How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
We discovered then that some of her letters had the same tint as mine and that, besides, she was optically affected by musical notes. (2.1.4)
By pointing out that both he and his mother experience synesthesia, we automatically feel like their relationship is deeper and more spiritual than that of the average mother-son pair.
Quote #2
One day, after a long illness, as I lay in bed still very weak, I found myself basking in an unusual euphoria of lightness and repose. I knew my mother had gone to buy me the daily present that made those convalescences so delightful. (2.2.2)
During his times sick in bed, Vladimir (or, Nabokov) claims that he correctly imagines what his mother is going to bring him. Does this feel like hyperbole? If so, what's the point of it? Bonus question: just because something is called autobiography, should we assume it's true? Does it matter?
Quote #3
The number and diversity of contacts that my ancestors had with the world of letters are truly remarkable. (3.1.5)
There's some flavor of a predestination argument here: Vladimir is one of many writers and thinkers. His passions are genetic. He believes, perhaps, in nature before nurture.
Quote #4
A pair of especially large bears [my grandfather] had shot stood upright with redoubtably raised front paws in the iron-barred vestibule of our country house. Every summer I gauged my height by the ability to reach their fascinating claws—first those of the lower forelimbs, then those of the upper. (3.3.3)
A lot of children have a special doorway or piece of wall in the family home, filled with lines marking their height and accompanying dates as they grow. Vladimir has two big hunting trophies with which to compare his height. Totally relatable.
Quote #5
In his youth [Uncle Ruka] had been intensely disliked by his father, a country gentleman of the old school (bear hunting, a private theatre, a few fine Old Masters among a good deal of trash), whose uncontrollable temper was rumored to have been a threat to the boy's very life. (3.4.5)
Those taxidermied bears Vladimir used to measure his height? It seems they're also the talismans of an angry father (Vladimir's grandfather). It's important to note, even though Vladimir got along pretty swimmingly with his parents, not all of the family members were able to play nice...and this might have had quite the bearing on the kind of man Uncle Ruka would become.
Quote #6
I next see my mother leading me bedward through the enormous hall, where a central flight of stairs swept up and up, with nothing but hothouse-like panes of glass between the upper landing and the light green evening sky. (4.3.1)
Here Nabokov is remembering a childhood ritual: his mother taking him up to bed, his resistance and games to avoid the much-hated sleep. Sleep will take him away from his mother and everyone he loves. The stairs function a little like the path to Heaven in this image, because Nabokov is a boss author like that.
Quote #7
Our relationship was marked by that habitual exchange of homespun nonsense, comically garbled words, proposed imitations of supposed intonations, and all those private jokes which are the secret code of happy families. (9.5.7)
This reminds us of that Leo Tolstoy quote from Anna Karenina: 'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' What do you think Nabokov would have to say about this?
Quote #8
My mother reclined on the sofa with the St. Petersburg Rech in her hands and an unopened London Times in her lap. A white telephone gleamed on the glass-topped table near her. Late as it was, she still kept expecting my father to call from St. Petersburg where he was being detained by the tension of approaching war. (10.5.3)
Vladimir's on his way to show off his first poem to his ma, but big things are afoot behind the scenes. Nabokov makes the most of his latter day perspective to give us context and empathy...even if it's at his own character's expense. Even if it's not quite fair, it can feel easy to judge Vladimir's lack of awareness when it comes to his father's questionable safety and his mother's preoccupation. His parents, however, are invested in keeping him worry-free, and his mother is able to offer all of the encouragement the little poet needs.
Quote #9
Except for the two or three poor little adventures I have sketched in earlier chapters, his boyhood and mine seldom mingled. He is a mere shadow in the background of my richest and most detailed recollections. I was the coddled one; he, the witness of coddling. (13.2.4)
Nabokov cops to having trouble writing about his brother Sergey. The two couldn't be more different, he says. But is it more than that? We think it has something to do with Sergey's sad fate—death in a Nazi concentration camp—and the fact that the two never even said goodbye.
Quote #10
I do not doubt that among those slightly convex chips of majolica ware found by our child there was one whose border of scrollwork fitted exactly, and continued, the pattern of a fragment I had found in 1903 on the same shore, and that the two tallied with a third my mother had found on that Mentone beach in 1882, and with a fourth piece of the same pottery that had been found by her mother a hundred years ago—and so on, until this assortment of parts, if all had been preserved, might have been put together to make the complete, the absolutely complete, bowl, broken by some Italian child, God knows where and when, and now mended by these rivets of bronze. (15.3.6)
We know this is a meaty quote, but it takes some amount of words to describe the sweep of Nabokov's family ancestry and human time, with the help of a kid's scavenger hunt on the beach.