Illustration by Tom Miller
Spring 1924 Lev Glebovich Ganin lives in a Russian pension in Berlin. In addition to Ganin, mathematician Aleksey Ivanovich Alferov lives in the boarding house, a man “with a thin beard and a shiny plump nose”, “an old Russian poet” Anton Sergeevich Podtyagin, Clara is “a full-breasted, all in black silk, a very comfortable young lady”, working as a typist and in love with Ganina, as well as ballet dancers Kolin and Gornotsvetov. "A special shade, mysterious affectation" separates the latter from other boarders, but, "speaking in conscience, one cannot blame the pigeon happiness of this harmless couple."
Last year, upon arrival in Berlin, Ganin immediately found a job. He was a worker, and a waiter, and an extra. The money he has left is enough to leave Berlin, but for this he needs to break with Lyudmila, the connection with which has been going on for three months and he is rather tired of it. And how to break, Ganin does not know. Its window opens onto the canvas railway, and therefore "the possibility of leaving teases relentlessly." He announces to the hostess that he will leave on Saturday.
Ganin learns from Alferov that his wife Masha is coming on Saturday. Alferov leads Ganin to his place to show him photographs of his wife. Ganin recognizes his first love. From that moment on, he is completely immersed in the memories of this love, it seems to him that he is exactly nine years younger. The next day, Tuesday, Ganin announces to Lyudmila that he loves another woman. Now he is free to remember how nine years ago, when he was sixteen years old, while recovering from typhus in a summer estate near Voskresensk, he created for himself female image who met in reality a month later. Mashenka had a “chestnut braid in a black bow”, “Tatar burning eyes”, a swarthy face, a voice “mobile, burry, with unexpected chest sounds”. Masha was very cheerful, loved sweets. She lived in a dacha in Voskresensk. Once, with two friends, she climbed into a gazebo in the park. Ganin spoke to the girls, they agreed to go boating the next day. But Mashenka came alone. They began to meet every day on the other side of the river, where an empty white manor stood on a hill.
When on a black stormy night, on the eve of leaving for St. Petersburg for the beginning of the school year, he met her for the last time at this place, Ganin saw that the shutters of one of the windows of the estate were ajar, and a human face pressed against the glass from the inside. It was the caretaker's son. Ganin broke the glass and began to "beat his wet face with a stone fist."
The next day he left for Petersburg. Mashenka moved to St. Petersburg only in November. The "snow age of their love" began. It was difficult to meet, it was painful to wander in the cold for a long time, so both remembered the summer. In the evenings they talked for hours on the phone. All love requires solitude, and they had no shelter, their families did not know each other. At the beginning of the new year, Mashenka was taken to Moscow. And strangely, this separation turned out to be a relief for Ganin.
In the summer Mashenka returned. She called Ganin at the dacha and said that her father would never want to rent a dacha in Voskresensk again and she now lives fifty versts from there. Ganin went to her on a bicycle. Arrived after dark. Mashenka was waiting for him at the gates of the park. “I am yours,” she said. "Do whatever you want with me." But strange rustles were heard in the park, Mashenka lay too humbly and motionless. “It seems to me that someone is coming,” he said and got up.
He met Mashenka a year later on a country train. She got off at the next station. They didn't see each other again. During the war years, Ganin and Mashenka exchanged affectionate letters several times. He was in Yalta, where “a military struggle was being prepared”, it is somewhere in Little Russia. Then they lost each other.
On Friday, Colin and Gornotsvetov, on the occasion of receiving an engagement, Clara's birthday, Ganin's departure and Podtyagin's alleged departure to Paris, decide to arrange a "feast". Ganin and Podtyagin go to the police department to help him with a visa. When the long-awaited visa is received, Podtyagin accidentally leaves his passport on the tram. He has a heart attack.
The festive dinner is not fun. The pull-up becomes bad again. Ganin waters the already drunk Alferov and sends him to sleep, while he himself imagines how he will meet Mashenka at the station in the morning and take her away.
