By Vladimir Nabokov
Nizhny Novgorod Gorky Drama Theater.
“Memory speak” is a mix of Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature, his poems and an autobiographical novel The Other Shores. Nabokov as a character of a play gives a lecture in an American university. He tries to explain what Russia used to be in his childhood and what is so dear to him in that lost, magical land. It was a free country. Now it isn’t there anymore.
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”
Nabokov brings American students on stage and turns them into Russian aristocrats.
Stage designer Anna Grebennikova created the images of Nabokov’s childhood.
A huge flaming butterfly as a symbol of Nabokov’s soul.
