'Other Shores' is a memoir designed to bring the long-gone past back to life. Even in the introduction, Nabokov compares human existence to the glowing crack of an open door, swallowed on both sides by darkness, nothingness, and oblivion. And he, like a child falling asleep, peers through this crack, trying to discern real objects within. Interestingly, we find an identical motif in Proust's novel 'Swann's Way,' where the narrator similarly peers through the glowing doorway and notices familiar outlines surrounded by darkness. In both works, the primary motif is the retrieval of memories, 'the search for lost time,' symbolized by a narrow strip of light.
Nabokov considers his primary task to be 'to catch, far ahead, through the fog and dream of life, a glimmer of something real.' These present moments, often vague and unclear, form a repeating pattern. It appears and disappears, changes, but somewhere deep down, its essence remains unchanged. In this way, Nabokov imbues all disparate events and impressions with order, regularity, and meaning.
'Other Shores' is an attempt to revive something long lost. Writing itself does not always possess this power, for by imbuing a fictional world with a detail from their own life, the writer seems to lose it, and it petrifies there, in fiction. Thus, memoirs become a special, enlivening genre, the only one truly capable of this.
'Other Shores' is Nabokov's memoir, in which he resurrects his past, from his first infantile sensations to the birth of his son. In these memoirs, he connects together all the signs and images that appeared to him in childhood and adolescence, examining how these images changed and refracted over time. These memoirs are filled with great tenderness for his past. Everything that formed the center of his childhood existence lives only in his memory, and in Nabokov's memoirs, the fracture from the loss of that life and those people is always evident. Nabokov approaches the work of a memoirist meticulously, combining documentary evidence and childhood experiences, fears and joys, dreams, reveries, and visions. This is a careful reconstruction, a resurrection of what was lost in its entirety.
