- The beginning of this section is a good example of how Nabokov's language can feel a little thick: "An inexperienced heraldist resembles a medieval traveler who brings back from the East the faunal fantasies influenced by the domestic bestiary he possessed all along rather than by the results of direct zoological exploration." (3.1.1) Though you may want to back away slowly, just take a breath and break it down. All he's saying, maybe, is that ignorant people will focus on what they know, and never learn anything new, because they don't even know to look for it.
- In this section, Nabokov gets totally geeked on his family history, starting by looking at his family crest: he thought it was bears playing chess, but it's actually just some lions not doing much.
- His father's first cousin and his own first cousin are both hobbyist-genealogists: they chart the family back to 1380.
- After 1494 or so, Nabokov men worked with the Russian government and military.
- Nabokov's paternal grandfather was the Minister of Justice under two different Tsars, and married a German baroness whose father was serving the Russians at the time.
- The Nabokov side of the family is facially challenged, or so Nabokov says, with a piggy, upturned nose and lightly-filled eyebrows. The other side of the family, however, has a straight, handsome nose, and elegantly arched. Nabokov cops to getting the better end of the deal.
- His mother's side is pink-cheeked and pretty, as far as he can tell.
- His father's family holds a tradition of singers and opera composers, and organists.
- One of the composers—his great-great-great-great grandfather—left an inheritance, and by the time Nabokov is living in Nazi-era Berlin as a young adult, he receives 250 dollars for being one of a few survivors of the line.
- Two of his great-great-grandsomethings on the barons' side did jail time: one for lending a passport of fleeing royals, the other for ordering custom dresses and then not paying for them, nor picking them up. (Rude? Sure. Criminal? We guess it was at the time.)
- Nabokov's paternal grandfather was liberal, though not as liberal as his father would become.
- At the end of his service for the second Tsar, Nabokov's grandfather took a pay-out and retired to travel and live abroad until dementia brought him back to Russia.
- As Nabokov's grandpa's condition worsened and his mother took care of the grumpy elder. He cursed and fell in and out of comas.
- Nabokov's mother made his room look like one he'd had in France, and just a couple of weeks later, he died peacefully, thinking he was in fact there.
- Nabokov's grandparents had nine children, who mostly were, or were married to, a collection of statesmen and diplomats.
- His father's youngest brother Konstantin was a statesman, never married, and was quite lucky in avoiding nearby explosions, only to succumb to something minor in a hospital. Prior to his death, he wrote a book called The Ordeal of a Diplomat. It was a version of the famous Russian writer Alexander Pushkin's play Boris Goudonov, about a Russian Tsar. (The Metropolitan Opera has a good summary of the play here.)
- Later in life, at the Natural History Museum in New York, Nabokov spies a portrait of his Uncle Konstantin, in a mural with Russian and Japanese representatives, and President Theodore Roosevelt. (He had been there are the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War.) Nabokov points it out to a fellow lepidopterist, but he doesn't really care.