Month: March 2021

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).  Continue reading “Mary, pp. 31-34: re-creating the past”