Nabokov's autobiography Speak, Memory (1967), which first appeared as Conclusive Evidence (1951), is marked by multiple revisitations. The memoir returns to powerful scenes of an autobiographical past not only to re-create and repossess a lost geocultural world together with a childhood family home of extraordinary bliss, but also to pretend that, on some level, displacement, death and loss have not occurred. As I shall argue in this chapter, it is precisely in its attempt to undo a cataclysmic past that the survior text comes to be haunted and revisited by the burden of a disturbing knowledge.

As we consider Nabokov's biography, we quickly notice that his recreation of the family home occurs against the backdrop of several dislocations, notably his geocultural displacement and the death of several family members. As a result, the home, which forms both the point of departure and the object of reconstruction, is troubled by loss – a fact that appears to ineluctably haunt the author and his text. Yet in spite of, or precisely because of, these radical dislocations, first through the Russian Revolution and then the Second World War, Nabokov still has recourse to home narratives. More specifically, his autobiography invokes a classic humanistic narrative of exile, a type of text that presupposes the chronotope of a home or homeland which, in retrospect, comes to be mythically refigured as a paradisiacal site or state from which the exiled person has been expelled.