Mary

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Mary

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia—Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.

  Mary

  a novel

  by Vladimir Nabokov

  Translated from the Russian

  by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the Author

  To Véra

  Having recalled intrigues of former years,

  having recalled a former love.

  — Pushkin

  Introduction

  The Russian title of the present novel, Mashenka, a secondary diminutive of Maria, defies rational transliteration (the accent is on the first syllable with the “a” pronounced as in “ask” and a palatalized “n” as in “mignon”). In casting around for a suitable substitute (Mariette?, May?) I settled for Mary, which seemed to match best the neutral simplicity of the Russian title name.

  Mashenka was my first novel. I started working on it in Berlin, soon after my marriage in the spring of 1925. It was finished by the beginning of the following year and published by an émigré book company (Slovo, Berlin, 1926). A German version, which I have not read, appeared a couple of years later (Ullstein, Berlin, 1928). Otherwise, it has remained untranslated for the impressive span of forty-five years.

  The beginner’s well-known propensity for obtruding upon his own privacy, by introducing himself, or a vicar, into his first novel, owes less to the attraction of a ready theme than to the relief of getting rid of oneself, before going on to better things. It is one of the very few common rules I have accepted. Readers of my Speak, Memory (begun in the Nineteen Forties) cannot fail to notice certain similarities between my recollections and Ganin’s. His Mary is a twin sister of my Tamara, the ancestral avenues are there, the Oredezh flows through both books, and the actual photograph of the Rozhestveno house as it is today—beautifully reproduced on the cover of the Penguin edition (Speak, Memory, 1969) could well be a picture of the pillared porch in the “Voskresensk” of the novel. I had not consulted Mashenka when writing Chapter Twelve of the autobiography a quarter of a century later; and now that I have, I am fascinated by the fact that despite the superimposed inventions (such as the fight with the village rowdy or the tryst in the anonymous town among the glowworms) a headier extract of personal reality is contained in the romantization than in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful account. At first I wondered how that could be, how the thrill and the perfume could have survived the exigency of the plot and the ostentation of fictional characters (two of them even appear, very awkwardly, in Mary’s letters), especially as I could not believe that a stylish imitation should be able to vie with plain truth. But the explanation is really quite simple: in terms of years, Ganin was three times closer to his past than I was to mine in Speak, Memory.

  Because of the unusual remoteness of Russia, and because of nostalgia’s remaining throughout one’s life an insane companion, with whose heartrending oddities one is accustomed to put up in public, I feel no embarrassment in confessing to the sentimental stab of my attachment to my first book. Its flaws, the artifacts of innocence and inexperience, which any criticule could tabulate with jocose ease, are compensated for me (the sole judge in this case and court) by the presence of several scenes (convalescence, barn concert, boat ride) which, had I thought of it, should have been transported virtually intact into the later work. In those circumstances, I realized as soon as my collaboration with Mr. Glenny started that our translation should be as faithful to the text as I would have insisted on its being had that text not been mine. Revampments of the lighthearted and highhanded order that I used for the English version of, say, King, Queen, Knave could not be envisaged here. The only adjustments I deemed necessary are limited to brief utilitarian phrases in three or four passages alluding to routine Russian matters (obvious to fellow-émigrés but incomprehensible to foreign readers) and to the switch of seasonal dates in Ganin’s Julian Calendar to those of the Gregorian style in general use (e.g., his end of July is our second week of August, etc.).

  I must close this preface with the following injunctions. As I said in reply to one of Allene Talmey’s questions in a Vogue interview (1970), “The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style. Only in that light can one properly assess the relationship, if any, between my first heroine and my recent Ada.” I can as well say that there is none. The other remark concerns a bogus creed which is still being boosted in some quarters. Although an ass might argue that “orange” is the oneiric anagram of organe, I would not advise members of the Viennese delegation to lose precious time analyzing Klara’s dream at the end of Chapter Four in the present book.

