The first scenes of King, Queen, Knave take place on the train as Franz Bubendorf moves from his hometown to Berlin. A great coincidence happens on this train, which certainly influences the whole course of events in the novel. Franz, deciding on impulse to travel second-class for the first time ever, ends up in a car “occupied by only two people—a handsome bright-eyed lady and a middle-aged man with a clipped tawny mustache.”

Franz doesn’t really have the stomach for many other human beings, and unlike the filthy riffraff that so disgusted him in third-class, the couple is “charming.” They begin a conversation. The man is thirsty; the woman begins talking about “such a silly thing to do,” something that’s “[his] own fault.” The narrator begins to explain: the man knows his wife is annoyed because of a visit he had with his cousin in the town. She needed “advice”; the man offered to give her son a job. “And that was what his wife could not forgive him. She called it ‘swamping the business with poor relations’; but when you come down to it, how can one poor relation swamp anything?”

The poor relation, of course, is Franz. We already know that he is heading to Berlin to get a job with his uncle, and the three of them will share a car all the way, none the wiser. When he arrives at his uncle’s doorstep the next day, all is revealed.

It’s a very Nabokovian beginning, to my mind. There’s the slowish start and the way Franz springs fully formed from the first page, with a complete set of neuroses laid out within a few paragraphs. The immediate focus is on his inner life and the kinds of thoughts he thinks (then right on to those of his uncle, Dreyer, and Martha, his wife). There’s the well described setting with plenty of specific details that all, of course, connect somehow (Dreyer is thirsty because he ate some strawberries Franz was eying before they ran into each other). Compare to Mary. There, he plunged us into the broken-elevator conversation between Ganin and Alfyarov, where we begin quite quickly to understand what kind of person each is. Then we have the layout of the pension, which creates the whole world of Russia-in-Berlin like *that*.

But who knew that we’d mostly abandon the pension and end up in the idyllic Russian countryside for the emotional high points of that novel? Or, here, that Franz’s innate disgust for nearly everyone would turn to lust for his aunt? Or that her frigidness and primness about men would lead her to vilify her husband (who is, by the way, adorable) while she falls for her creepy, weird, and pretty gross nephew who only changes his undershirt twice a week?

When Ganin and Mary first get together, as I noted yesterday, they are vacationing in the countryside. This gives them plenty of opportunity for romantic rural trysts. They can meet at abandoned pavilions, in empty fields, walk together through the forest. In all his memories of them together they are alone.

At the end of the season, Ganin returns to St. Petersburg and normal life. He is still a schoolboy at this point. Mary’s family follows some months later and the two again begin to meet. But “long walks in the frost were agonizing, and finding a warm place to be alone in museums and cinemas was most agonizing of all.” They write each other letters and talk on the phone. Ganin is deeply dissatisfied.

These meetings in the wind and frost tortured him more than her. He felt that their love was fraying and wearing thin as a result of these incomplete trysts. Every love demands privacy, shelter, refuge—and they had no such refuge.

I’m not sure that privacy is commonly thought of as a Nabokovian concern. I have not yet begun to really contaminate* myself with criticism. But I think this idea of privacy or refuge is a recurring one, both in Mary and elsewhere. I think immediately of Ada and Van, of course, who had nothing if not an intensely private relationship.

In Mary, much of what Ganin does is in quest of this privacy. He is, first of all, literally a refugee, one who ends up in some extremely nonprivate living quarters. The pension is like a suffocatingly small village. The opening scene of the novel finds Ganin stuck in a broken elevator with Alfyarov, whom he despises. Ganin wants only for him to stop talking, but he will not shut up, and is always asking Ganin questions he does not want to answer.

And it’s because of Alfyarov’s lack of concern for privacy that Ganin goes at all on this trip down memory lane. If Alfyarov could keep his own business to himself, could specifically keep his own relationship to himself—his own wife to himself, if you will—Ganin may never have thought of Mary again.

Ganin is also jealous of his reminiscences. He does not share with anyone what has happened, or tell them about his lost love in any but the most oblique terms. He just wants to go back to his room and be alone with his thoughts. His love only exists in private.

There’s another very private character in Mary, Ganin’s neighbor Klara. Described at least three times as “full-busted” and always wearing a black silk dress, Klara is an unhappy typist despairingly in love with Ganin. She does have one confidante, but generally holds back from any revelation about herself. She ends up quite sad, perhaps because of her privacy but perhaps not. And then there’s her extremely nonprivate friend, a girlfriend Ganin breaks up with during the novel. She doesn’t keep much of anything to herself, and Ganin is repulsed by her.

*Not a pejorative!

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.”