- Tamara (as elsewhere, names have been changed to protect the "innocent") is Vladimir's first real love affair, and they meet one summer when Vladimir is sixteen and she is fifteen.
- Two years later, the family will leave St. Petersburg because of the Russian Revolution, a "trite deus ex machina," Nabokov calls it. (12.1.1)
- Through the previous summers, Vladimir had been hearing Tamara's name everywhere.
- In August 1915, he spies her with friends crossing a bridge in the countryside near Vyra, and discovers that her family is renting a house nearby.
- Finally, they meet, when Vladimir finds her trespassing into the Vyra pavilion (where he first caught the poetry bug.)
- Tamara is beautiful and sarcastic, and Vladimir falls in love quickly, tell her they will marry as soon as he is done with school, in 1917.
- They canoodle, and when his tutor of the time tells on him, Vladimir's mother says she would prefer not to know anymore about it.
- Indeed, many of the poems Vladimir shares with his mother are about his love for Tamara, so she gets quite the earful anyway.
- At this point, his father is away, involved in various political goings-on, with his regiment.
- Tamara and Vladimir play in the countryside, spending time at Uncle Ruka's empty estate, where no one will spy on them.