Explanation of the significance of Zembla:

The youngest of his sons, my great-grandfather Nikolay Aleksandrovich Nabokov, was a young naval officer in 1817, when he participated, with the future admirals Baron von Wrangel and Count Litke, under the leadership of Captain (later Vice-Admiral) Vasiliy Mihaylovich Golovnin, in an expedition to map Nova Zembla (of all places) where “Nabokov’s River” is named after my ancestor.

We learn more about his father, his family, his aristocratic upgrbinging and distaste for soviets:

In the autumn of 1883, he [his father] started to attend the “Gymnasium” (corresponding to a combination of American “high school” and “junior college”) on the then Gagarin Street (presumably renamed in the twenties by the shortsighted Soviets).

The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.

My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who “hates the Reds” because they “stole” his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

The general reader may now resume.

dude looooved butterflies, student of zoology

It might be rewarding to go into the phylogenetic aspects of the passion male children have for things on wheels, particularly railway trains.

But we also learn how much of a snob and insufferable pedant Nabokov is/was, and is/was despite trying to acknowledge some of his own shortcomings, they still come across as aloof and condescending.

After having made me sign an oath of secrecy with blood, Yuri told me about the married lady in Warsaw with whom at twelve or thirteen he was secretly in love and whom a couple of years later he made love to.

AND THEN NABOKOV PUTS HIM ON BLAST IN THE BOOK smh. Yuri, meanwhile seems like a cool guy who actually spoke with Nabokkov's servants.

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