- Vladimir and Tamara continue their romance as both return to St. Petersburg in the fall, where they have significantly less freedom from prying adults, who are all up in their business.
- To escape their watch, the two lovers skip school to spend time together in museums, parks, and movie theatres. (Just as he did with Colette, during their "elopement"!)
- They would half-watch the movies, especially those starring an actor named Mozzhuhin, often riding up to a country estate much like Uncle Ruka's.
- Later, Tamara would say that it was Vladimir's obsession of writing poems about their relationship that killed the spark.
- Vladimir did indeed publish a collection of these poems, "juvenile" by Nabokov's standards now—work that never should have been published. His father's more literary friends, and his teachers, of the time, said as much, too.
- The next spring, Vladimir and Tamara both return to the country, and continue their wilderness adventures, though Vladimir is more interested in writing and thinking about the romance (and watching butterflies) than actually being in it.
- "I had already entered an extravagant phase of sentiment and sensuality, that was to last about ten years. In looking at it from my present tower I see myself as a hundred different young men at once, all pursuing one changeful girl in a series of simultaneous or overlapping love affairs, some delightful, some sordid, that ranged from one-night adventures to protracted involvements and dissimulations, with very meager artistic results." (11.2.12)
- Because of his artistic distractions, Nabokov can no longer remember when he and Tamara broke up, exactly.
- However, the next spring, in 1917 (just before the time when Vladimir once thought he'd be married), they see each other on a train, and speak of insubstantial things.