Speak, Memory Chapter 8, Section 4 Summary

  • Although Lenski is an excellent teacher, it turns out that he's a rigid and ignorant student who finds fault with the university for not caring about the social and political issues near and dear to his heart. Vladimir's father tries to help him, but he is too stubborn.
  • At the end of his time with the Nabokovs, Lenski is married, and during his honeymoon a Swiss tutor named Monsieur Noyer takes over.
  • Monsieur Noyer reads the boys Cyrano de Bergerac and plays tennis with them.
  • When Lenski leaves for good in 1914, a Russian man (from nearby the Volga River) becomes their elder companion: Vladimir is fifteen, and the boys are pretty much squared for tutors. They play tennis and ride horses. The new guy doesn't know much when it comes to literature—he thinks Charles Dickens wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin), but he seems sweet enough...until Nabokov lets us know that later he married one of the Nabokov cousins and sent her to a labor camp to die during Lenin's Russia. Oops.
  • Lenski keeps in touch, as he becomes a buyer of patents (an O.G. patent troll, perhaps?) and inherits a good sum of cashola from his father-in-law.
  • In 1918, when the Nabokovs are stranded in Yalta, Lenski offers them money and help.
  • By 1919, however, Lenski is forced to flee Russia, and after a bad investment in an amusement park, he ends up on the French Riviera painting and selling seascapes inside seashells to support himself. (Like how he put himself through college.)
  • By World War Two, Nabokov loses track of him, and would rather not think of what happened to Lenski during Nazi-occupied France.