Leona Toker Ganin in Mary-Land

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LEONA TOKER

GANIN IN MARY-LAND : A RETROSPECT ON NA- BOKOV'S FIRST NOVEL

For many present-day readers Nabokov's first novel, Mary (Mashenka, 1926) is interesting in so far as it contains a strong autobiographical element: there is a great deal in common between the protagonist's, Lev Ganin's, mem- ories of his first love and the material of the "Tamara" chapter (chapter 12) of Speak, Memory. It is perhaps due to this autobiographical element that readers tend to be rather uncritical of Lev Ganin's conduct. Nabokov's gen- eral practice, however, is to bestow parts of his own experience upon his char- acters, much as they may otherwise differ from himself. Qualitatively speak- ing, therefore, the autobiographical increment does not set Mary aside from the whole body of Nabokov's works, and the purpose of the present essay is to discuss this novel as part of his canon, mainly by examining its treatment of the theme of conflict between a fictional artist's (or a fictional artist's avatar's, like Ganin) creative pursuits and human commitments. This theme recurs, in different guises, throughout Nabokov's fiction. It underlies, for example, the structure of Pnin,l is embedded in the fabula of The Defense, The Gift, "Torpid Smoke," and so on, and takes on a moral or metaphysical coloration in Glory, Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Lolita, and Ada. In Mary, it emerges not so much from the properties of the fabula or the sjuzhet as from the relationship between the levels of interpret- ation: the moral value of the protagonist's actions clashes with their aes- the.tic value and their symbolic significance. The fictional present of Mary is set in Berlin, in the mid-twenties. Lev Ganin is staying at a Russian pension where an obnoxious fellow boarder, Alfyorov, is expecting his wife's arrival from Russia. Shown the picture of this woman, Ganin seems to recognize her as his first love, Mary. A sudden in- flux of emotion enables him to end a burdensome affair with a girl called Lyudmilla, after which he spends four days retrieving his lost love from the recesses of memory. He plans to meet Mary at the railway station and carry her off. Yet as the hour of her arrival draws nearer, the remaining portion of

1. See my essay, "Pnin: A Story of Creative Imagination," Delta (Montpellier), No. 17 (Oct. 1983), pp. 61-74. the novel becomes disconcertingly thin under the reader's fingers.2 Although we are thus warned not to anticipate an account of the reunion, the ending of the novel nevertheless takes us by surprise. While Ganin is waiting for Mary's train, the sordid parting with Lyudmilla flashes through his memory. Lyud- milla's words "I know he won't be able to forget me as quickly as he may think"3 prove to be perversely prophetic. The aftertaste of the recent liason suggests that even Mary may turn out to be different from Ganin's Galathea. He "realiz [es] with merciless clarity that his affair with Mary was ended for- ever" (p. 144), and, remaining true to the fantasy,4 beats.a hasty retreat, which is almost unanimously applauded by Nabokov's critics. A young novelist may be suspected of sabotaging a long-anticipated reunion in order to avoid the triteness (poshlost or posh-lusts) of "happily- ever-aftering." This, however, is not the case with Nabokov, who eventually will show great courage in tackling the theme of reunion, which ranges from liberating frustration in "The Doorbell" (1927), to partial success that looks like failure in "The Reunion" (1932), to triumph that masks itself as failure in Ada (1969). The weird ending ofMary is not an evasion on the part of the novelist, though it may well be one on the part of the hero: aesthetically and symbolically it is appropriate that Ganin should not meet Mary in the fictional present. Ganin remembers falling in love with Mary during a summer stay on his family's country estate in pre-revolutionary Russia. In the happy days of his recuperation after typhus he for the first time conceived the image of a girl that he would like to meet: "Now, many years later, he felt that their imagin- ary meeting and the meeting which took place in reality had blended and merged imperceptibly into one another, since as a living person she was just an uninterrupted continuation of the image which had foreshadowed her" (p. 44). The romance that started in imagination quite consistently ends in memory, with the events of "real life" sandwiched in between. As all his sub- sequent writings, Nabokov's first novel describes a complete circle. Unlike Kurt Dreyer of King, Queen, Knave, who regrets meeting his former mistress because "now [he] shall never remember Erica as [he] remembered her be-

2. Cf. the metaphor of the still thick remainder of a novel at the beginning of Invita- tion to a Beheading. , 3. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, trans. Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970). All further references in the text are to this edition of the novel. 4. Cf. Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammel with the collaboration of the author (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1963), p. 169: "0 swear to me that while the heartblood stirs, you will be true to what we shall invent." 5. See Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (Norfolk: New Directions, 1944), pp. 63-74.