Having collected his things, Ganin says goodbye to the boarders sitting at the bedside of the dying Podtyagin, and goes to the station. There is an hour left before Masha's arrival. He sits down on a bench in the square near the station, where four days ago he recalled typhus, the estate, Mashenka's foreboding. Gradually, “with merciless clarity,” Ganin realizes that his romance with Masha is over forever. “It lasted only four days - these four days were, perhaps, the happiest time his life." The image of Mashenka remained with the dying poet in the “house of shadows”. And there is no other Mashenka and cannot be. He waits for an express from the north to pass over the railway bridge. He takes a taxi, goes to another station and boards a train going to the southwest of Germany.
retold
About Nabokov's novel "Mashenka" {359}
"Mashenka", his first novel (which became the last of the author's translations into English language), Nabokov considered "a breakdown of the time." Alfred Appel recalls that on all the books signed to him, Nabokov drew a butterfly, and only on the Berlin edition of Mashenka (1926) “egg”, “larva” and “chrysalis”, “Somehow they stuck to the first novel, where metamorphoses remained forever unfinished” . In this work, we will try to trace the "rudiments" of mature Nabokov's prose contained in his first novel.
A number of works by domestic and foreign scientists are devoted to the analysis of "Mashenka". The researchers singled out literary associations and reminiscences: the “Pushkin theme”, echoes with Fet (Nora Books considers Fet’s poem “The Nightingale and the Rose” to be the dominant metaphor of the novel), analogies with Dante. Some cross-cutting motifs of the work have been identified: for example, the motif of the shadow, which goes back to Chamisso's carry "The Amazing Story of Peter Schlemiel". An attempt was made to include "Mashenka" in the concept of a meta-novel.
Let's pay attention to the functions of some elements of the text, based on the "presumption of the non-randomness of any word" .
"Dvoemirie" as one of the main features of Nabokov's prose has been repeatedly noted by researchers. In "Mashenka" two artistic spaces are skillfully intertwined through montage: the "real" Berlin world and the "imaginary" world of the hero's memories. The past "passes in an even pattern through Berlin everyday life." Let's see how these worlds are organized. "Real" space is, first of all, the space of a Russian boarding school. In the first lines of the second chapter, Nabokov introduces a cross-cutting metaphor “house-train”: in the boarding house “day-to-day and a good part of the night, trains of the city railway are heard, and therefore it seemed that the whole house was slowly going somewhere” (37). The metaphor, transforming, runs through the entire text (cf.: “It seemed to Clara that she lived in a glass house, oscillating and floating somewhere. The noise of trains reached here too ... the bed seemed to rise and sway” (61)). Some interior details reinforce this image: an oak trunk in the hallway, a cramped corridor, windows overlooking the railway bed on one side and the railway bridge on the other. The boarding house appears as a temporary shelter for the permanently replacing each other tenants - passengers. The interior is described by Nabokov in great detail. The furniture distributed by the hostess of the boarding house to the guest rooms pops up more than once in the text, reinforcing the "reality effect" (R. Barth's term). The desk with “an iron inkpot in the shape of a toad and with a deep, like a hold, a middle drawer” (38) went to Alferov, and in this hold a photograph of Mashenka will be imprisoned (“... here I have cards in my desk” (52)). In the mirror hanging over the trunk, the presence of which is also mentioned in the second chapter, Ganin saw "the reflected depth of Alferov's room, the door of which was wide open", and sadly thought that "his past lies on someone else's table" (69). And from the revolving stool, carefully placed by the author with the assistance of Mrs. Dorn in the sixth number to the dancers, in the thirteenth chapter, Alferov, drunk at the party, almost fell. As you can see, each thing is firmly in its place and text, except for the incident with the “four green chairs”, one of which went to Ganin, and the other to the hostess herself. However, Ganin, having come to visit Podtyagin, “sat down in an old green armchair” (62), no one knows how he ended up there. This, in the words of the hero of another Nabokov's novel, is rather a "treacherous blunder" than a "metaphysical paradox", an insignificant oversight by the author against the background of the solid "substantiality" of the details.
