“The Bright Labyrinth of Memory”: Nabokov’s Nostalgic Realm
by Sasha White
In his novels Mary (1926) and Lolita (1955), Vladimir Nabokov creates a realm of aesthetics and nostalgia for his characters where they exist inwardly, while externally experiencing the alienation of their present urban or transitory setting. Nabokov aestheticizes nostalgia as a physical space that can be inhabited by the character who misses his past. There is a place between memory and physicality and that is where Nabokov’s protagonists Ganin, in Mary, and Humbert Humbert, in Lolita, dwell. It is a space caught in the folds of time that exists parallel to a physical space: city, suburb, train, or car. Nostalgia keeps these characters locked out from reality, so though they experience the flow of linear time of their present setting, they are caught in that nostalgic realm, their minds and hearts left behind.
At the core of Nabokov’s stories is “an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm" (Alexandrov, 3). This realm is associated with rural dreamlike countryside, but it is the urban or transitory present settings of Nabokov’s novels that set the stage for the protagonist’s creation of this otherworld. Transitory is used here to refer to a state of homeless roaming, which is embodied by both characters, who travel from place to place, having left home behind forever. For Ganin in Mary, it is the urban environment of Berlin that provides the canvas on which he paints this memory image to withdraw into. In Lolita, Humbert is always on the move, traveling between motels and rented rooms, giving his surroundings a constant transitory element, while part of him is trapped in the allure of trying to bring his memory back to life. This essay explores how Humbert in Lolita and Ganin in Mary live in an alienating urban or transitory present, which leads them to create, godlike, this otherworld of memory and nostalgia, a realm that is ultimately untenable.
Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, is set in Berlin, portraying Ganin in the isolated “house of glass” (61) of the Russian boarding house, wandering the streets, and escaping into the rural Russia of his past. He describes the boarding house as occupied by “seven Russian lost shades” (41). The house is isolated from the rest of Berlin just as its residents are isolated, or severed, from their home country. Ganin sees a picture of his former beloved, Mary, which catapults him into a world of memories of his boyhood in Russia: “it was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense, than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin” (86). Here is Ganin’s otherworldly realm of something in between his past and his present. Ganin lives in the city of Berlin, daydreams of the Russian countryside, and thinks his daydreams are more real than life. The strength of his joy and longing for the past create a dimension for him where he is not fully in either place, but in an altogether new realm: one of nostalgia and memory. But his present environment of Berlin’s alien streets and buildings is also a necessary condition for his escape into this fantasy realm. Nabokov’s repeated use of the word “shadow” to describe his displaced characters points to the difficulty they find in continuing to live after great loss; these characters feel less than real. Away from his native soil, Ganin seems to feel like a shadow disembodied from a human:
"A native of Russia... walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil" (47).
Ganin’s clairvoyant trance points him not to the future but to the past, as well as a realm beyond sensory contact. Nabokov describes each individual on the street as a world of their own, alienated from all the others. Leaving Russia disconnected Ganin from the comfort of being a part of a larger whole: “How far he [Ganin] was from the warm mass of his own country and from Mary, whom he loved forever” (144). Ganin wanders the city streets in Berlin, which are likened to “shiny black seas” (47). The image of shiny black seas (chernye blestiaschie moria) evokes the Black Sea, across which Ganin sails out of Russia forever. When Ganin makes his passage across the Black Sea to Constantinople, he watches “the black water… varnished in the moonlight” (143). The mention of shiny black seas within the Berlin cityscape marks Ganin’s retreat into the realm of memory: urban objects give way to natural elements (concrete replaced by water).
