Mary By Vladimir Nabokov (1926)- IT IS THE stuff of a minor nightmare - trapped in an elevator with the wrong person. Yet faulty elevators were not all that common in 1925 when a newly married young Russian émigré, then living in Berlin, began writing his first novel.
Mashenka which became Mary when Nabokov was working on the English translation is as delicate as it is robust. It is a young man's study of bitter sweet romance with an edge, in which Nabokov reveals his debt to Turgenev. This beautiful novella effectively straddles the magnificent 19th century Russian literary tradition and modernism.
An elegant maverick, Nabokov was a stylist whose artistic manifesto believed in the visual possibilities of prose. He handled English, his second language, with all the assurance of a virtuoso born into it. Mary was written in Russian, years before his second career began, when in 1941, a year after moving to the US, he published The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first work written in English. Invariably placed shoulder to shoulder with Proust and Joyce, he remains an inspirational enigma; the sophisticated literary master who was also an international authority on butterflies.
Images of these winged beauties flutter throughout the narrative which centres on the handsome, exasperated Lev Glebovich Ganin, who as the story opens is standing in sudden darkness in a stalled lift. With him is the annoyingly cheerful Alfyorov, another Russian. The two men are fellow boarders at a defeated pension in Berlin.
The lodging house, run by a tiny Russian-born widow of a German businessman, is described as "both Russian and nasty. It was chiefly nasty because all day long and much of the night the trains of the Stadtbahn could be heard, creating the impression that the whole building was slowly on the move."
Ganin has been threatening to leave for a while. Alfyorov has only just moved in and is awaiting the arrival from Russia of his wife.
Also boarding in the pension and desperate to leave is Podtyagin, an elderly Russian poet who had been trying to secure permission to move to Paris where his daughter has settled. Another lodger, Klara, a young typist, has no dreams of escape. Her life is dominated by typing, long evenings spent in the pension and her hopeless love for Ganin. A pair of male dancers, "both as giggly as women, thin, with powdered noses and muscular thighs" share another room.
At meal times these displaced Russians engage in vague conversations and generally live within the confined worlds of their own situations, all of which is brilliantly sketched by Nabokov, displaying even at this early stage his genius for subtle nuance and characterisation. By chance Ganin discovers that the wife on her way to join Alfyorov is his lost love, a young girl Ganin met some nine years earlier while he was recuperating in the Russian countryside.
Reliving memories of his youthful romance enables Ganin to break free of his dead relationship with the cloying Lyudmila.
The flashback to that distant summer of first love is atmospheric and vividly described, almost dream-like. There are echoes of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. Ganin, who has a shadowy political past, has no doubts. He believes his love has endured and that Mary will flee with him. Meanwhile Alfyorov is intent on securing Ganin's soon-to-be vacated room for the same Mary. Nabokov cleverly succeeds in making Ganin highly attractive and sympathetic as it is he who attempts to help the old poet with his visa problems.
All the while in the background is Klara who although she has mistakenly interpreted Ganin's reasons for being in Alfyorov's room, continues to love him. Klara and Ganin have an interesting rapport. It is to her that he confesses: "I must leave. This room, these trains, Erika's cooking - I'm fed up with it all." Memory continues to sustain him; he plots and prepares for a fantasy reunion before Nabokov wields his realist's wand. The seeds of his subsequent artistry are well sown in this fledging miracle.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon
