Month: May 2021

As Mary walks away from him after departing from a train, Ganin’s last sight of her takes place in the atmosphere of “the heavy and fluffy scent of racemosa in bloom.”  This is probably the Padus racemosa, or European bird cherry, which is widely distributed across Europe and Asia Minor.  It flowers between April and June, which frames the time of the lovers’ last meeting.

Ganin notes that Mary offers him a piece of a “Blighen and Robinson’s chocolate” bar in their final moments in St. Petersburg together.  I’ve not been able to track down this brand reference, but, like the other product placements of perfumes and candies that seem to exist at several points in the novel, this indicates the odd and ironic form that historical specificity takes in Ganin’s memory, whether it be the casual mention of major historical events taking place under his nose, or the cultural products that seem to mark and frame the  historical progress of his relationship with Mary.

Looking over the train platform at the Warsaw Station before he meets Mary for the last time, Ganin thinks incongruently “about the shooting that had taken the day before on Nevski Avenue,” in reference to violent conflicts between police and crowds supporting the revolution in February, 1917 in St. Petersburg.  Ganin notes that the chaos of events have prevented him from contacting his family estate by telephone.  Once again, one of the most importance sequence of events in 20th century history seems to register only faintly and tangentially in Ganin’s memory and consciousness, but as they accrue in the novel, it is clear that the revolution represents a watershed in Ganin’s life that is paired with the loss of Mary:  the lost love, the lost world of childhood/adolescent innocence, the lost estate, the lost life of privilege—all conspire to represent the relation to the past in Mary.

Ganin inauspiciously enters the Mikhailov Officer Cadet school in December, 1916; in the following summer, “in the year of the revolution,” 1917, he has his final meeting with Mary.  The February and October revolutions of that year led to deposing of Czar Nicholas II and the tsarist government, and the installation of the Bolshevik Party and a communist government, led by Vladimir Lenin.

During their reunion in the public park near the small town in which Mary currently lives, the lovers converse, “in rapturous murmur,” about “the long time they  had not seen each other, about the resemblance of a gloworm that shone in the moss to a tiny semaphore.”  Later, after their failed tryst, Mary “stooped over the grass and picked up one of the pale green lampyrids they had noticed.  She held it upon the flat of her hand, bending over it, examining it closely, then burst out laughing and said in a quaint parody of a village lass, ‘Bless me, if it isn’t simply a cold little worm.’”   Continue reading “Mary, p. 73: Signal to noise: “a cold little worm””

Ganin is described as enjoying and then breaking up a “liasion with an elegant and enchanting blond lady whose husband was fighting in Galicia” while Mary has been taken to Moscow for several months.  This is one of Nabokov’s seemingly offhand historical references, in this case, to the Brusilov Offensive, the major Russian battle against the Central Powers in 1916 which took place in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, now parts of Poland and the Ukraine.  The battle was considered a major victory for the Russian government, but it did not significantly forestall the onset of the Russian revolution a year later.  The casual reference to one of the bloodiest battles of World War I suggests the degree to which the narrator of Mary is immersed in the fantasy of ideal love, even as the “echo” of the war’s reality cannot be thoroughly erased from the background or memory.

As their love affair fades, Mary and Ganin fatefully meet in St. Petersburg after several months’ separation “under the same arch where Liza dies in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades.”  The reference is to Tchaikovsky’s opera, first performed in 1890 in St. Peterburg; the melodramatic plot of the libretto involves a Countess known as the Queen of Spades who has acquired a secret gambling formula, and two lovers, Herman and Liza, who are conducting a stormy, illicit affair.  Liza commits suicide when she discovers that Herman seems more interested in discovering the Countess’ formula than in pursuing their romance, and Herman takes his own life after losing a “gambling duel” with Liza’s former betrothed.  The themes of lost love, the death of the beloved, and the omnipresence of fate (as “luck”) foregrounded in the opera echo throughout Nabokov’s fiction.

The description of Ganin as attacks the watchman’s son who has been voyueristically observing through a window of the house Ganin’s and Mary’s fondling suggests all those places in Nabokov where breaking through a pane of glass dissolves the separation between illusion and reality, as well as the intrusion of the snake into the lovers’ artificial Eden: Continue reading “Mary, p. 68: “In one furious leap . . .””

Thus commences one of the most evocative, and erotic  passages in early Nabokov:  Ganin’s description of his bike rides in the rain from his boyhood estate to the “mansion” in which Mary lives, and their covert meetings on a dark porch.