Category: Mary

The Mary of Ganin’s memories is surely a woman after Nabokov’s own heart:  “She loved jingles, catchwords, puns and poems.”  Perhaps an early signal to the reader that Nabokov’s fiction will be vehicles of serious word-play?

Ganin’s memories of Mary include her carrying “Landrin’s caramels loose in her pocket,” wearing a “cheap, sweet perfume called ‘Tagore,’” and wearing a bow in her hair that looked “in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty.” Noting these references:  the Landrin Confectionary Co. was established in 1848 in St. Petersburg and, according to the Landrin website (http://www.landrin.ru/2007/pages.php/fabric/en) “at one time was among the only two confectionary brands to be served to His Imperial Highness, the Russian Emperor.” Continue reading “Mary, p. 60: of puns and brand-names”

Ganin recollects the pavilion in a park where he first met Mary: “In its small diamond-shaped window frames were panes of different colored glass:  if, say, you looked through a blue one the world seemed frozen in a lunar trance; through a yellow one, everything appeared extraordinarily gay; through a red one, the sky looked pink and the foliage as dark as burgundy.”

The first example of the “false azure” of the windowpane?  The passage suggests that the memory of light passing through glass has the capacity to reproduce the “global affect” of a lost world; note that light passing through a blue pane suggests a freezing of time and the effects of the enormous distance between then and now.

A key passage as Ganin begins to increasingly dwell in the past of his Russian youth and memories of Mary: “In the sense of routine Ganin’s day became emptier after his break with Lyudmila, but on the other hand he did not feel bored from having nothing to do.  He was so absorbed with his memories that he was unaware of time.  His shadow lodged in Frau Dorn’s pension, while he himself was in Russia, reliving his memories as though they were reality.  Time for him had become the progress of recollection, which unfolded gradually.  And although his affair with Mary in those far-off days had lasted not just for three days, nor for a week but for much longer, he did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time in which he relived the past, since his memory did not take account of every moment and skipped over the blank unmemorable stretches, only illuminating those connected with Mary.  Thus no discrepancy existed between the course of life past and life present.”

This is a complex and intricate example of how Nabokov represents the temporality of memory in his novels, such that the process of remembrance, in effect, replaces daily life as Ganin becomes more embodied the former and more ghostly in the latter.

Many have commented on Nabokov’s synaesthesia, or the ways in which the senses collude in his novels to produce an effect.  The recollection of objects, smells, colors, and light forms much of the content of Ganin’s memories of Mary in chapter 8, but here, in chapter 7, there is a contrast to Ganin’s idealized olfactory remembrances to come.  He has received a letter from the unfortunate Lyudmila, which he tears into pieces before reading it:  “The stamp had been stuck upside down, and in one corner Erika’s fat thumb had left a greasy imprint.  Perfume permeated the envelope, and it occurred to Ganin in passing that scenting a letter was like spraying perfume on one’s boots to cross the street.”  This marks the beginning of Ganin’s living in two different time-zones, two different temporalities:  the idealized past, which becomes increasingly more real, and the tawdry present, which becomes increasingly more dreamlike and hallucinatory as the novel goes on.

I just came across Vladimir Nabokov:  Alphabet in Color, an illustrated book that purports to represent in colored letters Nabokov’s synesthetic sensibilities.  There is a forward by Nabokov’s biographer, Brian Boyd.

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.” Continue reading “Mary, pp. 44-47: the work of memory”

The old poet, Podtyagin, talking to Ganin, reflects in this conversation on the value of poetry:

“Do you know, Anton Sergeyevich, today I remembered those old magazines which used to print your poetry.  And the birch groves.”

“Did you really?”  The old man turned with a look of good-natured irony.  “What a fool I was—for the sake of those birch trees I wasted all my life, I overlooked the whole of Russia.”

Podtyagin’s “missing the forest for the trees” seems at once to be Nabokov’s reflection on the missed relation between specificity and totalilty in the romantic poetry of the Russian past, and perhaps an early comment on his lifelong fascination with the vexed relation between “literature” and “reality.”

After Klara catches Ganin searching Alyorov’s room for signs of Mary, they return to Klara’s room where hangs a copy of The Isle of the Dead, painted by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin; Böcklin painted several versions of the popular image between 1880 and 1886.  Here is one version:

Perhaps a visual analogue to Nabokov’s many islands and kingdoms (by the sea), all associated with temporality and mortality?

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”

The word “metempsychosis” is pronounced by Alfyorov in a conversation with Ganin about the “old life in Russia.”  It is a term that refers to the transmigration of souls or reincarnation, and one that, interestingly, is the basis for an important thematic in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), but also deployed by other high modernists such as Eliot, Borges, and Proust.  Alfyorov seems to connect the term with nostalgia and the aforementioned permanency of waiting.  A term just in the air in the 1920s?  Or a word that symptomatically shows the influence of Buddhism and other religions on Western modernism, as well as whatever biographical linkages can be discerned between these writers?

Continue reading “Mary, pp. 25-27: “Metempsychosis” and signs in the sky”

After watching a movie in which he recognizes himself working as an extra, his “dopplegänger” or double appearing on the screen, Ganin reflects that “[a]s he walked he thought how his shade would wander from city to city, from screen to screen, how he would never know what sort of people would see it or how long it would roam around the world. And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived seven Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed nothing like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.”