In 1904, Nabokov remembers meeting his cousin, Yuri, for the first time. The headstrong Yuri in later life introduces Nabokov to the Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid. He plays with Yuri throughout his childhood, first with wooden guns, then with air guns that shoot wax pellets producing painful, though non-lethal, effect. In 1914, a sixteen-year-old Yuri visits the Nabokovs, produces a cigarette case and tells Vladimir of his love for two married women. The following summer, when Nabokov is in officer's training school, Yuri visits again at which time the two young men, invent a game where one of them would lays beneath an outdoor swing as the other swoops down from above. The swing board passes just inches over the prone man's face. Yuri fights for the White's in Denikin's.....
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