Summary

Nabokov is looking at a scrapbook, as he is writing this chapter that his mother made about his father. He lists his father’s accomplishments—he is a quite famous liberal politician. He has served in the Russian service and also been briefly detained in a prison. Nabokov’s father is an intelligent man who has always worked for his convictions—with grave risks. He is killed in Berlin by an assassin while protecting one of his political comrades.

At 11 years old, Nabokov’s father decides that the tutors are no longer sufficient and sends him to a school for liberal thinkers. Nabokov is significantly wealthier than anyone else at the school and is even given grief about the limousines picking him up and dropping him every day at school. Nabokov knows that he is different in other ways as well—he dislikes what...