In 1926, Nabokov's first prose work was published - the novel Mashenka. On this occasion, Niva magazine wrote: “Nabokov, having fun, tirelessly embroiders himself and his destiny in different variations along the canvas of his works. But not only his own, although hardly anyone interested Nabokov more than himself. This is also the fate of an entire human type - the Russian emigrant intellectual.” Indeed, for Nabokov, life in a foreign land was still quite difficult. The past, in which there were bright feelings, love, a completely different world, became a consolation. Therefore, the novel is based on memories. There is no plot as such, the content unfolds as a stream of consciousness: dialogues characters, internal monologues of the main character, descriptions of the scene of action are interspersed.

The main character of the novel, Lev Glebovich Ganin, having found himself in exile, lost some of the most important personality traits. He lives in a boarding house that he does not need and is not interested in, its inhabitants seem pitiful to Ganin, and he himself, like other emigrants, is of no use to anyone. Ganin is sad, sometimes he cannot decide what to do: “should I change my body position, should I get up to go and wash my hands, should I open the window...”. “Twilight obsession” is the definition that the author gives to the state of his hero. Although the novel belongs to the early period of Nabokov’s work and is, perhaps, the most “classical” of all the works he created, the game with the reader characteristic of the writer is also present here. It is unclear what serves as the root cause: either spiritual experiences deform the external world, or, on the contrary, ugly reality deadens the soul. There is a feeling that the writer has placed two crooked mirrors in front of each other, the images in which are ugly refracted, doubling and tripling.

The novel "Mashenka" is structured as the hero's memory of old life in Russia, torn apart by revolution and Civil War; The narration is told in third person. In Ganin’s life before emigration there was one thing: important event- his love for Mashenka, who remained in her homeland and was lost with her. But quite unexpectedly, Ganin recognizes his Mashenka in the woman depicted in the photograph, the wife of his neighbor at the Berlin boarding house Alferov. She must come to Berlin, and this expected arrival revives the hero. Ganin’s heavy melancholy passes, his soul is filled with memories of the past: a room in a St. Petersburg house, a country estate, three poplars, a barn with a painted window, even the flashing spokes of a bicycle wheel. Ganin again seems to be immersed in the world of Russia, preserving the poetry of “noble nests” and the warmth of family relationships. Many events took place, and the author selects the most significant of them. Ganin perceives the image of Mashenka as “a sign, a call, a question thrown into the sky,” and to this question he suddenly receives a “gemstone, delightful answer.” The meeting with Mashenka should be a miracle, a return to the world in which Ganin could only be happy. Having done everything to prevent his neighbor from meeting his wife, Ganin finds himself at the station. At the moment the train on which she arrived stops, he feels that this meeting is impossible. And he leaves for another station to leave the city.

It would seem that the novel assumes a love triangle situation, and the development of the plot pushes towards this. But Nabokov rejects the traditional ending. Ganin’s deep experiences are much more important to him than the nuances of the characters’ relationships. Ganin’s refusal to meet his beloved has not a psychological, but rather a philosophical motivation. He understands that the meeting is unnecessary, even impossible, not because it entails inevitable psychological problems, but because it is impossible to turn back time. This could lead to submission to the past and, therefore, renunciation of oneself, which is generally impossible for Nabokov’s heroes.

In the novel “Mashenka” Nabokov first addresses themes that will then appear repeatedly in his work. This is the theme of lost Russia, appearing as an image of lost paradise and the happiness of youth, the theme of memory, which simultaneously resists everything destroying time and fails in this futile struggle.