From the description of the interior of the room in the summer estate, Ganin the creator also begins to “recreate the lost world”. His Nabokov-like memory, greedy for details, recalls the smallest details of the situation. It would not be difficult to draw an exact floor plan of the room, similar to the plans of the Moscow-Petersburg railway car or the apartment of Gregor Samsa, which Nabokov brought to his lectures on literature. Ganin arranges furniture, hangs lithographs on the walls, “wanders with his eyes” over the bluish roses on the wallpaper, fills the room with “youthful foreboding” and “sunny charm” (58) and, having relived the joy of recovery, leaves it forever. Space "memory"- open, as opposed to the “real” space closed in the boarding house. All meetings of Masha and Ganin take place in nature in Voskresensk and in St. Petersburg. Meetings in the city were hard for Ganin, because "all love requires solitude, cover, shelter, but they had no shelter" (84). Only the last time they meet in the car, which was a kind of rehearsal of separation from Russia: the smoke of burning peat through time merges with the smoke that clouds the window of Ganin's shelter in Berlin. Such a smooth transition from one narrative plan to another is one of the distinguishing features of the "mature" Nabokov's poetics.
Let's see what details are involved in the opposition "reality" (exile) / "memory" (Russia). Some parallels are the accessories of the Berlin boarding house and the rooms of the Ganinsky estate. Thus, the paintings on the walls “resurrected” by memory: “a starling made convexly from its own feathers” and “a horse’s head” (57) are contaminated into “yellow horned deer skulls” (39), and “the brown face of Christ in an icon case” (58) emigration replaced the lithograph of The Last Supper. (“The Last Supper” behind Mrs. Dorn, who is seated at the head of the table in the boarding canteen, also creates a parodic situation.)
Ganin meets Mashenka for the first time at a dacha concert. A knocked together platform, benches, a bass who came from St. a fat red-haired man without a jacket on the platform among the lanterns”, “who yelled into a horn to the point of stupor” (49-50). It is this episode on the set that introduces one of the central cross-cutting motifs into the novel - "the sale of the shadow." “Seven Russian lost shadows” lived in the boarding house, and life itself is a shooting, “during which an indifferent extra does not know in which picture he is participating” (50). The shadow of Ganin "lived in the boarding house of Mrs. Dorn" (72), and the other guests were only "shadows of his exiled dream." And only Mashenka is his real life. However, there is no clear opposition between dream and reality in the novel. The attitude of the hero to the property of memory is twofold. From doubt: “I read about the “eternal return” ... But what if this complex solitaire never comes out a second time?” (59) - to the point of being sure that the affair with Mashenka was over forever: in a "sober light, that life of memories that Ganin lived became what it really was in the distant past" (111). Mashenka remains "together with the dying old poet there, in the house of shadows, which itself has become a memory" (112). A revolution takes place in the hero's mind: "everything seems to be not so staged, fragile, turned upside down, as in a mirror" (110). Mashenka becomes a “shadow”, and Ganin returns “to life”.
The precariousness of the present/past opposition is marked by some details. In one episode, the hero’s “remembering self” is called a shadow: “He sat down on a bench in a spacious square, and immediately the quivering and tender companion who accompanied him lay down at his feet like a grayish shadow and spoke” (56).
It is important to note the importance of color rendering in Nabokov's poetics. The “emigrant” space of the novel is saturated in Dostoevsky style yellow. Yellow light in the elevator cabin, Alferov's "sand-colored coat", his "golden" (hereinafter "yellow", "dung-colored") beard. “The light on the stairs burned yellowish and dimly” (106), and “horned yellow deer skulls” hung in the dining room. And the yellow-violet combination carries a clear semantic load: Lyudmila's “yellow tresses” and her lips, “made up to a lilac gloss” (41), the faces of the extras “in purple and yellow make-up stains” (49); and at a party in the dancers' suite, the lamp was wrapped in a purple shred of silk (99). And although Ganin's memory "rearranged the light prisms of his whole life" (56), the color opposition turns out to be partly neutralized. Memory resurrects that distant happy summer, “bright languor”, “one of those forest edges that are only in Russia ... and above it the golden west”, crossed “only by a lilac cloud ...” (68; detente is mine everywhere. - AND I.). And “heavy bumblebees sleep on the pale purple pads of scabiosis” (73). In the arbor where Ganin first ventured to speak to Mashenka, multi-colored glass in "small rhombuses of white windows", and if you look through the yellow - "everything is extremely cheerful" (73). However, this gives rise to the opposition of the natural natural color of the “open” Russian space and the artificial, “closed” Berlin space.
