Nabokov’s Index Puzzle: Life and Art Transcendent in Speak, Memory

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, begins with a riddle. For fifty years the riddle-poem posed by Nabokov to his readers in the 1966 Foreword of the book has stood as an unsolved mystery. Certainly, there has been much commentary on the mysterious riddle-poem over the years, but as a quintessentially Nabokovian riddle—one that makes a fairly direct allusion of some sort, despite possibly first sending the reader off on a “wild goose chase”—it remains unsolved. This essay offers a possible solution to the riddle-poem, arguing (spoiler alert) that the rose of the poem refers to Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and, more abstractly, to the possibility of transcendence through art. The transcendence of art—and of mortality through art—is one of Nabokov’s most persistent themes, one found throughout his oeuvre and, aptly, emerging as the central trope of his autobiography. The autobiography, by its very nature as life-transmuted-into-art, attempts to do just that: to transcend time, space, and mortality by converting the author's life into a work of art. By pointing readers to the spiral pattern (Nabokov’s metaphor for transcendence), rainbow metaphor, and metamorphosis themes found in the index, the riddle-poem further reinforces the theme of transcendence.