Memory in these novels is a domain which is related to the rural, not the urban setting. In Lolita, Humbert uses the phrase “the hollows and dells of my memory” (10) when speaking of his childhood, which highlights the association of memory with the rural and natural world. (Humbert would never have been able to say, for example, “the sidewalks and skyscrapers of my memory.”) When describing his past, Humbert remembers his father’s hotel by the ocean “as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside” (10). Humbert’s memories are tied to his own childhood love, Annabel, who died as a young girl. His memories of Annabel are defined by their fairy-tale like rural setting. The two children fall in love on the beach. “She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers… We would… take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other” (12). These memories are colored by Annabel’s early death: time slipping away like the sand through her fingers. The children created a world of their own, within the larger cosmos, in those quirks of space and time. They were, however, still bound by the inescapable laws of space and time. Humbert tries to recreate this cosmos with Lolita, though he is unsuccessful. There is no escape from the present— not for adult Humbert who takes a child lover, nor for Ganin through a fantasy which was doomed to never be realized: that Mary would return to him.
In his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), the shrine of Nabokov’s own memory is rural: his estate in the countryside outside of St. Petersburg, where he spent summers with his own youthful love, Tamara. The memory of Tamara, who the character Mary later resembles, is connected to “Russia, the wildwood grading into old gardens… northern birches and firs… that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea” (183). The fate which “completely severed” (184) Nabokov from his boyhood was the motion of history, the political change that meant not only exile, but also heartbreak. Writing of a moment shortly before his permanent departure from Russia, when he was holding one of the last letters from Tamara, Nabokov reflects: “for several years, until the writing of a novel relieved me of that fertile emotion, the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of my love” (179). Perhaps part of what relieved his pain was Mary, in which Ganin is painfully displaced from home, but ultimately accepts the flow of history, moving on from his past, which threatens to trap him fatally (as it does Humbert in Lolita). In his fiction, Nabokov portrays his characters' futile attempts to regain their past, thwarted by the inescapable laws of time. The laws of time and space which trap his characters can be extended to stand for history and geography. For Nabokov, the progression of history meant being displaced from his home country for the rest of his life.
Ganin’s Berlin appears in drab, dark shades, and Ganin’s life there is but a “dream life in exile” (81). Descriptions of the city include the police headquarters: “a grim but extremely bad Gothic style with dim windows,” and inside, “a wide gray corridor,” a “rather dreary building” (117). Ganin and the old poet Podtyagin have a conversation about their memories of St. Petersburg. Podtyagin describes his dream about being back in a strangely unfamiliar Petersburg, walking along the Nevsky:
"The houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting and the sky was black, although I knew it was daytime…. It’s terrible… that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous" (120).
Ganin has a different experience with his memories and nostalgia. He says, “I only dream about the beautiful things. The same woods, the same country house. Sometimes it’s all rather deserted, with unfamiliar clearings” (120). Ganin dreams of rural Russia and tries to ignore “the specters of his Berlin life” which “kept interrupting” his memories of Mary (101). His memories are colored by the fact that he can never go back, just as the poet’s memories are colored (literally) by his new surroundings. The dark, geometrical, imposing Berlin affects Podtyagin’s dreams of the past. Podtyagin thinks of his dreams of the Nevsky Prospect as monstrous and therefore untrue to reality. Curiously, in works of Russian literature that would have been read by a poet such as Podtyagin (e.g., Gogol and Dostoevsky), Nevsky Prospect has been traditionally portrayed as ghostly or demonic. For example, in Gogol’s eponymous short story (1835) a young artist becomes obsessed with a woman he sees on Nevsky Prospect— a woman he idealizes and is shocked to learn is a prostitute. The young man begins to live only for his dreams of her, becoming numb to real life, and finally kills himself. The story ends where it begins: on Nevsky Prospect, where, as night falls,“the devil himself lights the street lamps” (Gogol, 112). There is a hint of a parallel to the plot of Mary, as Ganin temporarily lives only for his dreams of the past. The poet Podtyagin seems to be nostalgic for the literary Petersburg, not the real one.
Ganin lives in Berlin, but in his mind he lives in the realm of his memories. His memories play over the city in front of him like a film projected onto a screen:
"All Tuesday he wandered from cafe to cafe, his memories constantly floating ahead like the April clouds across the tender Berlin sky. People sitting in the cafes supposed that this man staring so fixedly ahead must have some deep grief; on the street he carelessly bumped into people…" (56).