Let's see how the "hero"/"anti-hero" relationship is implemented. Alferov opens a gallery of numerous Nabokov vulgarities. One of the features of Nabokov's poetics is the transfer of key phrases to a character who is far from the role of the author's representative in the text.
Alferov's statements that irritated Ganin about the symbolism of their meeting in the elevator actually set one of the central motifs of the novel: “the symbol is at a stop, in immobility, in this darkness. And in anticipation" (36). Iv. Tolstoy called Nabokov a master of exposition: “There is no dynamics in his books, the events in them only mature, are forced from within; a certain force of life accumulates, the description swells with details, reaching a critical level, after which everything is resolved by a plot explosion: Ganin escapes from Mashenka, Luzhin rushes out of the window, Herman shoots at a double, Cincinnatus is cut off his head, etc. ” . Alferov, Ganin, and the reader are waiting for Masha's appearance, but Chekhov's gun, hung in the first act, misfires in the last act in a Nabokovian way: the heroine never appears in the "real" tense of the novel.
Raising the event into a symbol is not alien to Ganin: “... on that black, stormy night, when, on the eve of leaving for St. Petersburg at the beginning of the school year, he met her for the last time ... something terrible and unexpected happened, a symbol, perhaps, of all blasphemy" (82). Ganin saw the watchman's son peeping behind him with Masha, overtook him, sagging the window with his back, and when the enemy began to moan under the blows, Ganin returned to the platform "and then noticed that something dark, glandular was flowing from his mouth, and that his hands cut him with pieces of glass” (83). This scene, perhaps, symbolizes the war and blood (Ganin was shell-shocked in the head), through which the hero had to go through before parting with Mashenka/Russia.
For Alferov and for Ganin, life becomes an expectation of Mashenka's arrival. Both of them almost equally express their impatience (Ganin - to himself, Alferov - aloud).
Alferov: "Today is already Sunday ... So, there are six days left" (36). “Think, my wife is coming on Saturday. And tomorrow is already Tuesday…” (51). “Three, four, five, seven,” Alferov counted again and winked at the dial with a blissful smile (105).
Ganin: “There are four days left: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And now I can die…” (59). “And tomorrow Masha is coming,” he exclaimed to himself, looking around the ceiling, walls, floor with blissful, slightly frightened eyes ... ”(94). “Yes, this is happiness. We'll meet in twelve hours" (98).
Such analogies "blur" the opposition, expand the possibilities of the reader's perception and, consequently, different interpretations of the text. So, V. Erofeev believes that Ganin commits an "unethical act", "does not feel the slightest remorse at the same time." Thus, the text creates an atmosphere not only of semantic fluctuation, but also of moral ambiguity.
Let us consider the elements acting in a different function. They can be conditionally called signs-signals that mark a change in the situation, critical points in the plot, changes in the psychological state of the characters, etc.
On that night, when Alferov showed Ganin a photograph of Mashenka, and fate turned the hero’s life upside down, throwing him “into the past,” an “old man” appears in the text, who “in a black cape wandered along the very panel along a long deserted avenue and poked with the tip of a gnarled stick at asphalt, looking for tobacco tips ... "(53). Here the old man "signals" the beginning of the plot. The second time it appears at the culminating moment - a few hours before the arrival of the "Northern Express": "A hunched old man in a black cape was already walking along the wide street, tapping with a stick, and, groaning, bent down when the tip of the stick knocked out a cigarette" (105). It is interesting that the blind beggar in Madame Bovary performs a similar function. He also makes two appearances at key points in the story, the first time at the beginning of Emma and Leon's love crisis, and the other time at the moment of Emma's death. The last thing she hears before her death is the sound of a stick, and the song of a blind man.
