All right. Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was written in a Berlin boarding house, when both the author and the century were about twenty-five. His situation was as follows: having fled the Bolsheviks, he and his Jewish bride now awaited the Nazis (the NSDAP was formed in 1920); his father had been shot dead by a (Russian) fascist in 1922; his mother and his sisters were penniless in Prague. Vladimir was deracinated, declassed, and destitute. And yet Mary bears not the slightest trace of melancholy, let alone alienation or nausée. Indeed, the only angst Nabokov ever suffered from had to do with ‘the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. And his first novel ends with his promise to meet that world with ‘a fresh, loving eye’. That’s your situation. You are a stranger in a strange land; but you come to it with a fresh and loving eye.