Ganin is blinded to Berlin’s streets and people by the haze of his memories. He wanders the streets of Berlin just as in a parallel universe, the “bright labyrinth of memory” (56). He is physically in Berlin, but part of him resides in the unattainable otherworld of his memory. “Ganin felt that this alien city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture” (82).
Much like Mary in Nabokov’s first novel, Dolores Haze in Lolita is a ghost of the past for Humbert, showing both the pain and the poignant futility of trying to bring back the past. Dolores can be read as a more potent embodiment of a character like Mary: an animated, flesh and blood version of the memory image. Instead of simply showing a now solitary man lost in the world of memories, in Lolita, Nabokov uses Dolores Haze for the image of the lost Mary. In Mary, while Ganin is lost in sensuous memories of the girl he loved as a boy, he does not look to replace her with a girl who reminds him of her. Humbert, on the other hand, is forever lusting after female children, “nymphets,” because of his yearning for Annabel. Ganin walks alone in his realm of memory, but Humbert pulls Lolita into his, in an attempt to sate his nostalgia for a shadowy memory girl with a real, live girl— with predictably destructive results. Humbert’s obsession with Lolita wraps him in a world of aesthetics that, while not constantly linked to memories throughout the novel, can only exist because of Humbert’s attachment to the past. Humbert and Lolita constantly wander, Humbert running from one place to the next with her held captive. He is afraid to stop, because when they are still for too long, things start to fall apart.
Memories are fragile, and living within them is like living in a glass bubble. In Mary, Klara, another boarder in the house where Ganin lives, describes it as a house made of glass. In Lolita, there is Glass Lake, where Humbert fantasizes about drowning Dolores’ mother, Charlotte Haze, in order to isolate himself and Lolita. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes that details from his past are preserved in “a glass cell of [his] memory” (100). These allusions to glass structures, whether urban or belonging to the natural world, evoke the fairytale-like world Nabokov creates for his characters, pointing to the fragility of these worlds, as well as the futility of their isolation.
The connection between the two novels and the contrast between urban and rural settings in each becomes evident on the linguistic level. In Lolita, Humbert’s transitory home is his car, mashina (the diminutive form being mashinka), the symbolic opposite to Máshenka from Mary. Máshenka (the novel's original Russian title) is associated with old Russia, lush green countryside, cleansing rain, and soft femininity. Ganin’s Berlin is dark, industrial, and isolating, haunted by the loud and dirty trains (a train is also a mashina, machine). The name Máshenka (with the stress on the first syllable) reflects, as if a mirror image, the word mashina (with the stress on the second syllable). Nabokov reflects one idea off the other: the protagonist displaced to a machine-oriented world looks at his past in a natural dreamland. The protagonists struggle to decipher which image is real and which is merely a reflection or a shadow.
For both displaced protagonists, the rural Máshenka (or Annabel) of the past is replaced by the urban mashina. Humbert inverts the idea of running away from the past, instead desperately (and vainly) trying to escape the present and the future, grasping at his past. Lolita, for him, is like a relic preserved in time while he has aged. He attempts to flee time itself in the ironic capsule of his car which he relies on but is also tortured by— his journey with Lolita is always an ordeal for him. Like Ganin, Humbert has no home; he goes from motel to motel, living in isolation and secrecy from the outside world. Dolores Haze is not the soft, pure, feminine Old World girl personified by Annabel and Máshenka. Lolita (like Ganin’s Berlin lover, Lyudmila) is crass, artificial, too loud, just as the city may feel like to someone from the countryside. Finally, the names of the two girls, Mary and Dolores, are both names for the Mother of Christ (the Virgin Mary and Mater Dolorosa), a figure inherently connected to the idea of the lost “Mother Russia.”
At the end of Mary, Ganin is finally able to walk away from his memories, accept that Mary will never (re)appear, and set out into the future, seemingly cured from his painful fog of memories. It is his view of the city at sunrise which jolts him out of the world of memories. “And just as the sun rose… the world of memories in which Ganin had dwelt became what it was in reality: the distant past” (158). As Ganin walks to the train station, he sees the city come alive for the day, and in particular is drawn to the sight of construction workers tiling a roof. “The yellow sheen of fresh timber was more alive than the most lifelike dream of the past” (159). This urban detail brings his mind back into the world where his body dwells. His moment of clarity comes when he looks “up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky” (159). Again there is the contrast between the lifeless urban setting (the skeletal roof) and the otherworldly natural realm of memory (the ethereal sky). But Ganin is no longer bound to that realm, and realizes that “the image of Mary, together with that old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory” (160). Ganin realizes that the fragile glass bubble of memory must shatter because it is only that: a glass house of ghosts. If Ganin hadn’t realized that beyond his realm of memory, “no Mary existed, nor could exist” (160), he may have evolved into a Humbert Humbert decades later, who tries, with a fatal outcome, to resurrect a girl who could only be a crass, urbanized simulacrum of his lost beloved.
In Mary and Lolita, Nabokov speaks to the existence of a realm where fairytale-like memories reign supreme, and lush aesthetics both comfort and torture. The urban setting of Berlin in Mary provides a backdrop for Ganin’s walk through the labyrinth of memory, and yet it is also the element which allows him finally to escape this enchanting but fatal realm. Humbert Humbert is likewise seduced into this realm, ravishing in the ultimately unattainable otherworld. Unlike Ganin, however, Humbert never stops yearning for the past, and meets a brutal end. Nabokov portrays the temptation inherent in the otherworldly realm, but he also shows how in the end, without a way out, these dreamscapes prove monstrous.
At the core of Nabokov’s stories is “an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm" (Alexandrov, 3). This realm is associated with rural dreamlike countryside, but it is the urban or transitory present settings of Nabokov’s novels that set the stage for the protagonist’s creation of this otherworld. Transitory is used here to refer to a state of homeless roaming, which is embodied by both characters, who travel from place to place, having left home behind forever. For Ganin in Mary, it is the urban environment of Berlin that provides the canvas on which he paints this memory image to withdraw into. In Lolita, Humbert is always on the move, traveling between motels and rented rooms, giving his surroundings a constant transitory element, while part of him is trapped in the allure of trying to bring his memory back to life. This essay explores how Humbert in Lolita and Ganin in Mary live in an alienating urban or transitory present, which leads them to create, godlike, this otherworld of memory and nostalgia, a realm that is ultimately untenable.
Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, is set in Berlin, portraying Ganin in the isolated “house of glass” (61) of the Russian boarding house, wandering the streets, and escaping into the rural Russia of his past. He describes the boarding house as occupied by “seven Russian lost shades” (41). The house is isolated from the rest of Berlin just as its residents are isolated, or severed, from their home country. Ganin sees a picture of his former beloved, Mary, which catapults him into a world of memories of his boyhood in Russia: “it was not simply reminiscence but a life that was much more real, much more intense, than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin” (86). Here is Ganin’s otherworldly realm of something in between his past and his present. Ganin lives in the city of Berlin, daydreams of the Russian countryside, and thinks his daydreams are more real than life. The strength of his joy and longing for the past create a dimension for him where he is not fully in either place, but in an altogether new realm: one of nostalgia and memory. But his present environment of Berlin’s alien streets and buildings is also a necessary condition for his escape into this fantasy realm. Nabokov’s repeated use of the word “shadow” to describe his displaced characters points to the difficulty they find in continuing to live after great loss; these characters feel less than real. Away from his native soil, Ganin seems to feel like a shadow disembodied from a human:
"A native of Russia... walks in a clairvoyant trance; at that late hour down those wide streets passed worlds utterly alien to each other: no longer a reveler, a woman, or simply a passer-by, but each one a wholly isolated world, each a totality of marvels and evil" (47).
