Nabokov's Mary

The Texture of Time

Mary peeked at me from the shelf of a used bookstore. I had read almost all of Nabokov’s works, but had never gotten around to his first novel. So when I saw it next to Look at the Harlequins!, his last and another I’d never read, I took it as a sign and bought both. Like all of the McGraw-Hill Nabokovs of the 1970s, the cover is unremarkable; by then, what he later called Hurricane Lolita had long made landfall and all a publisher needed was his name (and hers) on the cover. The one of Mary has almost an anti-cover, but I like these kinds of dustjackets that give nothing away. Even the inside flap tells nothing besides its being Nabokov’s first.

The pages are few (114 of them) but the issue is one to which their author would return throughout his career: the challenge of conveying (as biographer Bryan Boyd so perfectly puts it) “the mind’s encounter with time.”

The plot is simple because much of the action is internal. It’s 1924 and Lev Glebovich Ganin lives in a Berlin boardinghouse with other expatriates; Ganin never returned to Russia after serving with the White Army and being evacuated from Crimea. In the opening scene, he is stuck in an elevator with another exile, Alfyorov, who tells him that his wife will be arriving in Berlin after four long years of Russian delays. Ganin is aloof and uninterested, but when he finds himself in Alfyorov’s room and sees a photo of the wife, he leaves without saying a word. Alfyorov mumbles, “Really! How rude. What’s bitten him?” We learn that what’s bitten him is that Alfyorov’s wife, Mary, is Ganin’s first love, whom he had consigned to memory. On the very first page of that opening scene, Alfyorov says, “My name is a more modest one and my wife’s name is just plain Mary.” Yet Ganin doesn’t react; only when he sees the photograph does he realize that this Mary is his Mary. The name is as common as falling in love, but to Ganin—or anyone else who has had the experience—the universal becomes achingly particular.

The rest of the novel follows Ganin as he moves through the week and courts a rush of memories about Mary. That she has married a fool (as all rivals must be) is unbearable. Ganin assumes that once she sees him, she’ll leave Alfyorov and fall into his arms; he therefore breaks off with his current girlfriend and tells the landlady that he’ll be moving out on Sunday, the day of Mary’s arrival, when he’ll begin a new life with her. That Saturday night, Ganin gets Alfyorov drunk, presumably so he won’t give him any trouble the next morning; at dawn, Ganin waits for Mary at the train station. What happens there is surprising, but not for the reasons you may be thinking if you haven’t read the novel. As much as I’d like to take apart the ending, I won’t so that you’ll have the pleasure of your own reaction.

Mary is evocative of a specific time and place (émigré Berlin in the 20s) but, like all great writing, able to make a reader lean into the page when recognizing a common experience that transcends the fictional time and setting. There’s always a tension between what we assume are our deepest personal experiences and those of billions of other people: we are unique and exactly like everybody else. Yet that universality is exactly what Ganin, who assumes that Mary and he had a relationship so special that she will walk away from her husband, can’t accept. It’s why lovelorn teenagers respond to advice from their parents with, “You don’t understand.” Alas, their parents do, just as the reader understands what is happening to Ganin in a way that he does not. Ganin has no one to whom he can talk about the revelation and his plans; if he did, any rational person would tell Ganin that he was using events in the haze of memory as the basis for action.

Undated photo of Nabokov in the 1920s

Mary was written by the twenty-six-year old Nabokov in 1925, the same year in which the twenty-nine-year old F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the publication of his treatment of the same theme. When Nick Carraway tells Gatsby that he can’t repeat the past, Gatsby replies, “Why of course you can!” Gatsby and Ganin share this understandable delusion, as we all do to some degree. A few days ago, while cleaning the attic, I found the program to an event from 2006 and read the whole thing, on my knees in the ninety-degree crawlspace, thinking about that event that happened twenty years ago. Earlier last week, I received an email about my upcoming high-school reunion, promising to be an “epic” way to remember all of the great times. I wasn’t miserable in high school, but I also don’t want to relive any of it, even by proxy. But that’s what nostalgia is: reliving the past through an object, photograph, or event that provokes soft-focus memories. In one of his later novels, Nabokov’s narrator explains:

When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!

The photograph of Mary shines for Ganin with a light that blinds him to what any other person would say about the chances that she will abandon her life to return to him.

Nabokov’s work is filled with exiles, mostly from Russia, like Timofey Pnin (Pnin), displaced geographically and socially. But his protagonists are also exiled from places more obscure: Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire) is (as he tells it) the deposed king of Zembla, hiding in the college town of New Wye; Professor of French Humbert Humbert (Lolita) yearns not for the continent, but for the kingdom-by-the-sea in which he met his first Annabel Lee; the prisoner Cincinnatus (Invitation to a Beheading) knows there is a world far superior to his own to which he can only glimpse in the pages of cheap magazines and advertisements. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael says that Queequeg “was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away,” but that this island “is not down in any map; true places never are.” All of these places are true because they do exist—even if they exist only in our memories, true or false. Kinbote might not be Charles the Beloved of Zembla, but even if he isn’t, he believes that he is and fills Pale Fire with his memories of “our blue inenubilable Zembla,” which has the same effect: Zembla is a “true place,” just like the high school that is remembered as better than it was or, in Ganin’s case, a first love that has none of the awkwardness or complications that all romances entail.

We’re all exiles from our own pasts. Read Mary. You’ll be glad you did.