He means he will never surrender his memories. They are all safe in his head, where Stalin and the rest of the superhuman crew can’t get at them.

There is a letter somewhere about how he wished he had immortalized every blade of Vyra grass. He said he had the happiest childhood imaginable. We all live via memory, but Nabokov especially.

In one of the latest video presentations in which Vladimir Nabokov is being interviewed he mumbles, with a lowered head: "I'll not surrender." I found a printed interview for BBC, in 1962, (SO,Vintage, p.9/10) where VN replies to "Would you ever go back to Russia?" saying that he "will never go back, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language, and my own Russian childhood. I will never return. I will never surrender..." VN gives us to understand that he cannot become an exile since he carries the artist's passport and that his native country is a state of mind. In this context, what does it mean "I'll not surrender"?