The image of the main character, Ganin, is very typical of the work of V. Nabokov. Unsettled, “lost” emigrants constantly appear in his works. The dusty boarding house is unpleasant to Ganin, because it will never replace his homeland. Those living in the boarding house - Ganin, mathematics teacher Alferov, the old Russian poet Podtyagin, Klara, funny dancers - are united by uselessness, some kind of exclusion from life. The question arises: why do they live? Ganin acts in films, selling his shadow. Is it worth living to “get up and go to the printing house every morning,” as Clara does? Or “look for an engagement”, as dancers look for it? Humiliate yourself, beg for a visa, using bad language German How is Podtyagin forced to do this? None of them have a goal that would justify this miserable existence. All of them do not think about the future, do not strive to get settled, improve their lives, living in the daytime. Both the past and the expected future remained in Russia. But admitting this to yourself means telling yourself the truth about yourself. After this, you need to draw some conclusions, but then how to live, how to fill boring days? And life is filled with petty passions, romances, and vanity. “Podtyagin went into the room of the hostess of the boarding house, stroking the affectionate black dachshund, pinching her ears, a wart on her gray muzzle and talking about his old man’s painful illness and that he had been trying for a long time for a visa to Paris, where pins and red wine are very cheap "

Ganin’s connection with Lyudmila does not leave for a second the feeling that we are talking about love. But this is not love: “And yearning and ashamed, he felt how senseless tenderness - the sad warmth remaining where love had once slipped very fleetingly - makes him press without passion to the purple rubber of her yielding lips...” Did Ganin have true love? When he met Mashenka as a boy, he fell in love not with her, but with his dream, the ideal woman he had invented. Mashenka turned out to be unworthy of him. He loved silence, solitude, beauty, and sought harmony. She was frivolous and pulled him into the crowd. And “he felt that these meetings were diminishing true love.” In Nabokov's world, happy love is impossible. It is either associated with betrayal, or the characters do not even know what love is. Individualistic pathos, fear of subordination to another person, fear of the possibility of his judgment make Nabokov’s heroes forget about her. Often at the heart of the plot of the writer’s works love triangle. But it is impossible to find the intensity of passions, the nobility of feelings in his works; the story looks vulgar and boring.

The novel “Mashenka” is characterized by features that appear in further creativity Nabokov. This is a play with literary quotes and the construction of a text on elusive and reappearing leitmotifs and images. Here sounds become independent and significant (from nightingale singing, meaning the natural beginning and the past, to the noise of a train and tram, personifying the world of technology and the present), smells, repeating images - trains, trams, light, shadows, comparisons of heroes with birds. Nabokov, speaking about the meetings and partings of the characters, undoubtedly hinted to the reader about the plot of “Eugene Onegin.” Also, an attentive reader can find in the novel images characteristic of the lyrics of A.A. Feta (nightingale and rose), A.A. Blok (dates in a snowstorm, heroine in the snow). At the same time, the heroine, whose name is in the title of the novel, never appeared on its pages, and the reality of her existence sometimes seems doubtful. The game with illusions and reminiscences is ongoing.

Nabokov actively uses techniques traditional for Russian literature. The author turns to Chekhov's characteristic techniques of detailing, saturates the world with smells and colors, like Bunin. First of all, this is due to the ghostly image of the main character. Contemporary critics of Nabokov called Mashenka a “narcissistic novel” and suggested that the author constantly “reflects himself” in his characters, placing at the center of the narrative a personality endowed with remarkable intelligence and capable of strong passion. There is no character development, the plot becomes a stream of consciousness. Many contemporaries did not accept the novel, since it did not have a dynamically developing plot and a happy resolution to the conflict. Nabokov wrote about the “furnished” emigration space in which he and his heroes were henceforth to live. Russia remained in memories and dreams, and this reality had to be taken into account.

The main character of the work is a Russian emigrant living in Berlin in a cheap boarding house. He lived in it for 3 months, but constantly wanted to move out. IN lately he became lethargic and gloomy, but before he was so lively - he walked on his hands, could lift a chair with his teeth - his energy was overflowing.

Alferov, Alexey Ivanovich

Ganin's neighbor at the boarding house, Mashenka's husband. He married her in 1919, and a year later he was forced to leave, leaving her in Russia. Now, four years later, she comes to him, and he simply cannot wait for her. A few days before his arrival, he shows her card to Ganin, and he is horrified to recognize in her his first love, whom he still loves. He decides to intercept her from the train and leave with her, but at the last moment he changes his mind and leaves alone.

