Character Analysis
The Brothers Nabokov (Sergey & Kirill)
Vladimir is one of five, and while he says almost nothing about his two sisters, he doesn't say much more about his brothers Sergey and Kirill. There are a few reasons for this:
With Kirill, it's easy to tell why he doesn't loom large: he's twelve years younger than the author and as a result, has a very different life. Kirill lived only six or seven years in Russia before the family left, and went on to live in an apartment in Berlin with his parents and two sisters while the older boys studied at Cambridge. From what Nabokov says, he seems to have had a pleasant life: married to a Belgian woman, running (perhaps ironically) a travel agency, in love with both rich food and the seaside. Like Vladimir, he was passionate about both literature and practical jokes.
However, Nabokov admits that talking about Sergey is much more difficult. (In the first incarnation of the book, tellingly, he left him out altogether.) Though they are just over ten months apart in age, by Vladimir's estimation, Sergey was shy, quiet, and only occasionally allowed himself to be dragged along on adventures during their childhood. Instead, he attended concerts with their father and spent extra time studying. As a result, they were not close, and only a little more so when attending school at the same place at the same time.
A possible second, and more prominent reason, however, for Sergey's relative absence on these pages, is that he perished in a Nazi camp. Throughout the book, we get only peeks of World War Two. After all, it isn't the force that has driven the Nabokovs from Russia. It's a terrible thing that is in the process of happening as Vladimir, his wife, and young son escape to America. And Nabokov notes: even though they had become friends by the late thirties, in Paris, he never got a chance to tell his brother he was leaving.
Colette
#FirstLove
Colette, who Vladimir meets in Biarritz as a young boy, is his first object of affection. She's pretty, if a little chubby, by Nabokov's tastes, and likes to dig around in the sand. She's Parisian, less well-off than Vladimir, and less warmly parented: when a crab pinches her, she proclaims that it pinches "as bad as my mummy." (7.3.3) To Vladimir, she's different, and a little exotic. While his own tutor spends time with Colette's "fast" Irish nanny, the two children attempt to elope but end up only getting as far as the local movie theatre.
Colette is interesting enough, but let's note that this anecdote gets the majority of a chapter in Vladimir's life story. So, we're left to think: what has Colette come to symbolize for Nabokov? And why does she seem so important?
Lenski
A Radical in Their Midst
Lenski, unlike many of the other minor characters, crops up all over this book. Part of this likely has to do with the fact that the radical tutor was with the Nabokov family during their last years in Russia. Although Vladimir's father is an outspoken liberal, Lenski is at every turn more and more outspoken, complaining about all of the fancy trappings of the family's everyday life. (With two gigantic houses and a limo, it's hard to blame him, right?) Ultimately he seems to have an impact on both Vladimir's father and Vladimir, who ends up going to a democratic school after years of Lenski recommending it.
FAIL
Lenski's character also seems to say something about the failure of ideals: memorably, he stages a series of slide shows and poetry recitations so that the local children may be better exposed to the Russian literary tradition. But the room is hot and stuffy, and the presentations move at a snail's pace, and after a few sessions, Vladimir's mother puts an end to them. As with Nabokov and his revised autobiography, you can't always get it right the first time. Lenski is a great teacher, a terrible student, and a sweet man who often gets it wrong.
A Second Act
Lenski's end seems to say something about the potency of youthful passion: after all of his big ideas, he's married, owning a business buying the patents on other people's inventions, and has quite a bit of money. Just like Vladimir, he's cooled with age.
Mademoiselle
A Swiss Nanny for a Russian Family
Mademoiselle is forever stout or stouter, powdery, doughy, and elephantine. As the Swiss governess who reads to Vladimir and his brother Sergey in French and tries (without much success) to keep them out of mischief, Mademoiselle is one of the more tragic figures in these pages. She cares very much for her little charges, and for the family.
Unlike Lenski, Mademoiselle celebrates the trappings of the rich household and thinks nothing of trying to make pleasantries with any given dinner guest. Alas, she knows barely any Russian (her single word is the searching "gde" or Where?) and indeed, she barely seems to understand who she works for and where she lives. She's prone to feeling left out when everyone else prattles on in the national language, and things worsen when she starts to lose her hearing.
To add insult to self-confidence issues: Lenski doesn't approve of her presence, with her French and love of pretty things, and Mademoiselle becomes so hurt that eventually, after many empty threats, leaves.
A Reversal
In later life, she's living with another former Nabokov governess in Switzerland with very little money. Nabokov finds she's gotten even more romantic with age, and spends all of her time talking about lovely Russia and the lovely Nabokovs.
Nesbit
What's in a Name?
Nabokov decides to call Nesbit, Nesbit, because he looks like portraits of Maxim Gorki (a Russian socialist-realist writer), whose main translator of the time looked like R. Nisbet Bain. Later when he gets older, he looks more like Henrik Ibsen (a Norwegian realist playwright), so later, Nabokov calls him Ibsen. Sure, whatever. We should be used to this kind of personal code by now.
A Less-Than-Worthy Opponent
Beyond his name, Nesbit acts as a political foil for Vladimir during his Cambridge years. Like Vladimir, he studies English, but unlike Vladimir, he identifies as a Socialist. The two debate about this over and over (as only very smart college kids can) until there's nothing left to say. According to Nabokov, Nesbit knows almost nothing of Russia's political history, and what he knows has been fed to him through biased channels. Most English democrats were not unlike Nesbit, Nabokov says, and the ultraconservatives supported the liberal Russians, purely because the liberal British were against them.
