Translating Timelessness: The Relationship between Vladimir Nabokov’s Conclusive Evidence, Drugie berega and Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

Comparing the three full-length versions of Vladimir Nabokov's autobiography reveals shifts in the way he imagines his reader as he moves between languages. Nabokov's tussles with Edmund Wilson over Russian history and literature influence the devices he uses to share his experience of timelessness in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. The creation of a ludic text which prompts a rethinking of patterns of perception offers a way of accommodating the author's ambivalent feelings towards the reader, who is desired as a friend as much as he is feared as an enemy.