- Nabokov sticks with the time around Uncle Ruka's death: Vladimir is around eighteen, too absorbed with girls and studies and his own inner life to know to be angry or upset at the loss of his inheritance during the Bolshevik Revolution (AKA the October Revolution, part of the Russian Revolution during which the Tsarist rule was overthrown).
- Nabokov feels guilty now that he made fun of grumpy Uncle Ruka, particularly of his sentimental musical composition, "a romance."
- "...the plaintive sounds...reached me and my green butterfly net on the shady, tremulous trail, at the end of which was a vista of reddish sand and the corner of our freshly repainted house, the color of young fir cones, with the open drawing-room window whence the wounded music came." (3.6.2)