Mashenka

Alferov's wife and Ganin's first love. She desperately loved Ganin for many years. First, after meeting at the dacha, then in St. Petersburg. When Ganin rejected her, she still continued to love him, wrote letters to him at the front, and tried to maintain a relationship with him. In 1919, she married Alferov, who a year later left her in Russia and went to Europe. With great difficulty she was able to survive for four years and is now going to her husband in Berlin. She does not know that Ganin lives in the same boarding house with him, who planned to intercept her from the train, but never decided.

Podtyagin, Anton Sergeevich

Ganin's neighbor at the boarding house, a former Russian poet, now an old man who had completely lost heart. He is trying to go to France to visit his niece, but he can’t get a visa. Podtyagin often has heart attacks, and he is afraid that he will soon die. Almost finally receiving a visa, he loses his passport and this completely finishes him off. The author leaves him completely broken, lying on the bed after another heart attack.

Clara

Ganin's neighbor at the boarding house, a friend of his mistress Lyudmila. Klara is 26 years old, she is a full-breasted girl who secretly loves Ganin. Even once she noticed Ganin in Alferov’s room, and decided that he wanted to steal money from him, she did not give him away, and even continued to love him. Klara is very unhappy; after Ganin leaves, she cries for a long time.

Lyudmila

Ganin’s mistress, whom he fell out of love immediately after the first night spent with her. He keeps trying to break up with her, but can’t decide to do so. In the end, he makes up his mind and rudely leaves her. She makes some attempts to make peace, writes him a letter, but he does not answer.

Colin and Gornotsvetov

Ganin's neighbors in the boarding house are dancers living in the same room as a family. They were both short, thin, but with muscular legs. They came to Berlin from the Balkans in search of a place where they could dance. At the end of the work, luck will smile on them and they will find an engagement.

Lidia Nikolaevna Dorn

The owner of the boarding house where all the heroes live. She lived in a marriage with a German for 20 years, but the year before last he died of brain inflammation. She was not at a loss, rented an apartment, furnished it with her own furniture, bought a little more and opened a boarding house for Russians. She herself was a small, strange and quiet old lady. The hostess lived in the smallest room. Erica, the cook, was there to help.

Erica

The cook at the boarding house, a large, red-haired woman.

Kunitsyn

An episodic character, Podtyagin's guest, his former classmate, who also lives in Berlin, but despises the poet. After leaving, he slipped 20 marks into Podtyagin’s hand, which greatly offended him.

About Nabokov's novel "Mashenka" {359}

“Mashenka,” his first novel (which became the last one translated by the author into English language), Nabokov believed that “it’s time for a breakthrough.” Alfred Appel recalls that on all the books signed by him, Nabokov drew a butterfly and only on the Berlin edition of Mashenka (1926) an “egg”, “larva” and “pupa”, “As befits the first novel, where the metamorphoses remained forever unfinished.” . In this work we will try to trace the “beginnings” of Nabokov’s mature prose contained in his first novel.

A number of works by domestic and foreign scientists are devoted to the analysis of “Mashenka”. Researchers have identified 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 were identified: for example, the shadow motif, which goes back to Chamisso’s carry “ Amazing story Peter Schlemiel". Attempts were made to include “Mashenka” in the concept of a meta-novel.

Let us pay attention to the functions of some elements of the text, based on the “presumption of non-randomness of any word.”

“Dual worlds” as one of the main features of Nabokov’s prose have been noted more than once by researchers. In Mashenka, two artistic spaces are skillfully intertwined through editing: 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 house. In the first lines of the second chapter, Nabokov introduces the cross-cutting metaphor “house-train”: in the boarding house “day-day and a good part at night you can hear the city trains railway, and that’s why it seemed that the whole house was slowly moving somewhere” (37). The metaphor, transforming, runs through the entire text (cf.: “It seemed to Clara that she lived in a glass house, swaying and floating somewhere. The noise of the 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 track on one side and the railway bridge on the other. The boarding house appears as a temporary shelter for constantly changing residents - passengers. The interior is described by Nabokov in great detail. The furniture distributed by the hostess of the boarding house to the guests’ rooms appears more than once in the text, reinforcing the “reality effect” (R. Barth’s term). A desk with “an iron inkwell in the shape of a toad and a deep, middle drawer, like a hold” (38) went to Alferov, and in this hold a photograph of Mashenka will be imprisoned (“...here are the cards in my desk” (52)). In the mirror hanging above 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 swiveling stool, carefully placed by the author with the assistance of Mrs. Dorn in the sixth number for the dancers, in the thirteenth chapter Alferov, tipsy at the party, almost fell. As you can see, each thing stands firmly in its place and text, except for the incident with the “couple of green chairs,” one of which went to Ganin, and the other to the owner herself. However, Ganin, having come to visit Podtyagin, “sat down in an old green chair” (62), it is unknown how he ended up there. This, in the words of the hero of another Nabokov novel, is more of a “treacherous blunder” than a “metaphysical paradox”, a minor authorial oversight against the backdrop of the strong “materiality” of the details.

