The scent, and the butterfly, are doses of Nabokov. Recollecting, pausing, recollecting some more this makes me think of Woolf. Ganin now tried to recapture that scent again, mixed with the fresh smells of the autumnal park, but, as we know, memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.įor a moment Ganin stopped recollecting and wondered how he had been able to live for so many years without thinking about Mary-and then he caught up with her again: she was running along a dark, rustling path, her black bow looking in flight like a huge Camberwell Beauty.

Here, Ganin remembers Mary’s old perfume. I noted more than I ever had before a focus on stream-of-consciousness that (now that I’ve read her) bring Virginia Woolf immediately to mind. These concern Nabokov in his other work as well, but here they are the main show. Mary is a land of exiles, a good place for memory and nostalgia. Later, when the concert was over, the Petersburg bass was driven away in the local mill owner’s huge car which cast a mysterious light over the grass and then, with a sweep of its beam, dazzled a sleeping birch tree and the footbridge over a brook and when the crowd of fair vacationists, in a festive flutter of white frocks, drifted away through the blue darkness across the dew-laden clover, and someone lit a cigarette in the dark, holding the flaring match to his face in cupped hands-Ganin, in a state of lonely excitement, walked home, the spokes of his bicycle clicking faintly as he pushed it by the saddle. His first memory of noticing her is at a concert held in the village, and Nabokov’s virtuosity as a writer gets a lot of room to play in all these memories and dreams. Ganin met her in the countryside one summer her family was vacationing near his family’s dacha. And immediately the rest of Ganin’s week is washed in memory as he realizes his first love is coming, and she’s married to this awful man. He excitedly shows Ganin her picture-Mary’s picture. His “ pension was both Russian and nasty,” and his neighbor in the next room is Aleksey Ivanovich Alfyorov, also both Russian and nasty.Īlfyorov has just gotten word that his wife is on her way from Russia to join him in Berlin and will arive on Saturday.

In Mary, Nabokov’s first novel, Lev Glebovich Ganin is a Russian exile living in Berlin among other exiles.

Mary by Vladimir Nabokov