In Mary, Nabokov’s first novel, Lev Glebovich Ganin is a Russian exile living in Berlin among other exiles. His “pension was both Russian and nasty,” and his neighbor in the next room is Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov, also both Russian and nasty.
Alfyorov has just gotten word that his wife is on her way from Russia to join him in Berlin and will arive on Saturday. He excitedly shows Ganin her picture—Mary’s picture. And immediately the rest of Ganin’s week is washed in memory as he realizes his first love is coming, and she’s married to this awful man.
Ganin met her in the countryside one summer; her family was vacationing near his family’s dacha. His first memory of noticing her is at a concert held in the village, and Nabokov’s virtuosity as a writer gets a lot of room to play in all these memories and dreams.
Later, when the concert was over, the Petersburg bass was driven away in the local mill owner’s huge car which cast a mysterious light over the grass and then, with a sweep of its beam, dazzled a sleeping birch tree and the footbridge over a brook; and when the crowd of fair vacationists, in a festive flutter of white frocks, drifted away through the blue darkness across the dew-laden clover, and someone lit a cigarette in the dark, holding the flaring match to his face in cupped hands—Ganin, in a state of lonely excitement, walked home, the spokes of his bicycle clicking faintly as he pushed it by the saddle.
Mary is a land of exiles, a good place for memory and nostalgia. These concern Nabokov in his other work as well, but here they are the main show. I noted more than I ever had before a focus on stream-of-consciousness that (now that I’ve read her) bring Virginia Woolf immediately to mind. Here, Ganin remembers Mary’s old perfume.
Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.
For a moment Ganin stopped recollecting and wondered how he had been able to live for so many years without thinking about Mary—and then he caught up with her again: she was running along a dark, rustling path, her black bow looking in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty.
Recollecting, pausing, recollecting some more; this makes me think of Woolf. The scent, and the butterfly, are doses of Nabokov.
It can almost be sentimental, not Ganin really but certainly the sentimental poet Podtyagin, who laments: “It’s terrible—oh, terrible—that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous—the sort of dreams where the sky is falling in and you feel the world’s coming to an end.” I prefer this comment, amid reminiscences of the industrial and human grotesquerie Ganin witnessed while fleeing the country: “It was such trivia—and not nostalgia for his abandoned homeland—that stuck in Ganin’s memory, as though only his eyes had been alive and his mind gone into hiding.”
Like the quote above – “he caught up with her again” – as if he had just lost her on a walk. Never read this Nabokov title, don’t even own a copy but am drawn by the descriptions of both nature and function of memory.
Yes, exactly as if he had just lost her. There is lots of excellent nature stuff from the flashbacks to Ganin’s days at the dacha. Birches everywhere, that sort of thing.
Once we’re into the memory section of the book, Ganin keeps slipping backward and forward like this – Berlin to Russia and back. Each variation, each slip, is different. And this is in the first novel!
More, please!
I’m so excited that you’ve officially begun this project! And am now regretting that I didn’t immediately join you, since much of what you say about Mary is very appealing. Parallels with Woolf (and Proust, I think), and I love that description of the party breaking up.
I’m excited you’re underway; Mary still sits in my book pile beside my desk awaiting my own Nabokov journey. It will be awhile though, as I have got terribly distracted by Simone de Beauvoir. I shall get a virtual fix from reading with your journey.
It sounds like Nabokov’s themes emerge early. It also sounds, like all first novels, to have an autobiographical element: I recall from Speak, Memory that Nabokov met a girl under similar circumstances.
I’ve read about half of Nabokov’s works, but not this one yet. I plan to read four of his novels this year, and this is definitely on the list. Hopefully in the next couple weeks! :)
Wait! I’ve gone about my project all wrong – I picked up The Real Life of Sebastian Knight as his first novel, but of course that’s only his first English novel. Going back to the “bookstores” and will be joining in properly!
This sounds excellent. Wish I could read it in Russian.
Woohoo, we’re all excited! And I definitely recommend all of you who are thinking about this one should read it.
nicole, you’re making the case that I was merely asserting – they’re all this good, all of VN’s novels, or better.
The connections that run from this little novel through the rest of his life’s work are unbelievable. You could trace a line to almost everything.
The Proust connection is real. I think one purpose of this novel is to purge Proust, so to speak, to overcome Proust’s influence. He’s purging the autobiographical stuff, too, getting it out of the way. Mary is self-consciously a “first novel.”
I think I think you are right, that they are all this good. Part of me wants to say King, Queen, Knave is not, but that’s not actually true at all. Major and minor, major and minor all the way.
i’ve been re-reading vladimir nabokov’s work for some time now . . .and i wouldn’t recommend him for a summer read, or even a short read, unless you plan to read him exclusively for a summer. because even he thought that his best reader would be a re-reader of his work. that said, i’m still not sure how i feel about his ‘art’ or how one should approach it. i find his short stories brilliant but still hard to decipher his novels and novelettes less precise and almost willfully droll. yet you can’t resist some secret he may have hidden in his work which he’s waiting for someone to untangle. and this along with his sense of humor keeps me by his side even though i’m not sure that even if i uncovered some of those secrets it would have been worthwhile.