Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory

He complained to my mother that Sergey and I were little foreigners, freaks, fops, snobï , “pathologically indifferent,” as he put it, to Goncharov, Grigorovich, Korolenko, Stanyukovich, Mamin-Sibiryak, and other stupefying bores (comparable to American “regional writers”) whose works, according to him, “enthralled normal boys.” To my obscure annoyance, he advised my parents to have their two boys—the three younger children were beyond his jurisdiction—lead a more democratic form of life, which meant, for example, switching, in Berlin, from the Adlon Hotel to a vast apartment in a gloomy pension in a lifeless lane and replacing pile-carpeted international express trains by the filthy floors and stale cigar smoke of swaying and pitching Schnellzugs . In foreign towns, as well as in St. Petersburg, he would freeze before shops to marvel at wares that left us completely indifferent. He was about to be married, had nothing but his salary, and was planning his future household with the utmost cunning and care. Now and then rash impulses interfered with his budget. Noticing one day a bedraggled hag who was gloating over a crimson-plumed hat on display at a milliner’s, he bought it for her—and had quite a time getting rid of the woman. In his own acquisitions, he aimed at great circumspection. My brother and I patiently listened to his detailed daydreams as he analyzed every corner of the cozy yet frugal apartment he mentally prepared for his wife and himself. Sometimes his fancy would soar. Once it settled on an expensive ceiling lamp at Alexandre’s, a St. Petersburg shop that featured rather painful bourgeois bric-a-brac. Not wishing the store to suspect what object he coveted, Lenski said he would take us to see it only if we swore to use self-control and not attract unnecessary attention by direct contemplation. With all kinds of precautions, he brought us under a dreadful bronze octopus and his only indication that this was the longed-for article was a purring sigh. He used the same care—tiptoeing and whispering, in order not to wake the monster of fate (which, he seemed to think, bore him a personal grudge)—when introducing us to his fiancée, a small, graceful young lady with scared-gazelle eyes, and the scent of fresh violets clinging to her black veil. We met her, I remember, near a pharmacy at the corner of Potsdamerstrasse and Privatstrasse, a lane, full of dead leaves, where our pension was, and he urged us to keep his bride’s presence in Berlin secret from our parents, and a mechanical manikin in the pharmacy window was going through the motions of shaving, and tramcars screeched by, and it was beginning to snow.

We are now ready to tackle the main theme of this chapter. Sometime during the following winter, Lenski conceived the awful idea of showing, on alternate Sundays, Educational Magic-Lantern Projections at our St. Petersburg home. By their means he proposed to illustrate (“abundantly,” as he said with a smack of his thin lips) instructive readings before a group that he fondly believed would consist of entranced boys and girls sharing in a memorable experience. Besides adding to our store of information, it might, he thought, help make my brother and me into good little mixers. Using us as a core, he accumulated around this sullen center several layers of recruits—such coeval cousins of ours as happened to be at hand, various youngsters we met every winter at more or less tedious parties, some of our schoolmates (unusually quiet they were—but, alas, registered every trifle), and the children of the servants. Having been given a completely free hand by my gentle and optimistic mother, he rented an elaborate apparatus and hired a dejected-looking university student to man it; as I see it now, warmhearted Lenski was, among other things, trying to help an impecunious comrade.

Never shall I forget that first reading. Lenski had selected a narrative poem by Lermontov dealing with the adventures of a young monk who left his Caucasian retreat to roam among the mountains. As usual with Lermontov, the poem combined pedestrian statements with marvelous melting fata morgana effects. It was of goodly length, and its seven hundred and fifty rather monotonous lines were generously spread by Lenski over a mere four slides (a fifth I had clumsily broken just before the performance).

Fire-hazard considerations had led one to select for the show an obsolete nursery in a corner of which stood a columnar water heater, painted a bronzy brown, and a webfooted bath, which, for the occasion, had been chastely sheeted. The close-drawn window curtains prevented one from seeing the yard below, the stacks of birch logs, and the yellow walls of the gloomy annex containing the stables (part of which had been converted into a two-car garage). Despite the ejection of an ancient wardrobe and a couple of trunks, this depressing back room, with the magic lantern installed at one end and transverse rows of chairs, hassocks, and settees arranged for a score of spectators (including Lenski’s fiancée, and three or four governesses, not counting our own Mademoiselle and Miss Greenwood), looked jammed and felt stuffy. On my left, one of my most fidgety girl cousins, a nebulous little blonde of eleven or so with long, Alice-in-Wonderland hair and a shell-pink complexion, sat so close to me that I felt the slender bone of her hip move against mine every time she shifted in her seat, fingering her locket, or passing the back of her hand between her perfumed hair and the nape of her neck, or knocking her knees together under the rustly silk of her yellow slip, which shone through the lace of her frock. On my right, I had the son of my father’s Polish valet, an absolutely motionless boy in a sailor suit; he bore a striking resemblance to the Tsarevich, and by a still more striking coincidence suffered from the same tragic disease—hemophilia—so several times a year a Court carriage would bring a famous physician to our house and wait and wait in the slow, slanting snow, and if one chose the largest of those grayish flakes and kept one’s eye upon it as it came down (past the oriel casement through which one peered), one could make out its rather coarse, irregular shape and also its oscillation in flight, making one feel dull and dizzy, dizzy and dull.

The lights went out. Lenski launched upon the opening lines: