The Tribulations of Adonis

Abstract

First loves have always been a favorite subject for poets and novelists. Nabokov, before he undertook to write fiction, published a collection of poems composed when he was only sixteen and in love with a girl only a year younger, an episode of his life tenderly evoked in Chapter 12 of his autobiography, Speak, Memory. That first love, in the dream world of pre-Revolutionary Russia, may have been the secret source of many of his best novels, even of the most science-fictional or surrealistic one, Ada. The works studied in the present chapter, all written in Russian with one exception, that Chapter 12 of his autobiography, deal with various stages of a young man’s sexual initiation and discovery of love.