Boyd writes (p. 164) that he tried to sell his mother's pearls to Cartier before arriving in England, On the next page, BB reports the "jewels" were sold in London "and would have to pay for two years's study for her son at Cambridge (165). In October, 1919, Vn became a 'pensioner', a student who pays his own way--althour he remembers having received some scholarship 'awarded more in atonement for political tribulations than in acknowledgement of intellectual merit." (p. 166)

I remember having read somewhere on the Web that both Vladimir and Sergei Nabokov made use of a scholarship provided for sons of prominent Russians. The fact that VN's friend Gleb Struve (also son of a prominent Russian) completed his studies at Oxford seems to prove it. But here is a tiny excerpt from Jane Grayson's recent work:

Elena Ivanovna's jewels smuggled out of Russia in a travelling-bag, helped to subsidize the family's initial years abroad. In a letter to his governess Cécile Miauton, in June 1919 Nabokov wrote that his mother's pearls (which she is depicted wearing on the portrait by Léon Bakst (1909, The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg)) paid for two years of his studies at Cambridge. (Illustrated Lives: Vladimir Nabokov, pp. 22-23.)

Is there a Russian translation of Vladimir Nabokov's "On Conclusive Evidence"? It is a piece written in the form of a review of two autobiographical books: Nabokov's own Conclusive Evidence and the fictional Barbara Braun's When Lilacs Last. It was first published in the New Yorker (the 28 December 1998/4 January 1999 issue) and appended to an Everyman's Library edition of Speak, Memory (1999).