I walked by the mansion in which Nabokov grew up in St. Petersburg nearly every day over a five-week stay in 2005.
I hadn’t yet read Speak, Memory however.
I love this passage, re: the family’s doorman, a certain Ustin:
“As early as 1906 the police, suspecting my father of conducting clandestine meetings at vyra, had engaged the services of Ustin who thereupon begged my father under some pretext I cannot recall, but with the deep purpose of spying on whatever went on, to take him to the country that summer as an extra footman. . . and it was he, omnipresent Ustin, who in the winter of 1917-18 heroically led representatives of the victorious Soviets up to my father’s study on the second floor, and from there, through a music room and my mother’s boudoir, to the southeast corner room where I was born, and to the niche in the wall, to the tiaras of colored fire, which formed an adequate recompense for the Swalllowtail he had once caught for me.”