The "shadows" motif is marked in a similar way. It is introduced into the text by the description of filming (49-50). Ganin recalls “lazy workers, freely and indifferently, like blue angels, moving from beam to beam high above ...” (49). Since then, he perceives himself as a lost shadow. And at the end of the novel, sitting on a bench in the square near the station, to which a train will bring Mashenka in a few hours, Ganin sees a house under construction: “Despite the early hour, work was already underway. Figures of workers shone blue against the light sky. One moved along the very ridge, easily and freely, as if he was about to fly away” (111). Everything around becomes for the hero "more alive than the most vivid dream of the past." The house of shadows remains behind, the memory has exhausted the affair with Mashenka, Ganin is reborn to a new life. The "blue angels" "introduce" the hero into the "world of shadows", and at the end of the novel they "bring" him out of there.
A number of elements, repeating in the text, forms a symbol. “Slightly jagged at the edges” Masha’s bow (Ganin sees the heroine for the first time from the back at a concert) is subsequently compared to a butterfly: “the black bow flickered like a huge mourning woman” (77); "a bow that spread its wings" (68). This comparison turns the detail into a multi-valued symbol for Nabokov's poetic system (Nabokov himself, however, said that he was not interested in the butterfly as a symbol: "That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e. g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest").
It is characteristic that when the hero feels a crisis in his relationship with Mashenka, when he meets her, he notes: “... the bow has disappeared, and therefore her lovely head seemed smaller” (85).
We meet another character in the novel, Clara, at the tram stop with a paper bag of oranges pressed to her chest (54). She dreams of a merchant from whom she "buys oranges on her way to work" (61). At the dancers' party, Clara drinks orange liqueur (100). However, the symbol is built only when we learn from Ganin's memoirs the details of his departure from Russia and arrival in Istanbul, where on an "orange evening" he saw "a blue Turk sleeping on a huge pile of oranges" at the pier; “only then did he feel piercingly and clearly how far the warm bulk of his homeland was from him ...” (103-104).
The details mentioned above, realizing the “house-train” motif, can also be attributed to this kind of elements.
Thus, the narrative elements considered in this paper can be divided into groups depending on their functions in the text.
1) Elements that create the "effect of reality", giving density, materiality to the fabric of the narrative, striving, in the words of one of Nabokov's heroes, "to turn the reader into a spectator." Whether it is the revolving stool in the actors' room, which is mentioned twice, or the "bottler in cotton gloves" (75), who carries the lamp onto the veranda of the estate and disappears forever from the pages of the novel - all these elements "in the end say only one thing: we are reality" .
2) Elements participating in the creation of the opposition. Outwardly, they may not differ from the elements of the first group, but functionally mark artistic spaces, characters and other large structural units that enter into a relationship of opposition.
3) Elements that weaken the opposition. As V. Linetsky noted, “if two characters opposed by the plot are characterized through the same detail ... then the mechanism of meaning formation turns out to be paralyzed and the declared topic does not allow itself to be read” . Leaving aside the problem of deconstruction, we note that in this case the opposition is not neutralized, but only “blurred”, deprived of its unambiguous meaning.
4) Elements linking two (or more) spatial plan storytelling. So, during the first meeting with Masha, Ganin notices that "the black silk sock was torn at the ankle" (74). Packing his suitcases before leaving the boarding house, he came across "a tattered silk sock that has lost its pair" (93). Similar roll calls-repetitions permeate the entire novel, comparing and connecting different spatio-temporal levels.
5) Elements that mark critical moments of the plot (an old man collecting cigarette butts; workers - "angels"). Such elements, due to their function, acquire a symbolic meaning.
