How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me. [...] The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes. (3.5.2)
With the wealth the Nabokovs lost in being exiled, it can be easy to focus on the money and cars and houses and cash. But Nabokov firmly reminds us that in exile he lost every remnant of his childhood. As a result, memory and artifacts have become important to him as an adult, as he continues to look for something left of his time in St. Petersburg. Perhaps this book goes some way toward a salve?
Quote #2
In result, that particular return to Russia, my first conscious return, seems to me now, sixty years later, a rehearsal—not of the grand homecoming that will never take place, but of its constant dream in my long years of exile. (5.1.3)
If you want us to pull a Katy Perry, we'll happily oblige: Russia is "the one that got away." We don't mean to compare exile to a mediocre pop song, but it is indeed along the same line: because a sense of home and geographical belonging has been taken from Vladimir, he'll always wonder "what if?"
Quote #3
On the following morning, however, when she unlocked the wardrobe to take something out, my Swallowtail, with a mighty rustle, flew into her face, then made for the open window, and presently was but a golden fleck dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and Verkhne Kolymsk, and from Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the fair Island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson, and southward along the Rocky Mountains—to be finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder. (6.1.3)
Yes, this is one long quote. But that's because it's earned it: take a butterfly that escaped Vladimir's collection, and follow it through its life until he finds it again. It's a neat little allegory that explains Vladimir's lost-and-found sense of home post-exile.