I tried to address this issue, however successfully or not, in "Toward the Man Behind the Mystification," published in 1982 in Nabokov's Fifth Arc, edited by Rivers and Nicol.  I'm still rather fond of that piece but there were no drum rolls when it appeared.
 
Best to all,
Phyllis Roth

[EDNOTE.  I too discussed the issue in a couple of conference papers, one of them in a session organized by Phyllis, and an essay called "'The Small Furious Devil': Memory in 'Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,'" in A Small Alpine Form, ed. Nicol and Barabtarlo.  SES]

 

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From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum on behalf of jansymello
Sent: Fri 10/2/2009 2:05 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [NABOKOV-L] [QUERY: SPEAK MEMORY]

 

There is a sentence in Nabokov's "Speak Memory," which I find hard to understand. I tried to read it in a Portuguese translation but its meaning remains a puzzle to me.   Simon Karlinski ( in note 5 to letter 123, about Nabokov brother Sergei, in VN-Wilson Letters,p. 174) wrote:
"There is a moving tribute to him in Speak Memory (pp.257-258) which concludes: "It is one of those lives that hopelessly claim a belated something - compassion, understanding, no matter what - which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem."