"my english education"

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote in English for most of his life:

He learned to read English before he could read Russian and had a succession of English tutors and governesses, as well as other nationalities.

My English Education | The New Yorker

archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1948-03-27/flipbook/025

In his piece on his English education, he recalls the variety of English teachers he encountered as a boy in pre-Revolutionary St Petersburg:

russillosm.com/smem.html

It's from his much-acclaimed autobiography:

Time Magazine listed the book among the 100 All-TIME non-fiction books indicating that its "impressionist approach deepens the sense of memories relived through prose that is gorgeous, rich and full"

Speak, Memory - Wikipedia

Which is indeed greatly appreciated even today:

Why Nabokov’s Speak, Memory Still Speaks to Us | The National Endowment for the Humanities

Here is an excerpt from Chapter 4:

I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar—Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts—“Who is Ben?” “He is Dan,” “Sam is in bed,” and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ—for the initial lessons, at least—words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (“Ben has an axe”), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician’s chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me.

Chapter Four - Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

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