On the last day of the Add/Drop period, I frantically scrolled through the online course catalog for an available, hopefully interesting half-credit class to add to my schedule. I landed on a 100-level course in the Russian Department, “Nabokov before Lolita.” At the time, I was reading Elif Batuman’s memoir “The Possessed,” which traces her devotion to Russian Literature; she writes about Old Uzbek, the St. Petersburg ice palace, her far-fetched theory of Tolstoy’s demise and her quirky peers in graduate school. I submitted my form.
This is the second Russian literature course I have taken at Vassar; last semester, I studied the modernists with Professor Farida Tcherkassova, which I cannot recommend highly enough for students fearful of the Russian novel’s length. “Nabokov before Lolita” has, so far, fulfilled my expectations. I have neither read “Lolita” nor watched either of its two film adaptations, so I am unable to compare his earlier works with his most famous. Professor Nikolai Firtich began our first meeting by briefly introducing Vladimir Nabokov. Originally born in St. Petersburg to an aristocratic family, he fled Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, bouncing from Germany to France and eventually the United States. He was rejected from a teaching position at Vassar, ending up as a resident lecturer at Wellesley in 1941. We concluded class by discussing the library’s surprising deficit in Nabokov’s work and the difference between LibGen and Anna’s Archive.
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Our first assignment was to read the 1926 novel “Mary” and watch the 16-minute film “Ballet Mécanique,” directed by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger. The film was composed of clips of a woman with rounded eyebrows staring at the camera, footage of ambiguous machinery and various shapes wiggling in kaleidoscopic arrangements. It was fine. The book, though, was great. The opening scene takes place in an elevator; the protagonist, an apathetic, angry individual named Lev Glebovich, or Ganin, is trapped with his neighbor, the obnoxiously chatty Alfyorov. Both are residents in a boarding house in Berlin, having been exiled from Russia—most certainly pulled from, if only inspired by Nabokov’s own life.
The story toggles between Ganin’s depressing present and his past, spent with his young sweetheart, Mary. After losing to the Red Army and moving to Berlin, Ganin picks up random jobs in factories, restaurants and as movie extras. “Nothing was beneath his dignity,” Nabokov writes. As he wanders the city, he is overwhelmed by nostalgia—his desire to return to the past is so visceral, it seems possible: “[H]e did not feel any discrepancy between actual time and that other time which he relived in the past.”
After it is revealed that Alfyorov is married to Mary and that Mary is en route to the boarding house, Ganin plots to sweep her away. He gets Alfyorov drunk, screws with his alarm clock and travels to the train station at which Mary is scheduled to arrive. But at the very last moment, he changes his mind. Realizing that his days with Mary have ended, he turns around.
As I am beginning to learn, Nabokov enjoys toying with romantic tropes—in this instance, the love triangle—changing the anticipated ending within the last couple of pages.
Ganin’s longing for Mary and his longing for Russia are one and the same. While imagining Mary, he reconstructs the city in all of its pre-Revolution grandeur. But pieces of reality occasionally seep through Ganin’s recollection of the past; he remembers the last day he spent with Mary, a departure he felt to be “relieving.” He is reminded by another tenant, the sickly, retired poet Podtyagin, that Russia as he imagines it is gone.
When I first read the book, I was upset that Ganin abandoned Mary at the train station. But if we consider “Mary” a meditation on nostalgia, Nabokov’s ending is perfect. Realistically, Ganin and Mary would never work out—the two characters are no longer in love with one another. Rekindling their relationship would require time travel, as their feelings were contingent upon a country that no longer exists. Ultimately, we see Ganin accept the present for what it is.
It is a life lesson that feels particularly pertinent as I submit my first round of postgraduate job applications. Over the past month, I have written dozens of cover letters and rewritten my resume dozens of times, all the while wishing, with indescribable intensity, to return to the age of 19, when college stretched before me like a long carpet, and I was comfortable knowing what the next year of my life would resemble.
I am still waiting for the “merciless clarity” that solidifies one’s reckoning with the present. Until then, I am left with the following lines: “As his train moved he fell into a doze, his face buried in the folds of his mackintosh, hanging from the hook above the wooden seat.” We never find out if Ganin’s sleep is finally dreamless, but for his sake, I have decided it is.