6) Character-forming elements. Like the elements of the fifth group, they generate a symbol, but this happens through their multiple varying repetitions in the text.
Alexander Yanovsky, 1997.
Notes
{359} Yanovsky Alexander Dmitrievich is a 4th year student of St. Petersburg. state University, participant of the Nabokov seminar BV Averina.
Cit. on: Nabokov V. Stories. Invitation to the execution ... Paste.
Plot
Main character Ganin lives in a Russian guesthouse in Berlin. One of the neighbors, Alferov, keeps talking about the arrival of his wife Masha from Soviet Russia at the end of the week. From the photograph, Ganin recognizes his former love and decides to kidnap her from the station. All week Ganin lives with memories. On the eve of Mashenka's arrival in Berlin, Ganin solder Alferov and set his alarm clock incorrectly. At the last moment, however, Ganin decides that the past image cannot be returned and goes to another station, leaving Berlin forever. Masha herself appears in the book only in Ganin's memoirs.
Mashenka and her husband appear later in Nabokov's novel Defense of Luzhin (chapter 13).
In 1991, the book was made into a movie of the same name.
The image of Russia in the novel
V. Nabokov describes the life of emigrants in a German pension.
These people are poor, both materially and spiritually. They live in thoughts about the past, pre-emigrant life in Russia, and cannot build the present and the future.
The image of Russia is opposed to the image of France. The heroes associate Russia with a squiggle, and France with a zigzag. In France, "everything is very correct," in Russia it's a mess. Alferov believes that everything is over with Russia, “washed it away, as you know, if you smear it with a wet sponge on a black board, on a painted face ...” Life in Russia is perceived as painful, Alferov calls it “metampsychosis”. Russia is called cursed. Alferov declares that Russia is kaput, "that the 'god-bearer' turned out, as one might expect, to be a gray bastard, that our homeland, therefore, perished forever."
Ganin lives with memories of Russia. When he sees fast clouds, her image immediately appears in his head. Ganin most of the time recalls the Motherland. When the end of July comes, Ganin indulges in memories of Russia (“The end of July in the north of Russia already smells slightly of autumn ...”). In the memory of the hero, the nature of Russia mainly pops up, its detailed description: smells, colors ... For him, separation from Masha is also separation from Russia. The image of Mashenka is closely intertwined with the image of Russia. Clara loves Russia, she feels lonely in Berlin.
Podtyagin dreams of the apocalyptic Petersburg, while Ganin dreams of "only beauty."
The heroes of the novel reminisce about their youth, about studying at a gymnasium, a school, how they played Cossacks - robbers, bast shoes; recall magazines, poems, birch groves, forest edges ...
Thus, the heroes have an ambiguous attitude towards Russia, each of them has his own ideas about the Motherland, his own memories.
Recollection in the novel (on the example of Ganin)
Ganin is the hero of the novel "Mashenka" by V. Nabokov. This character is not prone to actions, apathetic. Critics of Literature in the 1920s consider Ganin a failed attempt to present a strong personality. But in the image of this character there is also dynamics. You need to remember the past of the hero and his reaction in the stopped elevator (an attempt to find a way out). Ganin's memories are also dynamics. His difference from other heroes is that he is the only one who leaves the boarding house.
Remembrance in V. Nabokov's novel is presented as an all-encompassing force, as an animated being. Ganin, seeing a photograph of Mashenka, changes his worldview in the bud. Also, the memory accompanies the hero everywhere, it is like a living being. In the novel, the memory is called a gentle companion who lay down and spoke.
In his memoirs, the hero plunges into adolescence, where he met his first love. Masha's letter to Ganin awakens in him memories of a bright feeling.
Sleep in the novel is equal to falling. Nabokov's hero survives this test. The means to awakening is remembrance.
The fullness of life returns to Ganin through recollection. This happens with the help of a photograph of Mashenka. It is from contact with her that Ganin's resurrection begins. As a result of the healing, Ganin recalls his feelings that he experiences while recovering from typhus.
