Though, in the respectable Nabokov family, things turned out melodramatic enough even without "Poor Nastya": Vladimir Nabokov's grandmother was married to his grandfather from the age of 15 and called her husband "a monkey with cold feet", at the time of

Though, in the respectable Nabokov family, things turned out melodramatic enough even without "Poor Nastya": Vladimir Nabokov's grandmother was married to his grandfather from the age of 15 and called her husband "a monkey with cold feet", while at the time of the wedding and for many years after it Dmitry Nikolayevich Nabokov was in an intimate liaison with Baroness Korff, his own mother-in-law. And Maria Ferdinandovna Nabokova herself was, by rumour, the mistress of Alexander II; it was even whispered that the writer's father, Vladimir Dmitriyevich, had been born of the Emperor. Whether or not this family legend is true, as retold by the writer's younger brother Sergey Nabokov, at the very least the old lady always kept about her a gold locket with a lock of Alexander II's hair, and a portrait of her august "lover" stood on her bedside table.