What's in a Name? Pt. 2
By the time Nesbit has become Ibsen, he has changed his mind about things:
In the early twenties Nesbit had mistaken his own ebullient idealism for a romantic and humane something in Lenin's ghastly rule. Ibsen, in the days of the no less ghastly Stalin, was mistaking a quantitative increase in his own knowledge for a qualitative change in the Soviet regime. (13.5.2)
That his political opinions changed his very name, in Nabokov's judgment, says something about how his character functions in this book.
Behind the Scenes
Note: Some scholars believe Nesbit to be a "composite" character, and indeed, he's the only named classmate in the Cambridge section of the story. Nesbit, Ibsen, whatever his name is: he stands in for the trends and thoughts of the day, the contextual food on which Vladimir snacked during his university studies.
Tamara
If Colette is Vladimir's "first love," Tamara is Vladimir's first legit girlfriend. By the time they meet, sixteen-year-old Vladimir has had about a thousand crushes, but none have been consummated with so much as a kiss. Their love inspires him to write truly terrible poetry. (After seeing a book of it, a literary cousin of his father's asks Vladimir "to pledge to never, never be a writer." Lucky for us, he didn't make that pledge.) (12.2.6)
But who is Tamara? She jokes around, doesn't mind skipping school, and tells Vladimir he's crazy when he confesses he's planning to marry her after they graduate in a couple years. Tamara is the rational one in the relationship, it seems, although it's her love and letters that find him later in Crimea, once the family flees St. Petersburg.
So why does Nabokov bother to tell this story? Like Colette, Tamara represents something else: something, maybe, about Vladimir's abandoned bonds as he leaves Russia and his senses of home and belonging.
"The Help"
The People Behind the Scenes
This book is full of names of the people who helped the Nabokovs live and learn comfortably, mostly during their time in Russia, if not for a little while after, too. While the personages of some, like Mademoiselle and Lenski, fill up chapters of this book, others are mentioned once or twice or never again.
Some examples:
Ustin, the townhouse janitor, for instance ended up being a traitor, having once caught a butterfly for Vladimir, later leads a Soviet posse to Vladimir's father in his study, and to various points in the house to reveal verboten riches. (In other words: he tells on them.)
Natasha, "a farsighted old chambermaid" swipes a handful of jewels during the Nabokovs' quick exit from St. Petersburg, the sale of which help support the Nabokovs as they settle into London and Berlin.
Osip, Vladimir's father's valet, is shot for hiding the family's beloved-but-outlawed bicycles, but not before he brings a go-bag to his boss when he's ready to flee from the violence of the November Revolution to meet his family in Crimea. (Another good servant, Nikolay Andreevich, makes sure to pack some caviar sandwiches for the journey.)
These are people, named and with their acts catalogued, seem to be of consequence to Nabokov, Though the class divisions in this story's universe can seem really severe, these inclusions seem to soften them, even in just the tiniest of ways.
Uncle Ruka
Though his full name is Vasily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov, his foreign friends end up nicknaming him Ruka. You know what they say about nicknames: they're a sign that people really love you or really hate you. Given the warmth with which Nabokov writes about this difficult soul, we're inclined to think it's the former.
Ruka is the only sibling of Vladimir's mother to survive to adulthood, and is a grumpy, brusque, and crotchety man who Vladimir happens to love. In the summers, he occupies one of the three family country estates, named Rozhdestveno. He's taken it easy on the career route, preferring instead to hunt with hounds and sing, and is the most religious member of the family, a part of the Roman Catholic Church. He's regarded by the family as a neurotic, complains of a heart condition, and can't pronounce certain consonants. Upon meeting his nephew on his fifteenth birthday, he tells him he'll be the heir to his estate, and then dismisses him, telling him he has nothing left to say to him. (How rude!)
Uncle Ruka is the kind of quirky relative many of us count on our family tree. For Vladimir, he's a formal, stodgy, rich Russian, in the tradition of his parents' ancestors. Uncle Ruka is old Russia, almost, his good and bad points presented equally and with fondness.
Véra (& Son Dmitri)
At first, it may seem bizarre that Nabokov's wife Véra and son are barely in this book. True, we get a bit of her, but when we do, Nabokov directly addresses her, i.e. "the view from a ranch you and I rented that year," (10.1.1), or "You remember the discoveries we made (supposedly made by all parents)..." (15.1.5) Véra seems to be Nabokov's true intimate, and maybe it's us readers who are her proxy. (A note: she was known to have been instrumental in Nabokov's writing career, helping him with this and other manuscripts throughout his career.)
Similarly: in telling the story of his last years in Europe, he must include his wife and son, since both were there and clearly had a lot to do with how he lived and enjoyed his life. In the final pages of the book, Dmitri (born in 1934), his every step and act of play seems to help Nabokov describe and talk about what Berlin and Paris were like in those days. Even if he doesn't get much of character portrait, he plays a major role in wrapping all of this up.
Yuri
Cousin Yuri, a child of divorced parents and without a country home, visits the Nabokov households throughout his childhood. Just a year older than Vladimir, he is adventurous and independent. He loves everything having to do with the military, from toy soldiers to real guns. (It may be worth noting that Yuri couldn't be more different than Vladimir's brother Sergey.)
Together, the two cousins reenact scenes from the American Western novels they love. Later, he's the first to have sex and reports back to Vladimir, talking about his affairs with older women. Eventually, he goes off to fight, where he eventually dies. For Vladimir, Yuri is the brotherly companion that he never quite found in Sergey. Nabokov writes:
Had I been competent to write his epitaph, I might have summed up matters by saying—in richer words than I can muster here—that all emotions, all thoughts, were governed in Yuri by one gift: a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to absolute pitch. (10.1.5)