Ganin reflects on his memory of his first projected and real encounters with Mary: “The fact was that he had been waiting for her with such longing, had thought about her in those blissful days after the typhus, that he fashioned her unique image long before he actually saw her. Now, many years later, he felt that their imaginary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was only an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her.”
The projected, prescient image “blended with the real” is a constant in N’s fiction; once again, the projection of the image seems cinematic: the living Mary, for Ganin, is the continuous movie of her that has been playing in his head for decades. The memory of the origins of his enchantment with Mary are connected throughout with mortality (the “blissful” period following a typhus infection) and the passage of time (the “foreshadowing” of Mary streaming from the past into the future).
As Ganin recalls his youthful days spent in “the manor,” after meeting Mary for the first time, he looks out upon the night sky from the perspective of a window ledge next to a water closet (toilet): “In one wing of the manor house, between the larder and the housekeeper’s room, there was a spacious old-fashioned water closet; its window gave onto a neglected part of the garden where in the shade of an iron roof a pair of black wheels surmounted a well, and a wooden water trough ran over the ground between the bare, winding roots of three huge bushy poplars. The window was decorated by a stained-glass knight with a square beard and mighty calves, and he glowed strangely in the dim light of a paraffin lamp with a tin reflector which hung beside the heavy velvet cord. You pulled the cord and from the mysterious depths of the oaken throne there would come a watery rumbling and hollow gurgles. Ganin flung open the casement and installed himself, feet and all, on the window ledge; the velvet cord swung gently and the starry sky between the black poplars made you want to heave a deep sigh. And that moment, when he sat on the window ledge of that lugubrious lavatory, and thought how he would probably never, never get to know the girl with the black bow on the nape of her delicate neck, and waited in vain for a nightingale to start trilling in the poplars as in a poem by Fet—that moment Ganin now rightly regarded as the highest and most important point in his whole life.” This won’t be the last time that Nabokov combines the sublime and the ludicrous in this way.
Afanasy Fet is regarded as one of the most important 19th century Russian romantic poets, especially known for his aesthetic philosophy which demanded a clear distinction between the ideal and the real. The reference to him in this instance of Ganin’s recollections clearly underscores the dichotomy between the real/absurd and ideal/sublime that N weaves into this scene.