The hero reports about his first meeting with the heroine as follows: "I met Nina a long time ago, in nineteen seventeen, probably judging by the places where time has worn out. It was on a birthday party at my aunt's house, on her Luzhsky estate, in a pure country winter." The observant reader, of course, cannot but pay attention to the historically extremely important date of acquaintance of the hero and heroine, as if through clenched teeth, - the winter of 1917. Very soon, the reader's guess about the secret explosive subtext embedded in this date is confirmed. A paragraph after the phrase just quoted, a hypothetical reason will be mentioned (again, as if in passing), which caused a crowd of merry guests to leave the warm room: "I don't remember why we all spilled out of the bell-shaped pillared hall into this motionless darkness, populated only by Christmas trees, twice swollen from snow porosity: whether the watchman was called to look at the promising glow of a distant fire, or whether we admired the ice horse carved by the Swiss near the pond of my cousins; but the memory only comes to life when..." This, lost in the endlessly unfolding sentence "the promising glow of a distant fire", nevertheless contains a clear reference: very similar realities and circumstances are described in the writer's novel "Podvig": "... in nineteen hundred and eighteen... the whole estate was also burned down, which, out of stupidity, was completely burned down, instead of making a profit on the situation, by peasants from a nearby village." Two Nabokovian epithets - "promising" and "distant" - also deserve special attention. Far Away is not only a spatial, but also a temporal characteristic (it is now February 1917, but the real fire will break out after October, which is still far away). The promising glow promises not only the horrors of Oktyabrsky perevoro- page 22 that, but also the emigration of the hero and heroine provoked by these horrors, and therefore their further emi ... Read more