Knopf issued a new edition with the addition of a previously unpublished section titled 'Chapter 16'.

An extended edition including several photographs was published in 1966 as Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. The Russian version was published in 1954 and called Drugie berega (Other Shores). It was first published in a single volume in 1951 as Speak, Memory in the United Kingdom and as Conclusive Evidence in the United States. Nabokov writes in the text that he was dissuaded from titling the book Speak, Mnemosyne by his publisher, who feared that readers would not buy a 'book whose title they could not pronounce'. Nabokov inherited the Rozhdestveno mansion from his uncle in 1916 Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.' 'If you require a sententious opening, here it is. The line is parodied at the start of Little Wilson and Big God, the autobiography of the English writer Anthony Burgess. There is also a similar concept expressed in On the nature of things by the Roman Poet Lucretius. The book's opening line, 'The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,' is arguably a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle's 'One Life a little gleam of Time between two Eternities,' found in Carlyle's 1840 lecture 'The Hero as Man of Letters,' published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841. It recounts, for example, how his first butterfly escapes at Vyra, in Russia, and is 'overtaken and captured' forty years later on a butterfly hunt in Colorado. Field indicated that the chapter on butterflies is an interesting example how the author deploys the fictional with the factual. Andrew Field observed that while Nabokov evoked the past through “puppets of memory” (in the characterizations of his educators, Colette, or Tamara, for example), his intimate family life with Véra and Dmitri remained 'untouched'. Subsequent pieces of the autobiography were published as individual or collected stories, with each chapter able to stand on its own.

Nabokov published ' Mademoiselle O', which became Chapter Five of the book, in French in 1936, and in English in The Atlantic Monthly in 1943, without indicating that it was non-fiction.

Nabokov speak memory