With a description of the interior of the room in the summer estate, he begins to “recreate lost world"and Ganin the Creator. His Nabokovian memory, greedy for details, resurrects the smallest details of the situation. It would not be difficult to draw an exact plan of a room, similar to the plans of a railway carriage on the Moscow-St. Petersburg train or Gregor Samsa's apartment, which Nabokov brought to his lectures on literature. Ganin arranges the furniture, hangs lithographs on the walls, “wanders his eyes” over the bluish roses on the wallpaper, fills the room with “youthful foreboding” and “sunny charm” (58) and, having re-experienced the joy of recovery, leaves it forever. Space "memory"- open, as opposed to the closed “real” space in the boarding house. All meetings between Mashenka and Ganin take place outdoors in Voskresensk and St. Petersburg. Meetings in the city were hard for Ganin, since “all love requires solitude, cover, shelter, and they had no shelter” (84). Only last time they meet in the carriage, which was a kind of rehearsal for separation from Russia: the smoke of burning peat through time merges with the smoke clouding the window of Ganin’s refuge in Berlin. Such a smooth transition from one narrative plan to another is one of the distinctive features of the poetics of the “mature” Nabokov.

Let's see what details are involved in the opposition “reality” (exile) / “memory” (Russia). Some parallels are made between the accessories of the Berlin boarding house and the rooms of the Ganin 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 “horned yellow deer skulls” (39), and “the brown face of Christ in an icon case” (58) emigration replaced it with a lithograph of The Last Supper. (“The Last Supper” behind Mrs. Dorn, sitting at the head of the table in the boarding dining room, also creates a parody situation.)

Ganin meets Mashenka for the first time at a country concert. The knocked together platform, the benches, the bass that came from St. Petersburg, “the skinny, horse-faced one erupted with dull thunder” (66) - all this refers us to the episode when Ganin recalls how he worked as an extra in a movie: “roughly assembled ranks,” and “on on the platform among the lanterns there was a fat red-haired man without a jacket,” “who was screaming until he was stupefied into a bullhorn” (49-50). It is this episode on the set that introduces one of the central cross-cutting motifs into the novel - “selling the shadow.” “Seven Russian lost shadows” lived in the boarding house, and life itself is a filming session, “during which the indifferent extra does not know what picture he is participating in” (50). Ganin’s shadow “lived in Mrs. Dorn’s boarding house” (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 hero's attitude to the property of memory is twofold. From doubt: “I read about the “eternal return”... What if this difficult solitaire game never comes out a second time? (59) - to the point of confidence that the affair with Mashenka was over forever: in “sober light, the 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 consciousness: “everything seems out of place, fragile, upside down, like in a mirror” (110). Mashenka becomes a “shadow”, and Ganin returns “to life”.

The instability of the present/past opposition is marked by certain 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 reverent and gentle companion who accompanied him, lay down at his feet as 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 with yellow in a Dostoevsky way. Yellow light in the elevator cabin, Alferov’s “sand-colored coat,” his “golden” (hereinafter “yellow,” “dung-colored”) beard. “The light on the stairs burned yellowishly and dimly” (106), and in the dining room hung “horned yellow deer skulls.” And the yellow-violet combination carries a clear meaning: Lyudmila’s “yellow shaggy hair” and her lips, “painted to a lilac gloss” (41), the faces of the extras “in lilac and yellow makeup stains” (49); and at a party in the dancers' room, the lamp was wrapped in a purple piece of silk (99). And although Ganin’s memory “rearranged the light prisms of his entire 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 exist only in Russia... and above it the golden west”, crossed by “only one lilac cloud...” (68; detente is mine everywhere. - A.Ya.). And “heavy bumblebees sleep on the pale lilac pads of scabiosis” (73). In the gazebo, where Ganin first decided to talk to Mashenka, there are multi-colored glasses in “small diamond-shaped white windows,” and if you look through the yellow, “everything is extremely cheerful” (73). However, this gives rise to a contrast between the natural color of the “open” Russian space and the artificial color of the “closed” Berlin space.

