SPEAK, MEMORY <i> by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage: $9.95, illustrated) </i>

Nabokov eschews the “and then I wrote” cliches of conventional literary autobiographies and presents a series of elegant vignettes, most of them from his luxurious childhood in Imperial Russia. (He discusses the creation of only one book in detail: an embarrassing collection of adolescent poems in Russian.) Nabokov downplays the dramatic events in his life--his flight to Germany after the Revolution, his often penniless existence as an emigre in Berlin and Paris, his escape to America during World War II--but he re-creates the pleasures of aristocratic life under the czars in exquisite detail. He originally wrote “Speak, Memory” in English, translated it into Russian then re-translated it into English, expanding and polishing the text each time, until the sentences became as delicately filigreed as the wings of the butterflies he passionately collected.