How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
A supply of memories, such as these, comprised her sole dowry when she left Russia in the spring of 1919. Everything happened in full accord with the style of the period. Her mother died of typhus, her brother was executed by the firing squad. All these are ready-made formulae, of course, the usual dreary small talk, but it all did happen, there is no other way of saying it, and it's no use turning up your nose. (2)
Suffering sure seems to be a given to the narrator here.
Quote #2
But presently her life darkened. Something was finished, people were already getting up to leave. How quickly! Her father died, she moved to another street. She stopped seeing her friends, knitted the little bonnets in fashion, and gave cheap French lessons at some ladies' club or other. In this way her life dragged on to the age of thirty. (9)
Somehow Nabokov manages to make Olga's descent into poverty seem positively elegant. Did you notice how he compares it to the end of a ball? "Something was finished, people were already getting up to leave," sounds like a dance or a ball has finished and now people are going home. How glamorous for something so sad.
Quote #3
She was still the same beauty, with that enchanting slant of the widely spaced eyes and with that rarest line of lips into which the geometry of the smile seems to be already inscribed. But her hair lost its shine and was poorly cut. Her black tailored suit was in its fourth year. Her hands, with their glistening but untidy fingernails, were roped with veins and were shaking from nervousness and from her wretched continuous smoking. And we'd best pass over in silence the state of her stockings.… (10)
We almost feel bad because the last line of this quote makes us laugh! Why do you think the narrator uses humor in a moment like this?