'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family 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.

An autobiographical volume covering Nabokov's first 40 years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II, telling of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, his passion for butterflies and his lost homeland.