The book treats Nabokov's concept of memory focusing on his work as a translator and as a translating autobiographer. In the first part of the book, Nabokov's translation theory and practice are seen as related to ancient concepts of memory as spelled out in antique rhetoric practice as well as in religious, specifically gnostic visionary texts. Nabokov uses the metaphors and ideas of these discourses for his own purposes. In the second part of the book, Nabokov's autobiographical writings and rewritings are related to contemporary texts on memory by William James, Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. It can be seen that questions of self and other, poetics and culture are interwoven in Nabokov's use of memory, whose foundations are at once classical and modern, pragmatic and metaphysical, while the Russian-American style is thoroughly Nabokov's own.
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