SMITHSONIAN.com
The Trouble With Autobiography
Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux examines other authors' autobiographies to prove why this piece will suffice for his
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Trouble-With-Autobiography.html
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Some writers not only improve on an earlier biography but find oblique ways to praise themselves. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Conclusive Evidence when he was 52, then rewrote and expanded it 15 years later, as Speak, Memory, a more playful, pedantic and bejeweled version of the first autobiography. Or is it fiction? At least one chapter he had published in a collection of short stories (“Mademoiselle O”) years earlier. And there is a colorful character whom Nabokov mentions in both versions, one V. Sirin. “The author that interested me most was naturally Sirin,” Nabokov writes, and after gushing over the sublime magic of the man’s prose, adds: “Across the dark sky of exile, Sirin passed... like a meteor, and disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of uneasiness.”
Who was this Russian émigré, this brilliant literary paragon? It was Nabokov himself. “V. Sirin” was Nabokov’s pen name when, living in Paris and Berlin, he still wrote novels in Russian, and—ever the tease—he used his autobiography to extol his early self as a romantic enigma.
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