chapter 8 The Great Divorce

In Nabokov’s Mary, a husband and wife’s missed meeting fails even to lead to the extramarital reunion for which it is orchestrated, while the novel’s second- ary plot involves the protagonist’s repeated attempts to break up with his own German lover before leaving the city. Its focus on troubled marriages and thwarted relationships is hardly alone among Berlin stories Nabokov published in American magazines from the 1940s to the 1970s.1 At the opening of “In Memory of L.I. Shigaev” (1975),2 a narrator discovers his “thin, bob-haired” German girlfriend in Berlin has been betraying him with a married man. In “An Affair of Honor” (1966), a husband returns from a business trip to find an acquaintance dressing by his unmade bed while his wife is in the bath, throws his wife out of the house, and invites her lover to a duel in a forest in Weissdorf (an imaginary but unromantic suburb near Wannsee), but in a last minute panic, runs off “with ghostly speed through the wastes of the blue-gray city” (92), renouncing hope of recovering wife or honor. In “The Doorbell” (1976), a protagonist searches for a woman lost years before, and now in Berlin. Six pages into the story, we understand the woman is not a lover, but his mother. Yet the scene of their reunion plays out almost as if she were an unfaithful lover. He discovers her at home―grotesquely transformed with blonde bobbed hair and grossly girlish mannerisms—before a table set for two, waiting for a lover half her age. An insistent doorbell interrupts their reunion, sending him off rejected, while she hurries to the phone to call back her lover. In “A Russian Beauty” (1973), an aging White Russian living in Augsburgerstrasse “(not far from the clock)” is invited to a friend’s villa, where she is pressured into an unappetizing engagement with a gruff German widower, only to die a year later in childbirth. Nabokov’s Berlin stories offer even more grisly marital misfortunes. In “Spring in Fialta” (1947), two White Russians meet repeatedly over the years by odd coincidence. Romance buds, but each time circumstances render union impossible. Their second meeting in Berlin is typical: he is “about to get mar- ried; she had just broken with her fiancé” (20). At their last meeting, moments

1 Nabokov himself was engaged in Berlin in 1922 to Svetlana Siewert, who broke off their engagement the following year. 2 Dates (with the exception of Despair) are given for the first English translations, done by or in collaboration with Nabokov, most first published in Russian in the 1920s or 1930s.

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146 chapter 8 after he confesses his love, she dies in a car crash which her husband survives unharmed. Nabokov’s third novel The Defense (1965) can only best be summa- rized as the story of a very unhappy marriage.3 Here, Luzhin, visiting Berlin for a writers’ meeting, decides on the subject of his next novel: based on the life of his son (a chess player also named Luzhin), it will have a tragic end. After Luzhin Sr. dies in Berlin, his son meets a wealthy Russian Berliner, falls in love and begs her hand in marriage. As Luzhin Jr. is penniless and unstable, her parents strongly resist his courtship, but are finally resigned to the marriage and give them an apartment. On the wedding night, their relationship is not consummated, and we are led to believe it never is. Their honeymoon is end- lessly planned and indefinitely postponed. Luzhin, after a nervous breakdown in Berlin, is forbidden by his doctor to ever think about chess again, and con- tents himself with drawing pictures, going for walks and shopping with his wife, who is unfailingly kind, but in moments of clarity realizes her marriage is deeply unhappy. Secretly, Luzhin begins to work out chess problems and decides what he needs for his final move in a deferred game is “a diversion.” Thus, as guests arrive for a dinner party, Luzhin barricades himself in the bath- room, smashes the window and jumps out, his wife helplessly pleading with him from the adjoining bedroom window. In “A Matter of Chance” (1975), a second Mr. and Mrs. Luzhin are separated by misfortune: he escaped Russia, while she was caught in the revolution and believed her husband to be dead. Having finally heard he is alive, she sets out to look for him. By coincidence, he is working for a railroad company on the same train she boards in Berlin. They miss meeting each other when she turns back from the dining car where he works after being harassed by another man. Having lost her wedding ring at the entrance to the dining car (it is pocketed by an unscrupulous train worker blocking her view of her husband), she returns to look for it, but the dining car has been uncoupled from the rest of the train at a stop. Her husband, outside, commits suicide as the train recouples by putting his head between the brake pads. “Details of a Sunset” (1976) offers another grisly death, this time involving a tram: Mark, a Berliner, is engaged to Klara, and in love (there are suggestions Klara is not). Before news can reach him that Klara’s former lover has returned and the engagement is off, Mark, having just had a dream of reunion with her, jumps off a streetcar and dies, his heart pierced by his own rib. In “A Slice of Life” (1976), a female narrator explains that Pavel, a friend of her brother, has just been left by his wife. The narrator, interested in hooking up with him, goes

3 Its focus on the marriage is held by shifts in focalization between husband and wife, to the exclusion of almost all other characters except the wife’s mother, who predicts an unhappy marriage, while the main setting is the young married couple’s domestic sphere.