Mirrors, Marbles & Window Glass

It's not hard to see the connection between a reflection in a mirror and the kinds of self-reflection in which a person must engage to write his own life story. As such, mirrors and reflective surfaces are everywhere in this book. As Nabokov describes rooms from memory, this becomes abundantly clear:

• "I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book." (3.7.3) See how there is a window and a mirror? And the mirror's reflection is "filled" to the brim with the image of the schoolroom, much like Nabokov's memory.

• "I next see my mother leading me bedward through the enormous hall, where a central flight of stairs swept up and up, with nothing but hothouse-like panes of glass between the upper landing and the light green evening sky." The "hothouse-like panes of glass" lend this scene some transcendence: as Vladimir makes his way toward bed, the glass and light remind him of the larger world. (4.3.1)

• Here's another type of glass, where little Vladimir is set on destruction. "I could be seen on my knees trying to set a found comb aflame by means of a magnifying glass." (7.2.3) It's almost as if he's working on a lesson of transformation, where lighting something on fire will teach him more about it. (This comes back later in life, when Nabokov, as a full-fledged lepidopterist, dissect butterflies and presses them in glass slides to look at his specimens through microscopes.

There are two descriptive-but-mysterious moments where mirrors play a big role:

• When Vladimir has finished his first poem, and he brings it to his mother. After she reads it and congratulates him, she hands him her hand mirror so that he can wipe a dead mosquito he's unknowingly squished on his forehead. But when he looks at his reflection, he sees more: "Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass." (11.5.3)

• Later, while taking his small son for a hike in the pine barrens outside Berlin, he comes upon "a badly disfigured but still alert mirror, full of sylvan reflections—drunk, as it were, on a mixture of beer and chartreuse—leaning, with surrealistic jauntiness, against a tree trunk." (15.3.1) What is he talking about, a drunk mirror? We suspect he might be talking about his own sense self, discombobulated as the mirror in his émigré era, but doing his best to write, and be a husband, and raise his son. In its reflections, there is a kind of visible hope.

Escapes

It's not uncommon that kids try and run away from home, only to make it down the street before homesickness or a stomach hungry for dinner calls them back. But for young Vladimir, escape is an obsession. Here's some of the quiet exits he tried to make:

• Vladimir and Sergey are kidlets on the run from Mademoiselle, trudging into the snow with their pet Turka the Great Dane beside them. After long, the Russian winter and miles walked exhausts the two boys, and a servant finds them and brings them back to Mademoiselle. (5.2.3)

• Colette is Vladimir's first crush, and he wants to marry that sweet-tempered, fast-talking little girl. He plans to elope with her, but they only get as far as the nearest movie theatre.

• As a boy, Vladimir becomes used to spending quiet mornings alone out in the country, looking for butterfly specimens. But when a friend comes to visit, it puts a cramp in his style: "Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window." (6.3.5)

Of course, these attempted runaways and escapes become all the more poignant when the family must escape quickly, fearing political persecution and death as the communists advance. In escaping Russia, they're forced to abandon all they know.

Is it possible that Nabokov is building irony in foreshadowing the exile with all of these mini-escapes, acting as mini-allegories, before the big event?