- "The spiral is a spiritualized circle," Nabokov begins. (14.1.1) It's an abstract place to start, but a fitting one. What he means is that a spiral holds the momentum and curves of a circle, without the start meeting the end.
- A spiral, he explains, has three parts: (1) the thetic, which begins the first curve, (2) the antithetic, which begins the second, and (3) the synthetic, which continues the pattern, and so on.
- Nabokov uses the image of the spiral to talk about the stages of his life: A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life." (14.1.2) (He's talking about a "corkscrew" marble; for a little break to learn everything you wanted to know about marbles, head here.)
- The first part of his life, in Russia from 1889 to 1919, Nabokov says, is his "thetic."
- The next period, his life as an émigré in England, Germany and France from 1919 to 1940, is his "antithetic."
- Finally, life in his new adopted home country—the U.S.—from 1940 to 1960, forms his "synthetic."
- He's now interested in talking about his "antithetic," particularly his time in Europe after his Cambridge graduation in 1922.
- Those years were fine, and he lived more or less normally, yet "no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own midst, existed between us and [non-émigrés]." (14.1.3)
- With a special émigré visa, it was hard to travel from one country to another.
- In Berlin and Paris, there were large populations of Russian émigrés, and the communities "kept to themselves." (14.1.4)
- The Russian émigré intelligentsia worked on a small scale, were more provincial than Nabokov was used to, and he didn't emerge from this "antithetic" time with more than one or two lasting friendships.
- While in Germany, Vladimir fails to encounters romantic scenes and friendly countrymen like those he's read about in German literature.
- Instead, the only real native German he speaks to is a strange, rich student named Dietrich, whose hobby is to tour acts of capital punishments: hanging, shootings, be-headings, etc.
- He shows Vladimir pictures of these horrors during their second meeting, thinking nothing of it, complaining of the difficulty of travel.
- Though they lost track of each other, Nabokov imagines that Dietrich had quite a jolly time during the atrocities of Nazi Germany.