Recommendations from our site
“I still think it’s one of the most beautiful memoirs ever written. Although it’s not about the Russian revolution as such, it is permeated with a sense of loss and exile, as are all of Nabokov’s books. He evokes gorgeous countryside scenes of pre-revolutionary Russia, but at the same time has some distance from it – he recognises the awfulness of what he at one point calls his “rather appalling country” at the same time.” Read more...
The best books on Memoirs of Communism
Anne Applebaum, Historian
“I love it for several reasons. First, it made me feel that it is possible to give written form to nostalgia. The lyrical affirmation of that was quite important to me. Secondly, his preoccupation with language. I kept looking for books which talk about language, and at the end of the book Nabokov has a dedication to the Russian language, or an invocation of it and his incredibly poignant loss of it.” Read more...
Eva Hoffman recommends the best Memoirs
Eva Hoffman, Memoirist
Our most recommended books
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Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov -
Basil Street Blues
by Michael Holroyd -
The Self-Aware Image: An Insight Into Early Modern Meta-Painting
by Victor Stoichita -
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
by Tarana Burke -
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
by Janet Malcolm -
Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon
by Sir Henry Channon