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  January 9, 1970

  1

  ‘Lev Glevo. Lev Glebovich? A name like that’s enough to twist your tongue off, my dear fellow.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Ganin agreed somewhat coldly, trying to make out the face of his interlocutor in the unexpected darkness. He was annoyed by the absurd situation in which they both found themselves and by this enforced conversation with a stranger.

  ‘I didn’t ask for your name and patronymic just out of idle curiosity, you know,’ the voice went on undismayed. ‘I think every name —’

  ‘Let me press the button again,’ Ganin interrupted him.

  ‘Do press it. I’m afraid it won’t do any good. As I was saying every name has its responsibilities. Lev and Gleb, now — that’s a rare combination, and very demanding. It means you’ve got to be terse, firm and rather eccentric. My name is a more modest one and my wife’s name is just plain Mary. By the way, let me introduce myself: Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov. Sorry, I think I trod on your foot —’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Ganin, feeling in the dark for the hand that poked at his cuff. ‘Do you think we are going to be stuck here for long? It’s time somebody did something. Hell.’

  ‘Let’s just sit down on the seat and wait,’ the tiresome, cheerful voice rang out again just above his ear. ‘Yesterday when I arrived we bumped into each other in the passage. Then in the evening, through the wall, I heard you clearing your throat and I knew at once from the sound of your cough that you were a fellow countryman. Tell me, have you been boarding here for long?’

  ‘Ages. Got a match?’

  ‘No. I don’t smoke. Grubby place, this pension — even though it is Russian. I’m a very lucky man, you know — my wife’s coming from Russia. Four years, that’s no joke. Yes, sir. Not long now. It’s Sunday today.’

  ‘Damned darkness,’ muttered Ganin, and cracked his fingers. ‘I wonder what time it is.’

  Alfyorov sighed noisily, giving off the warm, stale smell of an elderly man not in the best of health. There is something sad about that smell.

  ‘Only six more days now. I assume she’s coming on Saturday. I had a letter from her yesterday. She wrote the address in a very funny way. Pity it’s so dark, or I’d show it to you. What are you fumbling for, my dear fellow? Those little vents don’t open, you know.’

  ‘For two pins I’d smash them,’ said Ganin.

  ‘Come, come, Lev Glebovich. Wouldn’t it be better to play some party game? I know some splendid ones, I make them up myself. For instance: think of a two-figure number. Ready?�
�

  ‘Count me out,’ said Ganin, and thumped twice on the wall with his fist.

  ‘The porter’s been asleep for hours,’ droned Alfyorov’s voice, ‘so it’s no use banging like that.’

  ‘But you must agree that we can’t hang here all night.’

  ‘It looks as if we shall have to. Don’t you think there’s something symbolic in our meeting like this, Lev Glebovich? When we were on terra firma we didn’t know each other. Then we happen to come home at the same time and get into this contraption together. By the way, the floor is horribly thin and there’s nothing but a black well underneath it. Well, as I was saying, we stepped in without a word, still not knowing each other, glided up in silence and then suddenly — stop. And darkness.’

  ‘What’s symbolic about it?’ Ganin asked gloomily.

  ‘Well, the fact that we’ve stopped, motionless, in this darkness. And that we’re waiting. At lunch today that man — what’s his name — the old writer — oh yes, Podtyagin — was arguing with me about the sense of this émigré life of ours, this perpetual waiting. You were absent all day, weren’t you, Lev Glebovich?’

  ‘Yes. I was out of town.’

  ‘Ah, spring. It must be nice in the country now.’

  Alfyorov’s voice faded away for a few moments, and when it sounded again there was an unpleasant lilt to it, probably because the speaker was smiling.

  ‘When my wife comes I shall take her out into the country. She adores going for walks. Didn’t the landlady tell me that your room would be free by Saturday?’

  ‘That is so,’ Ganin replied curtly.

  ‘Are you leaving Berlin altogether?’

  Ganin nodded, forgetting that nods were invisible in the dark. Alfyorov fidgeted on the seat, sighed once or twice, then began gently whistling a saccharine tune, stopping and starting again. Ten minutes passed; suddenly there came a click from above.

