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Exile was Nabokov's omnipresent theme, though he discovered the 'sorrows and delights of nostalgia' long before the Revolution had removed the scenery of his early years.⁵¹ Nabokov was born in 1899, the elder son of a highly cultured and prominently liberal aristocratic family from St Petersburg who fled Russia in 1919. His grandfather, Dmitry Nabokov, had been Minister of Justice in the final years of Alexander II's reign, when the Emperor had considered the adoption of a liberal constitution in the European mould. Until his dismissal in 1885, he had opposed the attempts by Alexander III to overturn the liberal judicial reforms of 1864. The writer's father, V. D. Nabokov, was a well-known liberal lawyer and an influential member of the Kadet (Constitutional Democratic) Party in the First Duma of 1906. He had drafted the abdication manifesto of the Grand Duke Mikhail, briefly invited to assume the throne in the February Revolution of 1917, which brought the monarchy to an official end. He had also been head of the Chancellery in the Provisional Government, a sort of executive secretary to the cabinet, and had played a leading role in formulating the electoral system of the Constituent Assembly. The Bolshevik seizure of power forced the Nabokovs to leave Russia, moving first to London and then to Berlin, where the writer's father was the editor of the newspaper Rul' until his assassination by a Russian monarchist in 1922. Throughout his career as a Russian writer in Europe Nabokov kept the pen name 'Sirin' (the name of a legendary bird of paradise in Russian mythology) to set himself apart from his famous father in the emigre community.

The Nabokov family was strongly Anglophile. Its mansion in St Petersburg was filled with 'the comfortable products of Anglo-Saxon civilization', Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory:

Pears' soap, tar-black when dry, topaz-like when held to the light between wet fingers, took care of one's morning bath. Pleasant was the decreasing weight of the English collapsible tub when it was made to protrude a rubber underlip and disgorge its frothy contents into the slop pail. 'We could not improve the

cream, so we improved the tube,' said the English toothpaste. At breakfast, Golden Syrup imported from London would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon from which enough of it had slithered on to a piece of Russian bread and butter. All sorts of snug, mellow things came in a steady procession from the English shop on Nevski Avenue: fruitcakes, smelling salts, playing cards, picture puzzles, striped blazers, talcum-white tennis balls.⁵²

Nabokov was taught to read English before he could read his native tongue. He and his brother and sister were looked after by 'a bewildering sequence of English nurses and governesses', who read them Little Lord Fauntleroy; and later by a mademoiselle who read to the children Les Malbeurs de Sophie, Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours and Le Comte de Monte Cristo. In a sense Nabokov was brought up as an emigre. As a schoolboy he would set himself apart, imagining himself as an 'exiled poet who longed for a remote, sad and - unquenchable Russia'.⁵³ Pushkin was Nabokov's inspiration. Many of the heroes in his novels were meant to be the poet in disguise. Nabokov saw himself as Pushkin's heir. So much so, in fact, that when, at the age of eighteen, Nabokov found himself a refugee in the Crimea, where his family had fled the Bolsheviks, he took inspiration from the image of himself as a romantic exile, wandering in the footsteps of Pushkin, who had been sent into exile a hundred years before. His first published collections of poems, The Empyrean Path (1923),contains an epigraph from Pushkin's poem 'Anon' on the title page.

From the Crimea the family sailed to England, where Nabokov completed his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1919 and 1922. The reality of post-war England was a long way from the Anglo-Saxon dreamworld of the Nabokov mansion in St Petersburg. The rooms at Trinity were cold and damp, the food unspeakable, and the student clubs were full of naive socialists, like the pipe-smoking 'Nesbit' in Speak, Memory who saw only bad in Russia's past and only good in the Bolsheviks.* Nabokov grew homesick. 'The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become

* Nabokov later identified R. A. ('Rab') Butler, the future Tory Deputy Prime Minister and 'a frightful bore', as the man behind the mask of R. Nesbit Bain in Speak, Memory (B. Boyd, Nabokov: The Russian Years (London, 1990), p. 1 68).