The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in an aristocratic family living in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg and at their country estate Vyra, near Siverskaya.

[1] The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.Nabokov published "Mademoiselle O", which became Chapter Five of the book, in French in 1936, and in English in The Atlantic Monthly in 1943, without indicating that it was non-fiction.

Andrew Field observed that while Nabokov evoked the past through "puppets of memory" (in the characterizations of his educators, Colette, or Tamara, for example), his intimate family life with Véra and Dmitri remained "untouched".

The book's opening line, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," is arguably a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle's "One Life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities," found in Carlyle's 1840 lecture "The Hero as Man of Letters", published in On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History in 1841.

[citation needed] The line is parodied at the start of Little Wilson and Big God, the autobiography of the English writer Anthony Burgess.

Nabokov, having lost his belongings in 1917, wrote from memory, and explains that certain reported details needed corrections; thus the individual chapters as published in magazines and the book versions differ.

He wrote, however, a fictional autobiographic memoir of a double persona, Look at the Harlequins!, apparently being upset by a real biography published by Andrew Field.