- As an adolescent, Vladimir is fond of a particular author of American Western novels named Captain Mayne Reid. (Incidentally, Reid was never actually any sort of captain.)
- The characters in Reid's books are desert frontiersmen solving or committing crimes, and the books are pulpy fun for serious young Vladimir.
- In 1953, when Nabokov first translated this chapter into Russian, he did so in view of an American desert vista and recalled the books all the more vividly.
- Yuri is Vladimir's cousin, a little older and a little tougher, with divorced parents and no country house.
- In the summers, Yuri visits Batovo or Vyra, and Vladimir only sees him after his morning butterfly hunts.
- Yuri himself wasn't into butterflies. He preferred toy soldiers.
- The two cousins first met in Weisbaden, Germany, when Vladimir was five and a half and Yuri seven.
- In little Yuri's eagerness to show Vladimir a new toy gun, he fell and skinned his knee.
- Later, Yuri was the one to introduce Vladimir to Reid's novels and played as the characters on the grounds of the family estates.
- In the summer of 1912, Yuri arrived with a real gun, but Lenski confiscated it quickly.
- Much later, after Yuri's death in 1919, his mother would find one of his toy soldier in the couch cushions of a Swiss hotel room where they had summered in 1913.
- After his Swiss summer, Yuri returns to the family estates the next year, with cigarettes and tales of affairs with older ladies.
- Yuri is in love with a married woman, and makes long distance calls for several hours each day.
- After this, the two boys go to the grocery store to buy sunflower seeds and eat them while talking about the monarchy. (Yuri is pro, Vladimir is—like his father—against.)
- In 1916, Vladimir sees Yuri for the last time.
- By 1919, Yuri is dead, having fought Communists in Yalta.