Where It All Goes Down
St. Petersburg, circa 1905 to 1917
Sorting History
St. Petersburg was in the middle of so many doings during this period it's hard to know where to start. For our purposes, let's use the lens of the Nabokovs to narrow down the history we're dealing with here. You may want to head here first, to read a brief and good summary of what went down. At the beginning of the book, it's 1905, and we find the Nabokovs just having returned to Russia after a three-year tour of various European resort towns. They had been avoiding the fallout from the Russo-Japanese War, but are relieved to return home.
Although the Russo-Japanese War is over, it'll be less than a decade before World War One hits. In the meantime, there's unrest with the Tsarist rule, and the Social Democrats (including Vlad's dad) are pushing for reforms. Over the next fifteen years, the Social Democratic Party will split apart, with Vladimir's father on one side with the liberals, and Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik-Communists on the other. When the communists rise to power, the Nabokovs decide to flee in the name of safety. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
In His Own Little World
For little Vladimir, who spends his childhood in St. Petersburg, much of this is outside of his awareness. It's only our older, wiser narrator who's able to give us the context that helps us better understand characters like Lenski. As far as Vladimir is concerned, however, St. Petersburg is the beautiful, severe place where he spends the fall and winter.
The town house, Nabokov writes, was "an Italianate construction of Finnish granite, built by my grandfather circa 1885, with floral frescoes above the third (upper) story and a second-floor oriel." (5.5.8) From that very oriel, our dreamy hero may look out upon the square and dream of butterflies.
Even the arctic winters and springs, Nabokov professes, were painfully gorgeous:
How utterly foreign to the troubles of the night were those exciting St. Petersburg mornings when the fierce and tender, damp and dazzling arctic spring bundled away broken ice down the sea-bright Neva! It made the roofs shine. It painted the slush in the streets a rich purplish-blue shade which I have never seen anywhere since. (5.5.10)
Hear that nostalgia? That's a signal of his impending exile.
A Note About St. Petersburg, Which Once Wasn't "St. Petersburg," But Is Now Again
During the Soviet Era, St. Petersburg was called Leningrad, which is why Nabokov says things in the book like "what was formerly St. Petersburg." In 1991, when Soviet rule ended, it became St. Petersburg once more. Of course, poor Nabokov died in 1977, never to see his hometown re-renamed.
Setting: Vyra & the Family Estates
Vyra is one of three linked family estates, on land about an hour's drive from St. Petersburg proper. Vyra is Vladimir's mother's childhood home, and neighbors Uncle Ruka's manse, Rozhestveno, where Vladimir will conduct canoodling with Tamara, and which Vladimir will inherit for a hot second, only to lose a year later it to the Soviets. The third estate is Batovo, where Vladimir's maternal grandmother lives, when she isn't traveling. It's a lush set-up and the rooms (studies, nurseries, kitchens, pantries, attics, cellars, basements, drawing rooms, parlors, living rooms, dining rooms, foyers, etc.) are nearly uncountable.
And outside, on the grounds of the estate? Fuggedaboutit. As Nabokov describes his boyhood ambles across the land, we'll admit that all the meadows and forests and marshes and riverbanks swam in our heads.
If Russia is Vladimir's Motherland, Vyra is his Eden, where everything is beautiful, and nothing can go wrong. He waxes poetic about "an alley of ornamental oaklings" (1.1.6), "the bright, many-windowed, walnut-paneled dining room" (1.5.1) and the "raspberry and racemosa" (3.1.5) climbing over the stones in the family cemetery. It's here that Vladimir learns to really see the natural world as he falls in love with butterflies and poetry. It feels important for the book that Vyra be so darn magical: it sets us up for the Fall of exile and Vladimir's years in much less friendly places.
Setting: Cambridge University, 1919 to 1922
From the start, England is a disagreeable place for Vladimir. His family is forced to leave for Berlin, unable to meet the cost of living in London, and Vladimir and his brother Sergey are left to find their ways in "dull and damp" (13.3.2) Cambridge. It isn't, Nabokov says, that the place isn't clearly special for some students, but during his time, he was busy salvaging what was left of his identity now that he was divided from his home.
If Russia was severe in its beauty, Cambridge is a mealy-mouthed place where it never stops raining. His lodging sits on a "a staid and rather sad little street" (13.3.2), and here, Vladimir never feels so happy as in the middle of night, when he stays up into the night to write. He sits next to the fire, "all the potent banality of embers, solitude and distant chimes pressed against me" (13.3.3)
But by the end of his time there, Vladimir has warmed up to the place a little, professing: "Environment, I suppose, does act upon a creature if there is, in that creature, already a certain responsive particle or strain (the English I had imbibed in my childhood)." (13.4.6) After all, what's the point of having endured Lenski's ribbing about his putting on snobby international airs, if he can't now enjoy the rarefied air of this institution of higher learning?
Soon, Vladimir is ready to graduate, (with honors, natch), and judging by the comparisons he's making in the following quote, Cambridge had started to feel a bit like home:
The air was as warm as in the Crimea, with the same sweet, fluffy smell of a certain flowering bush that I never could quite identify (I later caught whiffs of it in the gardens of the southern States). (13.5.1)
It's too bad dear Vlad has to leave this place, too.
Setting: Berlin, Germany, 1922 to 1939
By the time Vladimir moves to Berlin, to work out a living writing, translating, teaching, and composing crossword puzzles, his family has dispersed. His younger siblings are studying elsewhere in Europe, his father has died, and his mother has decamped to Prague. Living as an émigré is difficult, and travel is limited.
In Berlin, he works and makes tenuous connections with other Russian émigré writers, the older ones of whom are bitter and grumpy. He attends readings, amateur and predictable as they are, and begins to carve out a little life. We don't get a lot of the physicality of Berlin for Vladimir, or don't until he has (off-screen) met and married Vera, and the two have had a baby son.
Berlin comes alive in the final chapter (15) when Vladimir spends much of his time walking his toddling son through the parks of Berlin. It's the eve of World War Two, and Hitler had been in power since 1933. Nabokov writes:
Spring flowers adorned the portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler in the window of a shop that sold frames and colored photographs. Leftist groups of sparrows were holding loud morning sessions in lilacs and limes. A limpid dawn had completely unsheathed one side of the empty street. (15.1.2)
Elsewhere, the father and son keep it light, spotting "a bed of pallid pansies, each of their upturned faces showing a dark mustache-like smudge, and had great fun, at my rather silly prompting, commenting on their resemblance to a crowd of bobbing little Hitlers." (15.3.3)
Luckily, the family gets their travel visa in the spring of 1939, and after a brief stay in Paris, they head off to the States, narrowly avoiding the war.