Ganin reacts to this news by breaking up with his girlfriend, a woman he was getting tired of anyway, and giving notice to his landlady. Lo and behold, the pictures of this wife show that she is Mary, Ganin's first love from an idyllic Russian country summer back in his teens. He's so excited, indeed, that he shows Ganin a few pictures of her, gushing over how wonderful she is. His obnoxious neighbor, on the other hand, has at least one thing to look forward to - the man's wife, separated from him by the Russian Revolution for some years, is about to arrive. He's pretty bored, but can't seem to motivate himself to make any changes. Afraid of making a mistake, of losing his way in the bright labyrinth of memory, he re-created his past life watchfully, fondly, occasionally running back for some forgotten piece of trivia, but never running ahead too fast."Ī young Russian exile named Ganin lives in a Berlin boarding house with a bunch of other Russian exiles. But her image, her presence, the shadow of her memory demanded that in the end he must resurrect her too – and he intentionally thrust away her image, as he wanted to approach it gradually, step by step, just as he had done nine years before. Gradually, he had resurrected that world, to please the girl he did not dare to place in it until it was absolutely complete. "He (Ganin) was a god, re-creating a world that had perished. If Ganin dare not go home again physically, he also learns that he cannot go home again emotionally. Ganin must arrive, through reliving the experience in his memory, at that mature, if sad, awareness that the past is no more than memory, however idyllic it still seems to be.
Mary, without appearing in the course of the novel, exists only insofar as she figures in Ganin’s recollections or is spoken of by the other characters. The novel is basically about an older guy who lives in a constant state of re-living his past relationship and the lines between memory and reality / past and present are blurred.Īll this info below is taken from various online sources: While researching Nabokov and the Isle of the dead painting, the novel Mary kept popping up.
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