. Nabokov (a.k.a. Sirin) from a letter to his sister, Elena Sikorski, 6 October 1951(1)

In October of 1951, when Nabokov wrote his sister with the details of his recent lepidopterous success, he had just published Conclusive Evidence, the text that would come to be called in its final revised edition, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1967). Made up of recollections upon which Nabokov had performed his "little Sirin number" and published separately between 1936 and 1951, Speak, Memory stands today as one of the most exquisite memoirs published in the twentieth century, blending, as Nabokov said, "perfect personal truth with strict artistic selection...."(2)

"Perfect personal truth" and "strict artistic selection"? That is, to be sure, a typically bold Nabokovian claim, one that provokes suspicion. For anyone schooled in theoretical work on historical representation, Nabokov's aplomb seems decidedly naive: representation always risks, masks, the erasure of the very object it attempts to capture.(3) Memory, moreover, is a tricky subject to begin with, mediated as it is by one's desires. But of course Nabokov knew this. His winking acknowledgment of his performance in the letter to his sister is an echo of the narrative strategy throughout Speak, Memory, where Nabokov constantly calls attention to his own artifice as he presents his recollections. While doing so seems to undermine the claims of his "empiricism," his "perfect personal truth," I would like to suggest that it is precisely Nabokov's aestheticism that allows him to go beyond the claims of a naive representational empiricism--"apprehending the past just as it was"--to bring readers into connection with his past.

Modern historical consciousness can be described as having been characterized by two primary attitudes toward the past. The first of these we would call the "Hegelian": freedom through self-consciousness. In the Hegelian orientation toward the past, historical consciousness is an "active" vocation, wherein the philosopher (or historian, or individual) re-collects, pursues, elements of the past and integrates them into a coherent narrative of meaning. In addition to Hegel, this attitude is typical of thinkers like Ranke, Marx, and Freud. The second attitude we would call "Proustian": pleasure through historical reflection. In the Proustian orientation toward the past, historical reflection is understood as reverie, as a more "passive" process whereby one...