- Nabokov begins by speaking about his two brothers.
- Kirill, the youngest Nabokov child, was born in 1911 and as a child lived mostly with his sisters in a nursery in a different part of the house.
- After the Nabokov family left London, Vladimir hardly sees Kirill, until after 1960.
- They see each other a bit after that. Kirill has married a Belgian woman and runs a travel agency with her.
- A lover of rich food, he dies of a heart attack in Munich in 1964, soon after the brothers' reunion.
- Nabokov's other brother—the one with whom he grew up—is Sergey, who, Nabokov says, he finds it difficult to talk about.
- In the first version of this book, he even tried to avoid doing so at all.
- Even though they grew up together, and were only ten and a half months apart, the two boys were never that close.
- While Vladimir was a noisy, rough boy, Sergey was shy and quiet.
- At ten, Sergey fell in love with music, and went to concerts with their father.
- The boys went to different schools.
- Their one mutual interest was tennis, and they often played together.
- Their time at Cambridge was the one period in their lives where they had even mutual friends, studying in the same subjects.
- After Cambridge, Sergey went to Paris to teach English and Russian, just as Vladimir did in Berlin.
- They did not see each other again until the late 1930s, when both were in Paris.
- When in 1940, Vladimir and his wife and young son fled to the States, he did not even have time to tell his brother.
- Sergey was eventually wrongly arrested as a British spy and sent to a Nazi camp where he died on January 10, 1945.