Nabokov completed his first novel at age 26 while in Berlin with his family, which had been forced into exile after the Bolshevik Revolution. Written in Russian, it is heavily autobiographical in inspiration and focused on themes that would be developed further in his later literary output, most essentially young love and memory.

Nabokov's alter-ego in this story in Ganin, a young Russian man who has been forced to flee Russia and who has ended up in Berlin following the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war, in which he fought in the White Army. He is staying in a long-term residency situation with a small group of fellow Russian emigres, and learns that one of them is expecting his wife to join him in 6 days hence. In discussion with this fellow, he learns that this wife is Mary, who was Ganin's first love as a sixteen year old teenager. Quite a coincidence, you might say.

This revelation brings up a flood of memories for Ganin, and he spends the next few days living among them in his head. The reader sees that this first love was primed by Ganin's illness and recovery from typhus, which left him in a heightened emotional state that of necessity led to him falling in love with a girl whose image he formed in his sick room. It happened that this image came to be embodied in Mary.

Nabokov thus explores the idea that Ganin's love for Mary had nothing to do with Mary's actual qualities, but sprang solely from his own reflections and projections. Reliving those memories in Berlin years later is pleasant for Ganin, but also stunts any productivity. Under their influence he decides to meet Mary at her train's arrival in Berlin and arranges to leave her husband behind so he can steal away with her, but then on the morning of arrival, he essentially snaps out of it and realizes that life has to move on. It's the opposite of what happens to Humbert Humbert in Lolita, then, as Humbert is forever arrested in his development by a young love affair, while Ganin leaves it behind.

On a side train of thought, Nabokov has one of the characters speak the line, "We should love Russia. Without the love of us emigres, Russia is finished. None of the people there love her.", which one assumes is his own comment on what has happened politically in his native land. ( )

Ganin, un joven exiliado ruso, sobrevive en el Berlín de entre guerras gracias a los más diversos trabajos -camarero, vendedor a domicilio, extra de cine...- mientras sueña con abandonar la ciudad y rememora su infancia y adolescencia en la añorada Rusia y su temprano romance con Mashenka, mujer deseada e idealizada, amor perdido en el pasado. Anhelante, mientras rebusca en su memoria los preciados recuerdos, Ganin rompe con su acutal novia y deja pasar el tiempo en la pensión en la que vive con otros exiliados que mantienen una peculiar relación de amor-odio con la madre patria; el viejo poeta rondado por la muerte, la romántica muchacha de los grandes pechos, los dos bailarines homosexuales y el mediocre hombre al que el protagonista conoce cuando ambos se quedan encerrados en el ascensor y que resulta ser el marido de Mashenka, que pronto irá a reunirse con él...Mashenka, primera novela de Vladimir Nabokov, es una temprana muestra de su talento y contiene ya mucho de los elementos que configuran el fascinante mundo del genial autor de Lolita, así como la admirable prosa y la desbordante capacidad fabuladora que caracterizan su producción literaria.

"Mary" is Nabokov's 1st novel. The protagonist is a Russian emigre living in a boarding house filled with other Russian emigres. He is always broke, planning to leave Berlin (but has not yet), he's bored with his girlfriend, tired of everyone. Then unexpectedly he learns that one of his annoying neighbors is the husband of his first love, Mary, and that she is due to arrive in a very short time. He begins to reminisce and suddenly is filled with detailed and touching memories of his relationship with her. He dreams of their reunion, of how she'll leave her husband, go with him to France. He prepares for this and awaits the moment she gets off the train... It is a well-written story of longing, even in its predictability. ( )

SO mauve. ( )

2020

https://www.librarything.com/topic/315313#7038570 ( )