'Speak, memory' said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately a host of enchanting recollections came flooding back to him; of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and faily hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography which is itself a work of art.This Penguin Modern Classic edition contains an appendix, 'Chapter sixteen', a pseudo-review written by Nabokov in 1950 but only now published for the first time in paperback.