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

The ambivalence of Ganin's decision to avoid meeting Mary finds its parallel in the cautious touch of ambiguity concerning Mrs. Alfyorov. It is not quite clear whether this woman really is Ganin's Mary. The photograph that Ganin sees is not described, nor is the impression that it produces on him. While Ganin is looking at the picture, we hear only Alfyorov's comments: "'And that's Mary, my wife. Poor snapshot, but quite a good likeness all the same. And here's another, taken in our garden. Mary's the one sitting, in the white dress. I haven't seen her for four years. But I don't suppose she's changed much. I really don't know how I'll survive till Saturday. Wait! Where are you going, Lev Glebovich? Do stay!'" (p. 25).

It is significant that though the English version of Mary follows the Russian original with a fidelity matched only by that of Invitation to a Beheading, the dress of Alfyorov's wife is described as "white," whereas it is "light" (svetloe) in the Russian text.15 The word "light" can suggest "flimsy," which Nabokov might have wished to avoid, yet whatever considerations determined his choice, the epithet "white" brings to mind the white dress that Mary had worn for her intended bridal night with Ganin in the park (see p. 72). Ganin may have merely projected familiar features onto the "poor snapshot," subconsciously prompted by the white dress and the mention of a yellow-bearded admirer in Mary's letter to him (p. 92)--Alfyorov sports a little yellow beard. In the first chapter of the novel Ganin narrowly escapes being shown Mrs. Alfyorov's letter and thus misses his chance to recognize the handwriting.

Moreover, the concatenation of memories starts not with Mary herself but with Ganin's convalescence after typhus. Just before showing Ganin his wife's picture, Alfyorov produces the picture of his sister who, he says, died of typhus. Typhus may therefore be the key to Pandora’s box of memories, and the four days that Ganin spends reliving his romance may have originated in a mnemonic trick. In retrospect, Mary thus appears to contain elements of the "sources" technique that Nabokov perfected in his later fiction, in particular, in Pnin and Lolita.

The touch of ambiguity suggests that no matter who Alfyorov's wife may turn out to be, she is not the Mary whom Ganin had loved. This could provide further aesthetic justification for Ganin's retreat at the end of the novel; therefore Nabokov undermines the ambiguity by giving Ganin a few minutes to re-examine the photographs before Klara surprises him in Alfyorov's room (see p. 35). Moreover, in The Defense, Mrs. Luzhin admires Alfyorov's wife16: there may, of course, be more than one nice woman by the name of Mashen'ka in ‘real life,’ but fiction does not usually imitate ‘real life’ to that extent.

By the time Nabokov wrote Mary, he had already translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian, and it would not be surprising to find him basing the most appealing part of the protagonist's experience on a mistake or a dream, as he would later do in "The Affair of Honor" (1927), The Waltz Invention (1938), and other works. Yet one must acknowledge the wisdom of his refraining from the use of this framework in Mary. Had the doubt about the identity of Alfyorov's wife been given greater force, the aesthetic aptness of Ganin's final choice would have eclipsed the ugliness of his decision to abandon the woman he had loved to the life of sordid compromise from which he himself escapes. The tentativeness of the ambiguity, especially when compared with the flourishing of this technique in Invitation to a Beheading, is indicative of the novelist's attitude toward Ganin: faced with the ambivalence of Ganin's conduct, Nabokov tips the scale in favor of criticism rather than justification.

Another Nabokovian technique, somewhat more clearly evident in Mary, is the ultimate cancellation of the protagonist by means of reminding the reader of his fictionality. At the end of the novel Ganin goes to the southwest of Germany, whence he intends to continue to France and the sea--"without a single visa" (p. 114). That cryptic remark refers either to the fact that, unlike Podtyagin, Ganin has a forged Polish passport (a counterfeit identity?), which gives him greater freedom, or else to the fact that he does not care about the legality of his transits. If the latter possibility is read figuratively, however, the remark may also be understood to mean that Ganin does not need a visa for where he is going back to the "involute abode"17 whence he has emerged--any more than Podtyagin needs a passport, or Mr. Silbermann of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight needs money. Ganin is dismissed after having served his purpose as a beneficiary of one of the most touching parts of his creator's past. On seeing the movie in which he himself appears as an extra, Ganin thinks that "the whole of life seem[s] like a piece of film-making where heedless extras [know] nothing of the picture in which they [are] taking part" (p. 22). The remark is more than a piece of home-spun philosophy: at this point in the narrative Ganin does not yet know what the novelist (the "Assistant Producer"?18) has in store for him, though only a short while later he is going to knock on Alfyorov's door and be shown some photographs. Nabokov is generous to Ganin: not only does he give him the love of Mary and four happy days of memories, but he also arranges for the lovers' paths to cross again. The rest, however, is left, as it were, for Ganin to decide. Nabokov does not seek out plausible accidents to prevent an aesthetically impossible reunion. Instead he presents Ganin as the kind of person who would choose to renounce Mary--one whose choice is as much in character as Martha's decision to abort her husband's murder at the end of King, Queen, Knave.

Nabokov's last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, contains a significant allusion to Browning's "My Last Duchess," in which the Duke of Ferrara admires the beautiful portrait of his late wife much more than he had appreciated the original--he has, it is implied, deprived the lady of her young life and, so to say, turned her into a picture that he commissioned. In Mary, Ganin prefers his beautiful internalized image of the woman he has loved to the woman herself. His decision not to see Mary at the end of the novel is motivated by his wish to separate his image of her from the real person that she may have become. This insistence on a strict partition is opposed to true creativity, which seeks to reduce the distance between the real and the ideal.

As Ganin is waiting for Mary's train to arrive, the corresponding span of the representational time is filled with the description of the splendid morning; this description is discontinued as soon as he decides against meeting Mary. Before his final resolution is made, Ganin's keen observation of the details of the scene is said to mean "a secret turning point for him, an awakening" (p. 113); yet, in the last sentence, after he has boarded a train Southbound, he is shown falling into a doze, "his face buried in the folds of his mackintosh" (p. 114). Ganin's awakening is canceled, together with the protagonist himself: the dawn and the "curiously calming effect" (p. 114) of the sight of workmen building a house stands for his author's feelings on the completion of the novel. In his introduction to Mary, Nabokov explains his use of autobiographical material as motivated by a writer's "relief of getting rid of oneself, before going on to better things" (p. xi). His criticism of Ganin may to some extent have exorcised the irrational feeling of guilt that transpires through the ending of the "Tamara" segment (chapter 12) of Speak, Memory, with its thought of "Tamara's" letters reaching the Crimea after the addressee has sailed away.

Be this as it may, though aesthetic appropriateness does not justify Ganin's decision, it does justify the narrative choices of the author. If it is Nabokov's imagination that balks at the penultimate moment and thus prevents the reunion, it keeps the carnivalesque element inherent in the theme of sympathy well under control. He is prepared to carry sympathy only to a certain point, and that point is the threshold beyond which sympathy denies detachment and contact threatens to become merger. The need for a balance between sympathy and detachment is the structural idea that governs the relationship between the themes and techniques of Mary.

15. Vladimir Nabokov, Mashen’ka (Ann Arbor: Ardis; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 42.

16. See Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Putnam, 1980), p. 203. English trans. by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author.

17. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), p. 63.

18. Cf. Nabokov’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories (London: Heinemann, 1959), p. 71.