I've really been enjoying Speak, Memory , a fascinating collection of Vladimir Nabokov's remembrances of his youth (1899-1919) in Imperial Russia. As he notes in his penultimate chapter, it is the first arc of the spiral that made up his life, in which he delves into the some of the formative moments that shaped him. One can find echoes of Lolita in his "first love" for Collette on a French seashore, where his family vacationed one summer. And, his first real love for Tamara which ended when his family had to flee Petersburg for Crimea, as the Bolshevik revolution thrust the country into turmoil, and eventually set sail for Greece with Tamara's letters left to drift like butterflies as no forward address was left. There is even a pause for silence in the death of Tolstoy, which Nabokov notes in his parents one morning. Brian Boyd wrote the introduction to this Everyman's Library edition, 1999, and here he is on the Centennial of Nabokov's birth th...