From one of the 20th centurys great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokovs life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

The exiled Russian master began writing short stories while he was still at Cambridge University and, in his subsequent years of residence in Berlin and Paris during the 1920s and 30s, continued to publish them frequently, writing in Russian, French and, later, English. Most of the 65 stories gathered here appeared in a 1958 Doubleday collection, Nabokovs Dozen, or in three McGraw-Hill volumes in the 1970s, Details of a Sunset, Tyrants Destroyed and A Russian Beauty.

For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. Its a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev.