Mary, pp. 31-34: re-creating the past

Having freed himself from his relationship with Lyudmila, Ganin now feels free to delve freely into his past, recalling a summer nine years ago (1915) when, recovering from typhus, he was tended by a nurse who “loved to use folksy quips and bits of Japanese which she remembered from the war of 1904” (the territorial war between Japan and Russia over areas of  Manchuria and Korea).  Nabokov thus weaves historical details such as this one into the remanufactured memories of his protagonists’ pasts that are at once fantasies founded upon elaborate “realities”  (the most famous example being, of course, Charles Kinbote, the deposed king of Zembla in Pale Fire).  Typically, Ganin is convinced (as is, perhaps, the reader) that his memory of adolescence is authentic and “true to life” because so many of the recollected details—the nurse uttering Japanese phrases, the size and location of the windows in his bedroom, the wallpaper—appear to be microscopically accurate.  Yet Nabokov gives the game away in describing Ganin’s memory of two pictures that hung by his bedside:  “To the right of the bed between the icon case and the side window hung two pictures—a tortoiseshell cat lapping milk from a saucer, and a starling made of real starling’s feathers appliquéd above a drawing of a nesting box.”  The artificial, trompe-l’oeil aspects of these images underscore how much Ganin’s memories are constructed out of the combined elements of fantasy, projection, and reality in his re-membering of first love:  “He was a god, re-creating a world that had perished.” But in fact he is a “god” lost “in the bright labyrinth of memory,” the fractured mirror of narcissistic self-reflection.”  Thus, as he gloomily thinks on p. 34, there is no “eternal return,” no “second time.”  Nietzsche lurks in the background here, as does Schopenhauer with the notion of “metempsychosis.”