Ganin’s clairvoyant trance points him not to the future but to the past, as well as a realm beyond sensory contact. Nabokov describes each individual on the street as a world of their own, alienated from all the others. Leaving Russia disconnected Ganin from the comfort of being a part of a larger whole: “How far he [Ganin] was from the warm mass of his own country and from Mary, whom he loved forever” (144). Ganin wanders the city streets in Berlin, which are likened to “shiny black seas” (47). The image of shiny black seas (chernye blestiaschie moria) evokes the Black Sea, across which Ganin sails out of Russia forever. When Ganin makes his passage across the Black Sea to Constantinople, he watches “the black water… varnished in the moonlight” (143). The mention of shiny black seas within the Berlin cityscape marks Ganin’s retreat into the realm of memory: urban objects give way to natural elements (concrete replaced by water).
Memory in these novels is a domain which is related to the rural, not the urban setting. In Lolita, Humbert uses the phrase “the hollows and dells of my memory” (10) when speaking of his childhood, which highlights the association of memory with the rural and natural world. (Humbert would never have been able to say, for example, “the sidewalks and skyscrapers of my memory.”) When describing his past, Humbert remembers his father’s hotel by the ocean “as a kind of private universe, a whitewashed cosmos within the blue greater one that blazed outside” (10). Humbert’s memories are tied to his own childhood love, Annabel, who died as a young girl. His memories of Annabel are defined by their fairy-tale like rural setting. The two children fall in love on the beach. “She kept lifting handfuls of fine sand and letting it pour through her fingers… We would… take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other” (12). These memories are colored by Annabel’s early death: time slipping away like the sand through her fingers. The children created a world of their own, within the larger cosmos, in those quirks of space and time. They were, however, still bound by the inescapable laws of space and time. Humbert tries to recreate this cosmos with Lolita, though he is unsuccessful. There is no escape from the present— not for adult Humbert who takes a child lover, nor for Ganin through a fantasy which was doomed to never be realized: that Mary would return to him.
In his memoir, Speak, Memory (1951), the shrine of Nabokov’s own memory is rural: his estate in the countryside outside of St. Petersburg, where he spent summers with his own youthful love, Tamara. The memory of Tamara, who the character Mary later resembles, is connected to “Russia, the wildwood grading into old gardens… northern birches and firs… that fate one day bundled up pell-mell and tossed into the sea” (183). The fate which “completely severed” (184) Nabokov from his boyhood was the motion of history, the political change that meant not only exile, but also heartbreak. Writing of a moment shortly before his permanent departure from Russia, when he was holding one of the last letters from Tamara, Nabokov reflects: “for several years, until the writing of a novel relieved me of that fertile emotion, the loss of my country was equated for me with the loss of my love” (179). Perhaps part of what relieved his pain was Mary, in which Ganin is painfully displaced from home, but ultimately accepts the flow of history, moving on from his past, which threatens to trap him fatally (as it does Humbert in Lolita). In his fiction, Nabokov portrays his characters' futile attempts to regain their past, thwarted by the inescapable laws of time. The laws of time and space which trap his characters can be extended to stand for history and geography. For Nabokov, the progression of history meant being displaced from his home country for the rest of his life.
Ganin’s Berlin appears in drab, dark shades, and Ganin’s life there is but a “dream life in exile” (81). Descriptions of the city include the police headquarters: “a grim but extremely bad Gothic style with dim windows,” and inside, “a wide gray corridor,” a “rather dreary building” (117). Ganin and the old poet Podtyagin have a conversation about their memories of St. Petersburg. Podtyagin describes his dream about being back in a strangely unfamiliar Petersburg, walking along the Nevsky:
"The houses had sloping angles as in a futurist painting and the sky was black, although I knew it was daytime…. It’s terrible… that whenever we dream about Russia we never dream of it as beautiful, as we know it was in reality, but as something monstrous" (120).
