The New Yorker Fiction :

Seen through the carefully wiped lenses of time, the beauty of her face is as near as ever and as glowing.

By Vladimir Nabokov
December 2, 194

When I first met Tamara—to give her a name concolorous with her real one—she was fifteen and I was a year older. The place was my parents’ estate in the rugged but comely country (black fir, white birch, peat bogs, hayfields, and barrens) just south of St. Petersburg. A distant war was dragging on. Two years later, that trite deus ex machina, the Russian Revolution, came, causing my removal from the unforgettable scenery. In fact, already then, in July, 1915, dim omens and backstage rumblings, the hot breath of fabulous upheavals, were affecting contemporary Russian poetry, which I had just begun to enjoy.

During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara’s name had kept cropping up at various spots on our estate and on my uncle’s land beyond the river. I would find it scrawled in the reddish sand of a park, or pencilled on a whitewashed wicket, or freshly carved in the wood of some ancient bench, as if Mother Nature were giving me mysterious advance notices of Tamara’s existence. That hushed July afternoon when I discovered her standing quite still in the emerald light of a birch grove (only her eyes were moving), she seemed to have been spontaneously generated there, among those watchful young trees, with the silent completeness of a mythological manifestation.

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