As is invariably noted at the beginning of positively all literary biographies, the little boy was a glutton for books.... For his first writing exercise he painstakingly reproduced: "Obey your sovereign, honor him and submit to his laws," and the compressed ball of his index finger thus remained ink-stained forever. Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun.

Nabokov wryly parodies the boilerplate opening of “literary biographies” (“the little boy was a glutton for books”), then undercuts it with a concrete, bodily detail: the ink-stained finger from a school copybook exercise. The copied maxim—obedience to a sovereign—hints at the old imperial order and the formative discipline of childhood, while the permanent stain suggests how early training (and early writing) marks the artist for life. The closing line (“Now the thirties are over and the forties have begun”) shifts from anecdotal childhood to the passage of decades, implying a self-aware, time-lapse autobiography: the narrator is both mocking the conventions of life-writing and acknowledging the inexorable movement from youthful formation to middle age.