Mary: 'Without Any Passport'
by Leona Toker
page two of three

Because of the autobiographical element of Mary (its story of the protagonist's first love is similar to the material of chapter 12 of Speak, Memory), readers tend to be rather uncritical of Ganin's conduct. Yet it is Nabokov's general practice to bestow parts of his own experience upon his characters, much as they may otherwise differ from himself. Ganin is not a Nabokovian lyrical hero; to a large extent he is Nabokov's version of a charismatic villain, a dynamic force of infinite potentialities for the world of fiction. In Mary this force is used to explore the tension between the moral and the pseudo-aesthetic, as well as the tension between sympathy and detachment.

The idea of detachment is explored through the motifs of proximity versus distance--distance in time, space, and personal relationships. On the last page Ganin realizes the metaphor of distance by boarding a train that will take him far away from Berlin. This act, like his attempts to maintain a sort of aesthetic detachment from actual experience, is associated with the rudimentary nature of his power of sympathy.

Ganin, indeed, passes through the novel leaving pain and confusion in his wake. The romantic lover of the fictional past is an inconsiderate and somewhat rude drifter in the fictional present. When his memories are first evoked, he takes care to "re-creat[e] a world that had perished" in order to "please the girl whom he did not dare to place in it until it was absolutely complete" (p. 33). Ironically, in the fictional present he also creates a setting for her arrival, yet not one that could please her. As the novel ends, the reader is left to imagine how Mary would painfully seek out the pension12 only to find the poet Podtyagin dying, the landlady exhausted by his bedside, the "cosy" Klara broken-hearted after Ganin's departure, and her husband Alfyorov insensible--because Ganin had got him drunk and set his alarm clock to a late hour in order to forestall him at the railway station.

Ganin's romantic image of himself is quite remote from his image in the eyes of this fellow boarders (Nabokov will developed such a contrast more fully in The Eye, 1930). Klara, who has seen him opening Alfyorov's drawer and been offered no explanation, will remain convinced that she has been in love with a thief; the others will regard his tampering with Alfyorov's alarm clock as a piece of wanton hooliganism. Like Ganin's self-image, the latter view is not completely devoid of truth: in the past Ganin had played with his will-power by "making himself, for instance, get out of bed in the middle of the night in order to go down and throw a cigarette butt into a post box" (p. 10) without even regarding his experiment as a practical joke on the owners of the box. This is a self-emulating game rather than a Schopenhauerian exercise in subduing one's will by forcing oneself to do things contrary to the desires of the flesh. By his entropy promoting unconcern for the discomfort of his neighbor, whom he does not bother to love as himself, Ganin increases the gulf between himself and others.13 In effect, he becomes as consummate a solipsist as Van Veen in Ada, and it is not accidental that Van Veen elaborates on Ganin's youthful trick of walking on his hands, turning the world upside down.

Ganin never seems to think about Mary's unhappiness. At the cinema he is annoyed with Lyudmila's whispering to Klara something about the material for a dress but never notices how sick Klara is of wearing the same dress every day. Having little else to do, he helps Podtyagin get his exit visa for France but does not prevent the old man from losing his precious passport (the reader, however, is allowed to notice the precise moment when Podtyagin lays his passport on the seat of a bus, never to pick it up; see p. 80). Podtyagin suffers his fatal heart attack as a result of the setback, yet Ganin has no feelings of guilt on leaving him. For the sake of the poetic image of Mary he not only sacrifices Mary herself but also spurns commitment to the essentially kind people around him. Such solipsistic single-mindedness prefigures that of Martin Edelweiss in Glory: in his pursuit of victory over fear, Martin does not regard his mother's anguish as too high a price for his self-emulating exploit.

Ganin's personal standard is not ethical, like Martin's, but aesthetic. He is repelled by anything that smacks of banality, of poshlost'; he is annoyed by Alfyorov and Lyudmila, and even by Mary when she uses the heavy-duty formula of surrender ("I am yours, [. . .] do what you like with me," p. 73) during their tryst in the park. At the same time Ganin is almost as shallow as another fictional salesman, Kurt Dreyer of King, Queen, Knave: the touch of artistic sensibility is wasted on him if he cannot appreciate the motives of Mary's strained submission or the proud humility with which she (unlike Lyudmila) accepts their rupture. Like Dreyer, Ganin dreams of outlandish adventures because he is incapable of achieving a defamiliarizing perception of ordinary life. "Average reality" does, indeed, begin "to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture."14 The divorce of average reality from the act of creation complements Ganin's solipsism. He leads a rich and intense inner life, but instead of letting this life irradiate upon the world given to perception, he leaves average reality to rot (like the cigarette butt in the post box) and replaces it with strictly internalized processes. He elevates memory to the status of art--not undeservedly--yet makes the mistake (to be repeated, in another way, by the protagonist of The Defense) of using art as a surrogate for life.

The blurred borderlines between the description of the Berlin scene and Ganin's memories of recuperating after typhus suggest that the memories are not embedded in the present experience but rather take its place. The image of clean ample clothes, which replaces the reader's memory of Ganin's dusty and sweaty ones of the previous morning, signals the point at which a full transition from the fictional present to the fictional past has taken place:

Wandering around Berlin on that Tuesday in spring, he recuperated all over again, felt what it was like to get out of bed for the first time, felt the weakness in his legs. He looked at himself in every mirror. His clothes seemed unusually clean, singularly ample, and slightly unfamiliar. He walked slowly down the wide avenue leading from the garden terrace into the depths of the park. Here and there the earth, empurpled by the shadows of leaves, broke into molehills that looked like heaps of black worms. He had put on white trousers and lilac socks, dreaming of meeting someone, not yet knowing who it would be (pp. 33-34).

12. In chapter 1 Alfyorov mentions that Mary "wrote the address in a very funny way" (p. 2), suggesting that she does not know German.

13. According to Schopenhauer, a truly virtuous man is one who "makes less distinction than is usually made between himself and others. [. . .] He perceives that the distinction between himself and others, which to the wicked man is so great a gulf, belongs only to a fleeting, deceptive phenomenon. He recognizes immediately, and without reason or arguments, that the in-itself of his own phenomenon is also that of others, namely that will-to-live which constitutes the inner nature of everything and lives in all." The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969) I: 372. Ganin, the artist manqué, is, to some extent, a wicked person. Yet in Nabokov's work (as in that of Joyce) the image of the true artist also almost invariably contains a touch of cruelty. This is not a Nietzschean reinterpretation of Schopenhauer but the consequence of art's mandatory emphasis on difference, on distinctive features. Art cannot reveal the universal inner nature of things without first capturing the "fleeting, deceptive phenomenon," the uniqueness of individual identities that increases distance at the expense of carnivalesque sympathy.

14. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 118.