  ‘That’s better,’ Ganin said with a smile.

  At the same moment the ceiling bulb blazed forth, and the humming and heaving cage was flooded with yellow light. Alfyorov blinked, as though just waking up. He was wearing an old sandy-colored, formless overcoat — of the so-called ‘in-between-season’ sort — and holding a bowler hat. His thin fair hair was slightly ruffled and something about his features reminded one of a religious oleograph: that little golden beard, the turn of that scraggy neck from which he pulled off a bright-speckled scarf.

  With a lurch the lift caught on the sill of the fourth-floor landing and stopped.

  ‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov said, grinning, as he opened the door. ‘I thought someone had pressed the button and brought us up, but there’s no one here. After you, Lev Glebovich.’

  But Ganin, with a grimace of impatience, gave Alfyorov a slight push and, having followed him out, relieved his feelings by noisily slamming the steel door behind him. Never before had he been so irritable.

  ‘A miracle,’ Alfyorov repeated. ‘Up we came and yet there’s no one here. That’s symbolic too.’

  2

  The pension was 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. The hall, where there hung a bleary mirror with a ledge for gloves, and where stood an oak chest so placed that people naturally barked their shins on it, narrowed into a bare and very cramped passage. Along each side were three rooms, numbered with large black figures stuck onto the doors. These were simply leaves torn off a year-old calendar — the first six days of April, 1923. April I — the first door on the left — was Alfyorov’s room, the next was Ganin’s, while the third belonged to the landlady, Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn, the widow of a German businessman who twenty years ago had brought her here from Sarepta and who the year before had died of brain fever. In the three rooms down the right-hand side — April 4 to 6 — there lived Anton Sergeyevich Podtyagin, an old Russian poet; Klara, a full-busted girl with striking bluish-brown eyes; and, finally, in room 6 at the turn of the passage, two ballet dancers, Kolin and Gornotsvetov, both as giggly as women, thin, with powdered noses and muscular thighs. At the end of the first stretch of the passage was the dining room, with a lithograph of the Last Supper on the wall facing the door and the yellow, horned skulls of deer along another wall above a bulbous sideboard. On it stood two crystal vases, once the cleanest things in the whole apartment but now dulled by a coating of fluffy dust.

