4 - VN: The Russian Novelist – Mary to The Gift

Summary

Between 1925 and 1938 Nabokov wrote nine novels in Russian (including, in most counts, the novella, The Eye). Of these the first, Mary, and the last, The Gift (from which he broke off in 1934 to write Invitation to a Beheading), may be considered the most ‘Russian’, in terms of their concern with émigré life (featuring Russian protagonists displaced to a Berlin setting), of their harking back fondly to a lost past in Russia, and their deep concern (at various levels) with Russian culture. The other ‘Russian novels’ most comparable in these senses may be said to be The Luzhin Defense and Glory. The former is distinct in its heavy emphasis – literal and symbolic – on the system and patterning of chess, while the latter – in any case more cosmopolitan in its settings – is something rather more of an imaginative pseudo-autobigraphical fairy tale. The shortish Mary may be considered Nabokov's overture to his Russian novels, and the full-length The Gift his symphonic culmination. Discussion in any detail of the novels in Russian will therefore here be confined to these two works.

When Mashen'ka was Englished in 1970, Nabokov seemed to have resolved to call it ‘Mariette’ (SL 459), but eventually settled for Mary which, for some reason, or so he finally decided, ‘seemed to match best the neutral simplicity of the Russian title name’ (M 9). Nabokov also acknowledged, in his 1970 ‘Introduction’, a similarity between his own reminiscences (now known to readers through Speak, Memory) and those of Mary‘s protagonist, Ganin, and between Mary herself and his first love, ‘Tamara’. He also claims greater faithfulness to the original text (in his collaborative translation with Michael Glenny) than in the versions of ‘say King, Queen, Knave’ (done together with his son). It will come as no surprise that certain (auto)biographical elements in common are to be discerned, not only with Speak, Memory, but also with the intervening The Gift, a variant (auto)biographical projection, as well as with a number of minor works (for instance, the story ‘A Letter that Never Reached Russia’).

Mary features a young Russian émigré intellectual (very much of artistic temperament, if not declaredly a writer) named Ganin, living with other Russians in a Berlin rooming-house close to the railway line (trains and railway stations are important in much of Nabokov's Russian fiction).