- Nabokov says, "Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives." (12.5.1)
- Unfortunately, however, Tamara's letters aren't still around.
- Rather, it, along with so much of his childhood, and his home of Russia, "fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea, completely severing me from my boyhood."(12.5.2)
- But because of this loss, Nabokov says, he has a heightened sense of nostalgia and the spiritual importance of being homesick.
- He thinks at first, perhaps he'll go back to St. Petersburg under a fake name and travel around his childhood haunts.
- But he knows he'll never do that: they way those sights and people are in his memory are sacred, and reality would disrupt this.
- In March of 1919, the Bolshevik armies reached Crimea, and it's time to skedaddle.
- They sail on a Greek cargo ship, and all the while, Vladimir tortures himself by imagining letters arriving from Tamara, with no one to receive them.