Let's see how the "hero"/"anti-hero" relationship is realized. Alferov opens a gallery of numerous Nabokovian vulgarities. One of the features of Nabokov’s poetics is the transfer of key phrases to a character far from the role of the author’s representative in the text.

Alferov’s statements about the symbolism of their meeting in the elevator, which irritated Ganin, actually set one of the central motifs of the novel: “a symbol in 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 are only maturing, forced from within; a certain force of life accumulates, the description swells with details, reaching a critical level, after which everything is resolved with a plot explosion: Ganin escapes from Mashenka, Luzhin throws himself out of the window, Herman fires at his double, Cincinnatus’s head is cut off, etc.” . Alferov, Ganin and the reader are waiting for Mashenka’s appearance, but Chekhov’s gun, hanged in the first act, misfires in the last, Nabokov-style: the heroine never appears in the “present” time of the novel.

Elevating an 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 school year, he met her for the last time... something terrible and unexpected happened, a symbol, perhaps, of all future sacrileges” (82). Ganin saw the watchman’s son spying on him and Mashenka, overtook him, throwing his back through the window, and when the enemy began to groan under the blows, Ganin returned to the platform “and then noticed that something dark, iron was flowing from his mouth, and that his hands he was cut by shards of glass” (83). This scene perhaps symbolizes the war and blood (Ganin was shell-shocked in the head), which the hero had to go through before being separated from Mashenka/Russia.

For Alferov and Ganin, life becomes an expectation of Mashenka’s arrival. Both of them express their impatience in almost the same way (Ganin - to himself, Alferov - out loud).

Alferov: “Today is already Sunday... That means there are six days left” (36). “Think about it, 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: “Four days left: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And now I can die..." (59). “And tomorrow Mashenka is coming,” he exclaimed to himself, looking around the ceiling, walls, floor with blissful, slightly frightened eyes... (94). “Yes, this is happiness. We will meet in twelve hours” (98).

Such analogies “blur” the opposition and expand the possibilities reader's perception and therefore different interpretations of the text. Thus, V. Erofeev believes that Ganin commits an “unethical act” and “does not experience the slightest remorse.” Thus, an atmosphere of not only semantic instability, but also moral ambiguity is created in the text.

Let's consider elements that serve a different function. They can be conditionally called signs-signals that mark a change in the situation, critical plot points, changes psychological state heroes, etc.

On the night when Alferov showed Ganin a photograph of Mashenka, and fate turned the hero’s life upside down, throwing him “back into the past,” an “old man” appears in the text, who “in a black cape wandered along the very panel along the long deserted avenue and poked the point 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 climactic 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 the cigarette butt” (105). Interestingly, a similar function is performed by the blind beggar in Madame Bovary. He also appears twice at key points in the plot: once at the beginning of Emma and Leon's love crisis, and again 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 a 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 a park near the station, to which a train will bring Mashenka in a few hours, Ganin sees a house under construction: “The work, despite the early hour, was already underway. The figures of workers gleamed 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 vivid than the most vivid dream of the past.” The House of Shadows remains behind us, the memory of the affair with Mashenka is exhausted, 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 “lead” him out of there.

A number of elements, repeated in the text, form a symbol. Mashenka’s bow, “slightly jagged at the edges” (Ganin sees the heroine from the back for the first time at a concert), is subsequently compared to a butterfly: “the black bow flashed like a huge mourning box” (77); “a bow that opened its wings” (68). This comparison turns the detail into a multi-valued symbol for Nabokov’s poetic system (Nabokov himself, however, said that the butterfly as a symbol is of no interest to him: “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, upon meeting her he notes: “... the bow disappeared, and therefore her lovely head seemed smaller” (85).

