- Vladimir's first term at Cambridge did not begin smoothly.
- He goes to meet his college tutor, a man named E. Forrester and immediately upsets his tea.
- Vladimir is housed with another "white Russian" (a name at the time for Russian émigrés fleeing the "Red" Bolsheviks), but his roomie leaves after a few months, and he's left alone.
- Vladimir finds Cambridge bleak and cold, a kind of damp he is unfamiliar with.
- Though Nabokov admits he could speak more about what it was like to be a student, he states: "The story of my college years in England is really the story of my trying to become a Russian writer." (13.3.3)
- Cambridge is fine, objectively, but everything that Russia is, England isn't, and Vladimir nurses a worsening case of homesickness.
- This is, Nabokov admits, a don't-know-what-you-got-'til-it's-gone situation.
- To other "White Russians," this feeling is almost too obvious, but for British students, Russia is just a great way to talk about politics.
- One of Vladimir's fellow students, named Nesbit, proclaims himself to be a Socialist and debates with him bitterly about the importance communism and the new Russia.
- While Vladimir is interested in Russia's history, the different ways it was recorded, and what bearing it has on the current politics, close-minded Nesbit is only interested in what he already knows and thinks.
- Vladimir is surprised when he realizes that his liberal Russian views are more aligned with British ultraconservatives, and he finds their support "despicable." (13.3.7)