Nina's Memento Mori

Near the end of Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert makes an honest admission: "[A]nd it struck me...that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind." That line sums up the isolate game of memorializing a deceased loved one, which is the basic tension in Nina's Memento Mori, an elegy to Mathias Freese's lost wife. The profound responsibility of answering the question "Who was Nina?" is left to the lone memoirist:

I can say or write anything I want about her...There is much writerly power i...