We meet another character in the novel, Clara, at a tram stop with a paper bag of oranges clutched to her chest (54). She dreams of a merchant from whom she “buys oranges on the 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 away the warm bulk of his homeland was from him...” (103-104).

The above-mentioned details that implement the “house-train” motif can also be attributed to this type of elements.

Thus, the narrative elements considered in this work can be divided into groups depending on their functions in the text.

1) Elements that create the “effect of reality”, giving density and 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’s the spinning stool in the actors’ room, mentioned twice, or the “bartender in thread gloves” (75), who carries a lamp onto the veranda of the estate and disappears forever from the pages of the novel - all these elements “ultimately say only one thing: we are reality.”

2) Elements involved in creating the opposition. Outwardly, they may not differ from the elements of the first group, but they 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 to the plot are characterized through the same detail... then the mechanism of meaning formation is paralyzed and the stated 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 connecting two (or more) spatial planes of the narrative. Thus, during the first meeting with Mashenka, Ganin notices that “the black silk sock was torn at the ankle” (74). While packing his bags before leaving the boarding house, he came across “a torn silk sock that had lost its pair” (93). Similar roll calls and repetitions permeate the entire novel, comparing and connecting various spatio-temporal levels.

5) Elements marking critical moments of the plot (an old man collecting cigarette butts; “angel” workers). Such elements, due to their function, acquire symbolic meaning.

6) Symbol-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 - 4th year student in St. Petersburg. state University, participant of B.V. Averin’s Nabokov seminar.

Quote By: Nabokov V. Stories. Invitation to execution... Paste.

Vladimir Nabokov

Mashenka

Dedicated to my wife

...Remembering the novels of previous years,

Remembering my old love...

– Lev Glevo... Lev Glebovich? Well, your name, my friend, is enough to dislocate your tongue...

“It’s possible,” Ganin confirmed rather coldly, trying to make out his interlocutor’s face in the unexpected darkness. He was irritated by the stupid situation in which they both found themselves, and by this forced conversation with a stranger.

“I inquired about your name for a reason,” the voice continued carefree. - In my opinion, every name...

“Let me press the button again,” Ganin interrupted him.

- Press. I'm afraid it won't help. So: every name obliges. Leo and Gleb are a complex, rare connection. It requires dryness, firmness, and originality from you. My name is more modest; and his wife’s name is quite simple: Maria. By the way, let me introduce myself: Alexey Ivanovich Alferov. Sorry, I think I stepped on your toes...

“Very nice,” said Ganin, feeling in the darkness for the hand that was poking at his cuff. – Do you think we’ll stay here for a long time? It's time to do something. Damn...

“Let’s sit on the bench and wait,” a lively and annoying voice sounded right in his ear again. – Yesterday, when I arrived, you and I ran into each other in the corridor. In the evening, I heard you clear your throat behind the wall, and immediately from the sound of the cough I decided: fellow countryman. Tell me, have you been living in this boarding house for a long time?

- For a long time. Do you have any matches?

- No. I don't smoke. And the boarding house is a bit dirty, even though it’s Russian. You know, I have great happiness: my wife is coming from Russia. Four years – is it a joke... Yes, sir. And now we won't have to wait long. It's already Sunday.

“What darkness...” said Ganin and cracked his fingers. - I wonder what time it is...

Alferov sighed noisily; the warm, lethargic smell of a not entirely healthy, elderly man gushed out. There's something sad about that smell.

“That means there are six days left.” I believe she will arrive on Saturday. I received a letter from her yesterday. She wrote the address very funny. It's a shame it's so dark, otherwise I would have shown it. What are you feeling there, my dear? These windows don't open.

“I don’t mind breaking them,” said Ganin.

- Come on, Lev Glebovich; Shouldn't we play some petit-jo? I know amazing ones, I compose them myself. Think, for example, of some two-digit number. Ready?

“Excuse me,” said Ganin and slammed his fist twice into the wall.

“But you must admit that we can’t stay here all night.”

