Nabokov insistă asupra copilăriei sale ruseşti, cu personajele pitoreşti ale guvernantelor străine, cu imaginea mamei mereu lângă fiul ei şi pasiunile lui, susţinându-l chiar şi când scrie poezii mediocre, cu tatăl care încearcă să menţină o idee şubredă de echitate într-o societate nedreaptă unde conflictele sunt peste tot pe punctul de a izbucni (lucru care se şi întâmplă, forţând familia să plece în exil o dată cu revoluţia bolşevică, burgheza copilă franţuzoaică de care s-a îndrăgostit în vacanţă etc).
"I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchement on the smooth-sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park -not from the house- as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement.[...] And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties -smiling, frivolous duties- some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause."
In autobiografia lui, Nabokov nu ţine să-şi povestească viaţa cronologic şi prin evenimente, ci se opreşte asupra detaliilor care l-au marcat la nivel sentimental (distrugerea unui fluture din colecţie, câinii dachsund ale maică-sii, datul periculos cu sania care o îngrozea pe guvernanta elveţiancă). Nabokov caută să surprindă atmosfera diferitelor etape din viaţa lui şi mai puţin întâmplările, acţiunile. Ne ajută să înţelegem de unde a pornit în conturarea personajelor din romane şi în alegerea temelor mai mult decât să ne transmită o poveste a vieţii lui formată din evenimentele prin care a trecut.
"It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem's value is due to the number of 'tries' -delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I do not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connexion with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients -rocks, and carbon, and blind throbbings."
Autobiografia se opreşte la momentul în care este nevoit să părăsească Europa pentru a emigra cu soţia şi fiul său în America.
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