Summary

In the summer of 1914 a “fury of verse-making” came over Nabokov. He remembers roaming the country house grounds with his butterfly net, briefly ducking into a pavilion during a fierce and beautiful storm and once the clouds had passed needing to write verse. He cites this particular storm as the catalyst for his verse.

As a beginner of poetry, he recognizes that he wasn’t very good. The rhythm of words and sounds were particularly important to him and he believed that through his veil of words the beauty he saw would be encapsulated—that others would see things as he did. But to other his writing was an amalgam of words, not necessarily depicting the grandiose beauty that he thought they did. He becomes so distraught by his poetry that he cannot eat or butterfly hunt. His writer’s block ends when he...