- It seems that I will have to. Don’t you think, Lev Glebovich, that there is something symbolic in our meeting? While we were still at Terra Firma, we didn’t know each other, and it so happened that we returned home at the same hour and entered this room together. By the way, what a thin floor this is! And underneath is a black well. So, I said: we silently entered here, not yet knowing each other, silently floated up and suddenly - stop. And darkness came.

– What, exactly, is the symbol? – Ganin asked gloomily.

- Yes, here, in a stop, in immobility, in this darkness. And waiting. Today at dinner this - what's his name... old writer... yes, Podtyagin... - argued with me about the meaning of our emigrant life, our great expectation. Didn't you have lunch here today, Lev Glebovich?

- No. I was out of town.

- Now it’s spring. It must be nice there.

“When my wife arrives, I will also go out of town with her.” She loves walks. The landlady told me that your room will be free by Saturday?

“That’s right,” Ganin answered dryly.

– Are you leaving Berlin completely?

Ganin nodded, forgetting that a nod could not be seen in the dark. Alferov shifted on the bench, sighed twice, then began whistling quietly and saccharinely. He will be silent and start again. Ten minutes passed; suddenly something clicked upstairs.

“That’s better,” Ganin grinned.

At that same moment, a light bulb flashed in the ceiling, and the entire humming, floating cage was filled with yellow light. Alferov blinked, as if waking up. He was wearing an old, hooded, sand-colored coat—as they say, a demi-season one—and holding a bowler hat in his hand. His light sparse hair was slightly disheveled, and there was something popular, sweetly evangelical in his features - in his golden beard, in the turn of his skinny neck, from which he pulled off a colorful scarf.

The elevator shookly caught on the threshold of the fourth platform and stopped.

“Miracles,” Alferov smiled, opening the door... “I thought someone upstairs raised us, but there’s no one here.” Please, Lev Glebovich; behind you.

But Ganin, wincing, gently pushed him out and then, coming out himself, rattled the iron door in his heart. He had never been so irritable before.

“Miracles,” Alferov repeated, “rose, but no one was there.” Also, you know, a symbol...

