Speak, Memory Education Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)

Quote #10

I suddenly felt that something in me was as naturally in contact with my immediate surroundings as it was with my Russian past, and that this state of harmony had been reached at the very moment that the careful reconstruction of my artificial but beautifully exact Russian world had been at last completed. I think one of the very few "practical" actions I have ever been guilty of was to use part of that crystalline material to obtain an Honours degree. (13.4.5)

Vladimir might've been a miserable student at Cambridge, or so Nabokov tells us. He takes pleasure in saying that he didn't even know where the library was, that he skipped lectures, and spent time chasing girls and staging practical jokes. But meanwhile, big intellectual investigations were afoot, and Vladimir avoided the horrors of sleep by spending each night working on writing about his Russian identity, or what was left of it.