Ganin has a different experience with his memories and nostalgia. He says, “I only dream about the beautiful things. The same woods, the same country house. Sometimes it’s all rather deserted, with unfamiliar clearings” (120). Ganin dreams of rural Russia and tries to ignore “the specters of his Berlin life” which “kept interrupting” his memories of Mary (101). His memories are colored by the fact that he can never go back, just as the poet’s memories are colored (literally) by his new surroundings. The dark, geometrical, imposing Berlin affects Podtyagin’s dreams of the past. Podtyagin thinks of his dreams of the Nevsky Prospect as monstrous and therefore untrue to reality. Curiously, in works of Russian literature that would have been read by a poet such as Podtyagin (e.g., Gogol and Dostoevsky), Nevsky Prospect has been traditionally portrayed as ghostly or demonic. For example, in Gogol’s eponymous short story (1835) a young artist becomes obsessed with a woman he sees on Nevsky Prospect— a woman he idealizes and is shocked to learn is a prostitute. The young man begins to live only for his dreams of her, becoming numb to real life, and finally kills himself. The story ends where it begins: on Nevsky Prospect, where, as night falls,“the devil himself lights the street lamps” (Gogol, 112). There is a hint of a parallel to the plot of Mary, as Ganin temporarily lives only for his dreams of the past. The poet Podtyagin seems to be nostalgic for the literary Petersburg, not the real one.
Ganin lives in Berlin, but in his mind he lives in the realm of his memories. His memories play over the city in front of him like a film projected onto a screen:
"All Tuesday he wandered from cafe to cafe, his memories constantly floating ahead like the April clouds across the tender Berlin sky. People sitting in the cafes supposed that this man staring so fixedly ahead must have some deep grief; on the street he carelessly bumped into people…" (56).
Ganin is blinded to Berlin’s streets and people by the haze of his memories. He wanders the streets of Berlin just as in a parallel universe, the “bright labyrinth of memory” (56). He is physically in Berlin, but part of him resides in the unattainable otherworld of his memory. “Ganin felt that this alien city passing before him was nothing but a moving picture” (82).
Much like Mary in Nabokov’s first novel, Dolores Haze in Lolita is a ghost of the past for Humbert, showing both the pain and the poignant futility of trying to bring back the past. Dolores can be read as a more potent embodiment of a character like Mary: an animated, flesh and blood version of the memory image. Instead of simply showing a now solitary man lost in the world of memories, in Lolita, Nabokov uses Dolores Haze for the image of the lost Mary. In Mary, while Ganin is lost in sensuous memories of the girl he loved as a boy, he does not look to replace her with a girl who reminds him of her. Humbert, on the other hand, is forever lusting after female children, “nymphets,” because of his yearning for Annabel. Ganin walks alone in his realm of memory, but Humbert pulls Lolita into his, in an attempt to sate his nostalgia for a shadowy memory girl with a real, live girl— with predictably destructive results. Humbert’s obsession with Lolita wraps him in a world of aesthetics that, while not constantly linked to memories throughout the novel, can only exist because of Humbert’s attachment to the past. Humbert and Lolita constantly wander, Humbert running from one place to the next with her held captive. He is afraid to stop, because when they are still for too long, things start to fall apart.
Memories are fragile, and living within them is like living in a glass bubble. In Mary, Klara, another boarder in the house where Ganin lives, describes it as a house made of glass. In Lolita, there is Glass Lake, where Humbert fantasizes about drowning Dolores’ mother, Charlotte Haze, in order to isolate himself and Lolita. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov writes that details from his past are preserved in “a glass cell of [his] memory” (100). These allusions to glass structures, whether urban or belonging to the natural world, evoke the fairytale-like world Nabokov creates for his characters, pointing to the fragility of these worlds, as well as the futility of their isolation.
