J F Vernon Blog

I’m interested in exploring our understanding of memory through the lenses of Nabakov’s recollections of his first love, Tamara, in ‘Speak, Memory’ and those single frail threads of his memory of ink scratched onto paper with a fountain pen compared to Anais Nin chasing multiple memories when picking one of many threads plucked from her diary until one trembled, to the 21st century and 2025 in particular where memories are forever digital and like ink drops in water instantly sealed in a record to be poured over, reformed, stirred, added to, shared and only to be formed all over again by the same drop of ink in the same tank of water.  Different each time a new entity, yet the same.

Nabokov’s memories were ink flows into sentences on paper. In Speak, Memory, each fragment — Tamara’s braided hair, a creaking grove of pines, the bitter taste of an insect caught in the mouth on a summer ride — forms a death dance on the page. Completed. Done with. Dead. Writing was an act of preservation against time, against forgetting, a stubborn itch turned into substance and memory.  

On his girlfriend Tamara. He was sixteen when they met; she was a year younger.’When I first met Tamara to give her a name concolorous with her real one, she was 15, and I was a year older.

During the beginning of that summer in 1917 and all through the previous one, ‘Tamara’s name had kept cropping up with the feigned naivety so typical of Fate, when meaning business, here and there on our estate (Entry forbidden) and on my uncles land (Entry strictly forbidden) on the opposite bank of the Oredezh.’

KAI: Let’s walk through it carefully:

• “On his girlfriend Tamara” — Tamara is a pseudonym Nabokov used for his first serious love. Her real name was actually Valentina Shulgina.
• “He was sixteen when they met; she was a year younger.” — Nabokov is recalling his own sixteenth summer; Tamara was about fifteen.
• “To give her a name concolorous with her real one” — Concolorous here means “similar in color” (or tone). Nabokov often plays with precise language: Tamara sounds close enough to Valentina in feel, rhythm, and era, but protects her real identity.
• “During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one…” — He sets the mood of Fate conspiring to bring them together, with Tamara’s name appearing around him, as if in little hints or premonitions.
• “(Entry forbidden)” and “(Entry strictly forbidden)” — This parenthetical note captures the teasing, slightly dangerous atmosphere of their meetings — young love blooming in forbidden or off-limits territories: woods, riverbanks, estates with warning signs.

This layering of fate, forbidden space, youthful innocence, and intense emotional discovery is a hallmark of Nabokov’s early memory style. His recall is sensuous, detailed, yet always just a little ironic about his own younger self.

JV: He described Tamara thus: ‘Seen through the carefully white lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near and is glowing as ever. She was short and a trifle on the plump side but very graceful, with her slim ankles and soft waist. A drop of tartar or Caucasian blood might of the countered for the slight slant, a very dark eye and the duskiness of a blooming cheek. I always recall her rich brown hair as it looked first, fiercely braided into a thick plait that was looped up at the back of her head and tied with a big bow of black silk. A lovely neck was always bare even in winter.’

We can bring her back to life, imperfectly through AI generate images:

KAI: Yes, exactly — beautifully quoted.

This is Nabokov at his most tender, weaving memory and physical detail together so intimately that it feels like the portrait shimmers between past and present. Let’s slow down and look at how he draws her:

• “Seen through the carefully white lenses of time” — Time has not dimmed her beauty but purified it. Carefully white suggests both a nostalgic idealization and an emotional softening, as if sorrow and loss have bleached away any flaws.
• “Short and a trifle on the plump side but very graceful” — He gives her a real, physical presence — not idealised into thinness, but graceful in her natural, rounded form. The slim ankles and soft waist are sensory and affectionate details.
• “A drop of Tartar or Caucasian blood” — He speculates lovingly on her exotic features: a slight slant of the eye, very dark eyes, duskiness to the cheek. Nabokov often delighted in describing physical nuances that suggested rich, mixed origins, as if beauty emerged from complexity, not purity.
• “Rich brown hair… fiercely braided into a thick plait” — This image is tactile and alive. Fiercely braided suggests vigor and youth, an energy that suits the burning emotions of first love.
• “A lovely neck was always bare even in winter” — This small detail of her neck’s exposure, even in the Russian cold, captures an unconscious boldness, an erotic undertone Nabokov lets hover without spelling it out.

There’s something deeply poignant in how he uses memory almost like an artist’s brush, adding light, shading, warmth — not altering her, but choosing how she is illuminated.

‘In one particular pine grove, everything fell into place, I parted the fabric of fancy, I tasted reality’. Nabakov writes.

KAI: That line you quote is pure Nabokov — from Speak, Memory — and it’s one of his most important moments: the first awakening of true consciousness, the discovery of beauty as something immediate, overwhelming, almost painfully real.