The memory of Mashenka, the appeal of the hero to her image, can be compared with the appeal to the Virgin Mary for help. N. Poznansky notes that Nabokov's recollection in its essence resembles "prayer-like conspiracies."
Thus, memory plays a central role in the novel. With the help of it, the plot is built, their own fate depends on the memories of the heroes.
That. memory is a kind of mechanism through which the dynamics in the novel are carried out.
[When writing this section, an article by Dmitrienko O.A. was used. Folklore - mythological motifs in Nabokov's novel<<Машенька>>// Russian Literature, No.4, 2007]
Sources
Notes
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010 .
See what "Mashenka (novel)" is in other dictionaries:
Mashenka: diminutive for the name "Maria". Not everyone is allowed to call Masha that way, but only to close people. If you are not one of them, take the trouble to call her less affectionately. Works with the name "Mashenka" Masha (novel) ... ... Wikipedia
Masha and the Bear ... Wikipedia
Roman Kachanov Birth name: Roman Abelevich Kachanov Date of birth: February 25, 1921 (19210225) Place ... Wikipedia
Wikipedia has articles about other people with that surname, see Kachanov. Wikipedia has articles about other people named Roman Kachanov. Roman Kachanov Birth name: Ruvim Abelevich Kachanov Date of birth ... Wikipedia
This term has other meanings, see Lolita. Lolita Lolita
- "King, Queen, Jack" novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Written in Russian during the Berlin period of his life, in 1928. In Nabokov's memoirs, it is noted that during his entire life in Germany, he did not get along with a single German. This alienation affects ... ... Wikipedia
This term has other meanings, see Camera obscura (meanings). Pinhole camera
This term has other meanings, see Feat. Feat Genre: novel
"Mashenka" (1926) - the first and most autobiographical novel the world-famous Russian-American writer, one of the greatest prose writers of the 20th century, the author of the famous "Lolita" Vladimir Nabokov. This book is about the “strangeness of memories”, about the whimsical interweaving of life patterns of the past and the present, about the “amazing event” of the resurrection by the main character, a Russian emigrant living in Berlin, Lev Ganin, the story of his first love. The novel, whose action spans only six days and in which there are very few characters, acquires emotional piercing and semantic depth thanks to the passionate power of Ganin's (and the author's) memory, faithful to the irrational moments of the past. © 1970, Dmitri Nabokov All rights reserved; © Publishing Group LLC © Azbuka Atticus, 2012 © AZBUKA® (R) Publishing House ARDIS Distribution LLC, 2004
Description added by user:
"Mashenka" - the plot
Lev Glebovich Ganin lives in Berlin, in a Russian boarding house. In addition to him, 5 more people live there: two dancers Colin and Gornotsvetov, Clara, who is in love with Ganin, the poet Podtyagin, disillusioned with himself, and Alferov. One day, Alferov, who is madly in love with his wife Masha, shows her photograph to Ganin. Mashenka herself should arrive from Russia on Saturday. Alferov did not see her for four years. And Ganin recognizes his first love in the photo - that same Mashenka. From that day on, he constantly thinks about Masha, remembers their meetings in the garden, a secret from his parents. Ganin even wants to steal this photo from Alferov, but at the moment when Ganin is looking for it in the desk drawer, Clara enters the room. She thinks that Ganin wanted to steal money from Alferov. but promises not to tell anyone about it. Meanwhile, Saturday is approaching. Ganin decides to meet Masha at the station and take her away from Alferov, away from Berlin. On Friday evening, Ganin waters the already drunk Alferov, but Alferov still remembers that he must meet his wife in the morning and asks to set the alarm clock at half past seven. Ganin puts Alferov to bed, and he sets the alarm for eleven. In the morning, Ganin leaves the boarding house, but on the way to the station, a stream of thoughts captures him, and Ganin decides that he should not stir up the past, let Mashenka remain an unfulfilled dream. He buys a ticket to the southwest of Germany and leaves.
