- Lenski serves as the structure for this chapter, Nabokov tells us: during his time with the Nabokovs he staged a series of "magic lantern" presentations for local children.
- He hopes that the boys will learn something, and meet children out of their own class.
- Lenski reads Russian poetry aloud, and shows slides to go with.
- Nabokov tells the story of the first presentation, during which Lenski reads a long piece about a monk by Mikhail Lermontov to an overly warm room stuffed with fidgeting kids. They laugh at Lenski's performance and Vladimir pities poor Lenski, who means well.
- During this time, Vladimir is worried that his own circumstances will be upturned with the help of the radical tutor.
- His mother's father, dissatisfied with the schooling options, had started his own academy for his children, hiring local students to be their classmates.
- After a few more long and boring presentations, Vladimir's mother stops the whole business—much to Vladimir's relief.
- Nabokov remembers the slides romantically, however, the miniature landscapes projected into large colors and shapes: "There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic." (8.3.6)