Let’s linger on it:

• “In one particular pine grove…” — A specific place: not a generalized forest, but one grove, sharply remembered.
• “everything fell into place…” — This suggests a sudden moment of perfect, crystalline order — the kind Nabokov loved: where the random flux of the world suddenly aligns into meaning.
• “I parted the fabric of fancy…” — Fancy here means dream, imagination, vague ideas. Parted suggests that for the first time, he moved through imagination into something more solid and astonishing.
• “I tasted reality.” — The most powerful line: he tastes (not just sees) reality — direct, vivid, sensory, overwhelming.
  It’s almost synesthetic — the real world so intense it floods not only sight but all the senses at once.

This is Nabokov describing the birth of aesthetic consciousness.

It’s the moment when the real world becomes enchanted — when a child ceases to live inside fuzzy fantasy and instead starts perceiving with such precision that beauty and sadness become inextricable.

In Speak, Memory, this experience is linked to everything that follows:

His obsession with reality perceived so keenly that it transcends itself.

His passion for butterflies.

His intricate prose.

‘I took my adorable girl to all those secret spots in the woods, where I daydream so ardently of meeting her, of creating her.’ Nabakov

KAI: That line (or your paraphrase of it) again captures something central to Nabokov’s vision of first love:
Desire not just for the beloved, but for the creation of the beloved — as if love itself invents the girl, as much as discovers her.

Let’s tease this out:

• “I took my adorable girl to all those secret spots in the woods…”
  — This suggests that in his imagination, he had already prepared these places, like little shrines — secret spaces shaped not only for meeting her, but for her existence to make sense.
  They are places of anticipation, places charged with longing even before she steps into them.
• “where I daydream so ardently of meeting her…”
  — He confesses that before even meeting her, he was already dreaming her — craving the encounter, building her presence in his mind.
• “of creating her.”
  — This is the astonishing, Nabokovian admission:
  That love — especially young love — conjures the beloved from desire, dream, memory, place.
  Tamara/Valentina is not just found; she is also created by the intense imaginative energy of youth.

In other words, the lover imagines the beloved into existence.
The woods, the secret spots, the stolen glances, all were part of the architecture of invention.

‘One is moved to speak more eloquently about these things about many other things that won’t always hopes might survive captivity in the zoo of words but the ancient limes close to the house drown Mnemosyne’s monologue with their creaking and heaving in the restless night’. Nabakov, C.12 p.233 Speak, Memory.

KAI: Nabokov is expressing a profound doubt:

• He is trying to capture memories (delicate, elusive things) into language (the “zoo of words” — a wonderfully painful metaphor: caging wild, living things).
• But even as he tries, the real world — the ancient linden trees (limes, an old word for linden) outside his house — makes noise, heaves, creaks.
• Their physical presence, their “creaking and heaving in the restless night,” overwhelms the mental monologue of Mnemosyne (the Greek goddess of memory).
• Thus real life’s physical world intrudes upon the fragile internal world of memory and language.

In short:

The physical world interrupts, drowns out, and threatens the survival of memory and its translation into words.

Anaïs Nin moved differently. She lived inside her memory even as she wrote it, pulling at a thousand threads at once, tugging feelings, dreams, moments out of the tangle. For Nin, memory was never linear. It shifted with the heart’s temperature, recombining love and longing with every breath. She teased memories, taunted them, and played with their truth by deliberately saying more or less than the truth.  

And here I stand, lie, walk, bathe decades later — in a different century, in another type of water, talking into a device or tapping with one hand, just two thumbs, even my nose. Yes, my nose if my hands are busy. 

My memories are not handwritten linear artefacts anymore, or paper fed into a typewriter or drawn from a printer drawer, but anything our digital world in 2025 can manage or contrive, from voice notes to video, photos to dictated text. When this won’t suffice, simply tell it all to AI and let them expand, investigate, or invent as you please. 

Memories are now like ink dropped into a digital sea (or less romantically farts captured in a digital wind): at the instant they fall, they bloom, and they freeze. Each one is sealed — not lost, not blurred, but instantly preserved in a medium that remembers everything too well.

I pour over them; I stir them; I add to them; I reform them; I send them into other hands and currents, where they are stirred again. The same drop of ink can draw one shape today, another tomorrow, endlessly mutable yet still somehow bound to its first falling.

There is no true forgetting now. No burning of paper. There is no fragile typewritten draft yellowing in a locked trunk. Only this: a sea where every drop endures, shifting and shimmering, never drying, never dying — and I, a swimmer in my unfathomable past, still reaching toward the old urgency that drove Nabokov’s scratch and Nin’s weave, knowing that in the end, it is not memory we save, but ourselves.