Housed in the grand home where Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born, the Nabokov Museum, established in 1997, “is dedicated to fostering Nabokov’s memory and his artistic legacy and cultural values, both within Russia and internationally.” Visitors will find “exhibits related to Nabokov’s life and milieu;” a research library; special events, including readings and lectures; an annual international Nabokov summer school; tours of Nabokov’s St. Petersburg; guided tours to other family homes; and temporary exhibitions and installations related to the author. The museum is open year-round, Tuesdays-Fridays, 11:00-18:00, Saturday-Sunday, 12:00-17:00. The Nabokov Museum website offers visitor information, along with biographical information on the author and his family.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is a perfect companion, whether planning a trip to St. Petersburg or armchair traveling. Evocative and moving, the author’s autobiography returns readers to a distant time and place, a time of “splendid country estates” and revolution.
My mother did everything to encourage the general sensitiveness I had to visual stimulation. How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red. Sometimes, in our St. Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to be hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fêtes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of colored electric bulbs – sapphire, emerald, ruby – glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets.. – from Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov
Related Website
Speak, Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov – Publisher’s Website