  Upon reaching the dining room, the passage took a right-angled turn to the right. There, in tragical and malodorous depths, lurked the kitchen, a small room for the maid, a dirty bathroom and a narrow W.C., whose door was labeled with two crimson noughts deprived of the rightful digits with which they had once denoted two Sundays on Herr Dorn’s desk calendar. A month after his death Lydia Nikolaevna, a tiny, slightly deaf woman given to mild oddities, had rented an empty apartment and turned it into a pension. In doing this she showed a singular, rather creepy kind of ingenuity in the way she distributed the few household articles she had inherited. The tables, chairs, creaking wardrobes and bumpy couches were divided among the rooms which she intended to let. Separated, the pieces of furniture at once faded, took on the inept, dejected look of a dismembered skeleton’s bones. Her late husband’s desk, an oaken monster with a cast-iron inkwell in the form of a toad and with a middle drawer as deep as a ship’s hold, found its way to room 1, where Alfyorov now lived, while the revolving stool, originally bought to match the desk, was parted from it and led an orphaned existence with the dancers in room 6. A pair of green armchairs was also severed: one pined in Ganin’s room, and the other one was used by the landlady herself or by her old dachshund, a fat black bitch with a gray muzzle and pendulous ears that had velvety ends like the fringes of a butterfly’s wing. The bookshelf in Klara’s room was adorned by the first few volumes of an encyclopedia, while the remaining volumes were allotted to Podtyagin. Klara had also been given the only decent washstand, with a mirror and drawers; in each of the other rooms there was simply a squat wooden prop and on it a tin basin and a jug of the same material. She had been forced, however, to buy additional beds. This caused Frau Dorn considerable pain, not because she was stingy, but because she had derived a kind of delicious thrill, a sense of pride in her own thrift, from the way she had distributed all her previous furniture. Now that she was a widow and her double bed too spacious for her to sleep in, she resented being unable to saw it up into the required number of parts. In a haphazard way she cleaned the rooms herself, but she had never been able to cope with food, so she kept a cook — the terror of the local market, a vast red-haired virago who on Fridays donned a crimson hat and sailed off for the northern quarters where she traded her blowsy charms. Lydia Nikolaevna was afraid of going into the kitchen and was altogether a quiet, timorous creature. Whenever her blunt-toed little feet brought her pattering along the corridor, the lodgers always had the feeling that this gray, snub-nosed little creature was not the landlady at all, but just some silly old woman who had strayed into someone else’s apartment. Every morning, bent in half like a rag doll, she would hurriedly sweep the dust from under the furniture, then disappear into her room, the smallest of them all. There she would read tattered German books or look through her late husband’s papers, whose contents she understood not a whit. The only other person to go into her room was Podtyagin, who would stroke her affectionate black dachshund, tickle its ears and the wart on its hoary muzzle, and try to make the dog sit up and proffer its crooked paw. He would talk to Lydia Nikolaevna about his senile aches and pains and about how he had been trying for six long months to get a visa to go to Paris where his niece lived, and where the long crusty loaves and the red wine were so cheap. The old lady would nod, occasionally questioning him about the other lodgers, in particular about Ganin, whom she found quite unlike all the other young Russians who had stayed in her pension. Having lived there for three months, Ganin was now preparing to leave, and had even said he would
give up his room next Saturday, however, he had planned to leave several times before and had always changed his mind and put off his departure. Lydia Nikolaevna knew, from what the gentle old poet had told her, that Ganin had a girl friend. And there lay the root of the trouble.

  Lately he had become dull and gloomy. Only a short while ago he could walk on his hands, quite as well as a Japanese acrobat, and with legs elegantly erect move along like a sail. He could pick up a chair in his teeth. He could break a string by flexing his biceps. His body was always burning with the urge to do something — to jump over a fence or uproot a post, in short to ‘bang,’ as we used to say when we were young. Now, however, some bolt had worked loose inside him, he had even acquired a stoop and he admitted to Podtyagin that he was suffering from insomnia ‘like a nervous female.’ He had an especially bad night from Sunday to Monday, after the twenty minutes spent with the effusive fellow in the stuck lift. On Monday morning he sat for a long time naked, gripping his cold, outstretched hands between his knees, appalled by the thought that today was another day and that he would have to put on shirt, trousers, socks — all those wretched things impregnated with sweat and dust — and he imagined a circus poodle which looks so ghastly, so sickeningly pitiful, when dressed up in human clothes. His inertia stemmed partly from his jobless state. He had no particular need to work at the moment, having saved that winter a certain amount of money, true, there was now no more than two hundred marks left of it: life had been rather expensive these last three months.

  On arriving in Berlin last year he had at once found work and had worked until January at several different jobs. He had learned what it meant to go to work in a factory in the yellow murk of early morning; he had learned, too, how one’s legs ached after trotting six sinuous miles a day carrying plates between the tables of the Pir Goroy restaurant; he had known other jobs too, and had sold every imaginable sort of goods on commission — Russian buns, and brilliantine, and just plain brilliants. Nothing was beneath his dignity; more than once he had even sold his shadow, as many of us have. In other words he went out to the suburbs to work as a movie extra on a set, in a fairground barn, where light seethed with a mystical hiss from the huge facets of lamps that were aimed, like cannon, at a crowd of extras, lit to a deathly brightness. They would fire a barrage of murderous brilliance, illumining the painted wax of motionless faces, then expiring with a click — but for a long time yet there would glow, in those elaborate crystals, dying red sunsets — our human shame. The deal was clinched, and our anonymous shadows sent out all over the world.