 Brilliant's Audio presents the unabridged recording of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov. Performed by Luke Daniels. Tuvera. One. Sebastian Knight was born on the 31st of December, 1899, in the former capital of my country. An old Russian lady who has, for some obscure reason, begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past. So uneventful had those years been, apparently, that the collecting of daily details, which is always a poor method of self-preservation, barely surpassed a short description of the day's weather. And it's curious to note in this respect that the personal diaries of sovereigns, no matter what troubles beset their realms, are mainly concerned with the same subject. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I'm able to state that the morning of Sebastian's birth was a fine, windless one, with twelve degrees ray amure below zero. This is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought, I cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That you will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was, and is, Olga Oligovna Orlova. An egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold. Her dry account cannot convey to the untraveled reader the implied delights of a winter day, such as she describes in St. Petersburg. The pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye. The sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets, with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung, the brightly-colored bunch of toy balloons hawked by an aproned peddler, the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of poultry frost, the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined in white, the rasp and tinkle of winter traffic. And, by the way, how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard, like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for a moment, to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight, self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees on this painted photograph, a dream-wide street with Doroskys all awry under incredibly blue skies, which, farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality. I've not been able to obtain a picture of the house where Sebastian was born. Sample complete. Ready to continue?