The connection between the two novels and the contrast between urban and rural settings in each becomes evident on the linguistic level. In Lolita, Humbert’s transitory home is his car, mashina (the diminutive form being mashinka), the symbolic opposite to Máshenka from Mary. Máshenka (the novel's original Russian title) is associated with old Russia, lush green countryside, cleansing rain, and soft femininity. Ganin’s Berlin is dark, industrial, and isolating, haunted by the loud and dirty trains (a train is also a mashina, machine). The name Máshenka (with the stress on the first syllable) reflects, as if a mirror image, the word mashina (with the stress on the second syllable). Nabokov reflects one idea off the other: the protagonist displaced to a machine-oriented world looks at his past in a natural dreamland. The protagonists struggle to decipher which image is real and which is merely a reflection or a shadow.
For both displaced protagonists, the rural Máshenka (or Annabel) of the past is replaced by the urban mashina. Humbert inverts the idea of running away from the past, instead desperately (and vainly) trying to escape the present and the future, grasping at his past. Lolita, for him, is like a relic preserved in time while he has aged. He attempts to flee time itself in the ironic capsule of his car which he relies on but is also tortured by— his journey with Lolita is always an ordeal for him. Like Ganin, Humbert has no home; he goes from motel to motel, living in isolation and secrecy from the outside world. Dolores Haze is not the soft, pure, feminine Old World girl personified by Annabel and Máshenka. Lolita (like Ganin’s Berlin lover, Lyudmila) is crass, artificial, too loud, just as the city may feel like to someone from the countryside. Finally, the names of the two girls, Mary and Dolores, are both names for the Mother of Christ (the Virgin Mary and Mater Dolorosa), a figure inherently connected to the idea of the lost “Mother Russia.”
At the end of Mary, Ganin is finally able to walk away from his memories, accept that Mary will never (re)appear, and set out into the future, seemingly cured from his painful fog of memories. It is his view of the city at sunrise which jolts him out of the world of memories. “And just as the sun rose… the world of memories in which Ganin had dwelt became what it was in reality: the distant past” (158). As Ganin walks to the train station, he sees the city come alive for the day, and in particular is drawn to the sight of construction workers tiling a roof. “The yellow sheen of fresh timber was more alive than the most lifelike dream of the past” (159). This urban detail brings his mind back into the world where his body dwells. His moment of clarity comes when he looks “up at the skeletal roof in the ethereal sky” (159). Again there is the contrast between the lifeless urban setting (the skeletal roof) and the otherworldly natural realm of memory (the ethereal sky). But Ganin is no longer bound to that realm, and realizes that “the image of Mary, together with that old dying poet, now remained in the house of ghosts, which itself was already a memory” (160). Ganin realizes that the fragile glass bubble of memory must shatter because it is only that: a glass house of ghosts. If Ganin hadn’t realized that beyond his realm of memory, “no Mary existed, nor could exist” (160), he may have evolved into a Humbert Humbert decades later, who tries, with a fatal outcome, to resurrect a girl who could only be a crass, urbanized simulacrum of his lost beloved.
In Mary and Lolita, Nabokov speaks to the existence of a realm where fairytale-like memories reign supreme, and lush aesthetics both comfort and torture. The urban setting of Berlin in Mary provides a backdrop for Ganin’s walk through the labyrinth of memory, and yet it is also the element which allows him finally to escape this enchanting but fatal realm. Humbert Humbert is likewise seduced into this realm, ravishing in the ultimately unattainable otherworld. Unlike Ganin, however, Humbert never stops yearning for the past, and meets a brutal end. Nabokov portrays the temptation inherent in the otherworldly realm, but he also shows how in the end, without a way out, these dreamscapes prove monstrous.
Works Cited
Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov’s Otherworld. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Gogol, Nikolay.The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories. Trans. Ronald Wilks. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Mary. Trans. Michael Glenny and Vladimir Nabokov. New York: McGraw-Hill International, Inc, 1970.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Random House Inc., 1997.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951.