| Preface and Acknowledgments | |
| Note on Citations | |
| Pt. 1 | Points of Departure | 1 |
| 1 | The European Nabokov, the Modernist Moment, and Cultural Biography | 3 |
| 2 | The Self-Defined Origins of an Artist of Memory | 24 |
| From Synesthesia to the Two Master Narratives | 24 |
| Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and the Discourse of Modernity | 36 |
| 3 | The Rejection of Anticipatory Memory: From Mary to The Defense and Glory (1925-1930) | 52 |
| Pt. 2 | Toward France | 71 |
| 4 | Encountering French Modernism: Kamera Obskura (1931-1932) | 73 |
| 5 | From the Personal to the Intertextual: Dostoevsky and the Two-Tiered Mnemonic System in Despair (1932-1933) | 91 |
| 6 | Narrative between Art and Memory: Writing and Rewriting "Mademoiselle O" (1936-1967) | 110 |
| 7 | Memory Modernism, and the Fictive Autobiographies | 130 |
| Recollected Emotion in "Spring in Fialta" (1936-1947) | 131 |
| The Covert Modernism of The Gift (1934-1937) | 146 |
| Pt. 3 | In English | 157 |
| 8 | Cultural Mobility and British Modernism: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Bend Sinister (1938-1946) | 159 |
| 9 | Autobiographical Images: The Shaping of Speak, Memory (1946-1967) | 178 |
| 10 | The Cultural Self-Consciousness of Speak, Memory | 203 |
| Epilogue: Proust over T. S. Eliot in Pale Fire (1962) | 219 |
| Notes | 233 |
| Index | 255 |
