Any capsule summary of this intricately complex life is sure to prompt protests from captious critics. Himself fascinated with "the miracle of the lemniscate" forms of life, he said: "A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899-1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany, and France (1919-1940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940-1960) forms a synthesis--and a new thesis." What followed was a not quite twenty-year period (1961-1977) in residence at the Palace Hotel (he never owned a home) in Montreux, Switzerland. Each of those four periods is almost a separate, a unique life, with its own feeling, tone, and pace, linked together with a unifying consciousness constantly making ornaments of accidents and possibilities.
His childhood in Czarist Russia was Edenic, magnificently evoked in the setting and tone--but not the incidents--of Ada. An aristocratic family, proud of its coat-of-arms and ancestry stretching back to Nabok Murza, a fourteenth-century Russianized Tartar prince in Muscovy (though this has been challenged by Igor Vinogradoff), provided an affluent and loving context for his idyllic boyhood.
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