Reviews
Reviews of the book "Mashenka"
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Julia Olegina
First and last love
Mashenka is a complex and painfully true novel. The main character - Lev Glebovch Ganin lives in a foreign land, in Berlin, in a Russian pension. His neighbor - Alferov - shows a photograph of his wife Masha. It is in this Mashenka that Ganin recognizes his first love.
This novel is now being studied at school, but it seems to me that schoolchildren do not need to read this at all. The novel tells about broken dreams, about unfulfilled desires, about the transience of time, about the rapid departure of first love. And school time is the time when dreams and first love do not need to be destroyed. All the same, the younger generation will not take advantage of the advice given by Nabokov in his novel. In short, an adult novel. Not in terms of scenes or anything like that, but just in terms of psychology.
To be honest, I didn't really like it. The ending was especially disappointing. But what else can you expect from Nabokov, a man who lived a difficult life, wandering all over our miserable planet all the time? On the other hand, this is his first novel, written at a time when life, it seems, did not "shock" much. This means that Nabokov had a presentiment that life is not an easy thing...
Not very impressed, although the novel, I repeat, with a strong psychological overtones.
Useful review?
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It was written by V. Nabokov shortly after his marriage to Vera Slonim in Berlin in 1925 (and by the way dedicated to her) and published in the Berlin Lay in 1926. This was Nabokov's first novel. A novel about the first, still childhood love ...
They say that Nabokov called "Mashenka" "an unsuccessful book", and, signing it for someone, drew a butterfly chrysalis on the title page as a sign that it is still far from perfect ... Then there will be "Lolita", "Other Shores", " Luzhin's defense "...
Some consider the novel autobiographical, even despite the assurances of the author himself that he never "pokes anyone into his things."
The action of the novel takes place in 1924 in Berlin, in a boarding house where emigrants from Russia live. Lev Ganin, looking at the family photos of his neighbor Alferov, suddenly recognizes his first love in his wife ... Masha ... "wonderful dazzling memory of happiness, - female face, surfaced again after many years of worldly oblivion ... "(With)
Childhood memories flooded back… Russia nine years ago, he was then sixteen years old, and while recovering from typhus in a summer estate near Voskresensk, he created a female image for himself, which he met in reality a month later. It was Masha. They met not far from the estate all summer and then again, when both moved to St. Petersburg ... and then Masha's parents took her to Moscow, and their last meeting on the train could be called accidental ...
And now she is the wife of another, and in a few days she arrives in Berlin ... Ganin sets himself the goal of returning Mashenka. Having drunk Alferov the day before, he instead goes to the station ... Already some moments separate him from happiness. And what ... At the very last moment, he understands “with merciless clarity that his affair with Mashenka ended forever. It lasted only four days - these four days were perhaps the happiest times of his life. But now he has exhausted his recollection to the end, has been completely sated with it, and the image of Mashenka remains with the dying old poet there, in the house of shadows, which itself has already become a memory.(With)
And seeing how the train approaches with noise, he grabs his suitcases and decides to go to another station.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899 in the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, into a noble and wealthy family. In the eventful year of 1917, his father was briefly among the ministers of the Kerensky government, and when the Bolsheviks came to power in the country, the Nabokovs were forced to emigrate. In 1919 Vladimir entered the University of Cambridge and graduated in 1922. In March of the same year, in Berlin, during an assassination attempt on the head of the Kadet Party, Pavel Milyukov, Nabokov's father died, shielding Milyukov from the bullet of a monarchist terrorist.
Nabokov spent the twenties and thirties in Berlin, then lived in Paris, and in 1940 he moved to the United States. A brilliant mind and an excellent sense of humor allowed Nabokov to become an excellent writer. characteristic feature his works were not so much the liveliness of images, ideas and the twist of the plot, but the virtuoso command of English - a language not native to him. The writer translated into English "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" and "Eugene Onegin". In 1961, he and his wife settled in Switzerland. Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977 at the age of 78.
Other works:
"Camera Obscura", "Gift", "Lolita", "Protection of Luzhin", a book of memoirs "Other Shores", etc.