The boarding house was Russian and unpleasant at that. The main thing that was unpleasant was that the city railway trains could be heard all day long and for a good part of the night, and therefore it seemed as if the whole house was slowly moving somewhere. The hallway, where there hung a dark mirror with a stand for gloves and an oak trunk that could easily be bumped into with a knee, narrowed into a bare, very cramped corridor. On each side there were three rooms with large, black numbers pasted on the doors: they were just pieces of paper torn from an old calendar - the first six days of the month of April. In the April Fool's room - the first door on the left - Alferov now lived, in the next - Ganin, in the third - the owner herself, Lydia Nikolaevna Dorn, the widow of a German businessman who brought her from Sarepta twenty years ago and died the year before last from inflammation of the brain. In three rooms to the right - from the fourth to the sixth of April - lived: the old Russian poet Anton Sergeevich Podtyagin, Klara - a full-breasted young lady with wonderful bluish-brown eyes - and finally - in room six, at the bend of the corridor - ballet dancers Colin and Gornotsvetov, Both are funny, feminine, thin, with powdered noses and muscular thighs. At the end of the first part of the corridor there was a dining room, with a lithographic “Last Supper” on the wall opposite the door and with horned yellow deer skulls on the other wall, above a pot-bellied sideboard, where stood two crystal vases, which were once the cleanest objects in the entire apartment, and now dulled by fluffy dust. Having reached the dining room, the corridor turned at a right angle to the right: there further, in the tragic and inodorous wilds, there was a kitchen, a closet for servants, a dirty bathroom and a toilet cell, on the door of which there were two crimson zeros, deprived of their legitimate tens with which they formed there were once two different Sundays on Mr. Dorn’s desk calendar. A month after his death, Lydia Nikolaevna, a small, deaf woman and not without oddities, rented an empty apartment and turned it into a boarding house, showing at the same time an extraordinary, somewhat creepy, ingenuity in the sense of distributing all those few household items that she inherited. Tables, chairs, creaky cabinets and bumpy couches were scattered throughout the rooms that she was planning to rent out, and, thus separated from each other, they immediately faded and took on a dull and absurd appearance, like the bones of a dismantled skeleton. The dead man's desk, an oak hulk with an iron inkwell in the shape of a toad and a middle drawer as deep as a hold, ended up in the first room where Alferov lived, and the swivel stool, once acquired with the table together, forlornly went to the dancers who lived in the room sixth. The pair of green armchairs also split up: one was bored by Ganin, in the other sat the owner herself or her old dachshund, a black, fat bitch with a gray muzzle and drooping ears, velvety at the ends, like the fringe of a butterfly. And on the shelf in Clara’s room, for decoration’s sake, stood the first few volumes of the encyclopedia, while the remaining volumes went to Podtyagin. Clara also got the only decent washbasin with a mirror and drawers; in each of the other rooms there was simply a thick stand, and on it a tin cup with the same jug. But then the beds had to be bought, and Mrs. Dorn did this reluctantly, not because she was stingy, but because she found some kind of sweet excitement, some kind of economic pride in the way all her previous furnishings were distributed, and in this case she It was annoying that it was impossible to saw the double bed into the required number of pieces, on which it was too spacious for her, a widow, to sleep. She cleaned the rooms herself, and moreover, somehow, but she didn’t know how to cook at all, and she kept a cook - the terror of the market, a huge red-haired woman who on Fridays put on a crimson hat and rode off to the northern quarters to ply her trade with her seductive obesity. Lidia Nikolaevna was afraid to enter the kitchen, and in general she was a quiet, timid person. When she ran along the corridor with her blunt legs, it seemed to the residents that this small, gray-haired, snub-nosed woman was not the owner at all, but simply a stupid old woman who had found herself in someone else’s apartment. She folded herself like a rag doll when in the morning she quickly collected rubbish from under the furniture with a brush - and then disappeared into her room, the smallest of all, and there she read some tattered German books or looked through the papers of her late husband, in which I didn’t understand a single word. Only Podtyagin came into this room, stroked the affectionate black dachshund, pinched its ears, a wart on its gray muzzle, tried to force the dog to give up its crooked paw and told Lydia Nikolaevna about his old man’s painful illness and that he had been working for a long time, six months. about a visa to Paris, where his niece lives and where long, crispy rolls and red wine are very cheap. The old woman nodded her head, sometimes asking him about the other residents and especially about Ganin, who seemed to her to be completely different from all the Russian young people who stayed in her boarding house. Ganin, having lived with her for three months, was now planning to move out, he even said that he would vacate the room this Saturday, but he had already planned to do so several times, but he kept putting it off and changed his mind. And Lidia Nikolaevna, from the words of the old gentle poet, knew that Ganin had a girlfriend. That was the whole point.

The novel Mashenka was written in 1926 by the 27-year-old Nabokov and published in Berlin, where Nabokov lived since 1922, after graduating from Cambridge. Roman, like more early works, written under the pseudonym Sirin.

Literary direction and genre

The novel is dedicated to the wife of Nabokov, who married in 1925. Obviously, Vera Nabokov is the one perfect image a woman who is embodied in the image of Mashenka, as he became in Ganin’s memories.

Nabokov began as a realist, like many émigré writers. He is the only Russian writer who managed to become American and considers himself as such, although he emigrated to Switzerland after living there for 21 years. Mature Nabokov is a modernist, postmodernists studied with him. So Nabokov can be considered the founder of the postmodern novel.

Nabokov’s entire work, according to his wife, is “a blow against tyranny, against any form of tyranny.”

“Mashenka” is Nabokov’s first novel, in which Nabokov’s special problematics, composition, and system of images are formed, which are repeated in subsequent novels.

Subject, issue, conflict

The theme of the novel is the emigrant’s farewell and final break with his homeland, the loss of hope of returning to the past. The problem is also related to the life of an emigrant (the problem of lack of money, work, but most importantly, lack of life purpose). The conflict of the novel is based on the contrast between the exceptional and the ordinary, ordinary; genuine, true - and false. The conflict is embodied in the image of the main character Ganin, who is contrasted with the antagonist hero Alferov and the entire situation, which is so inappropriate inner world and even the hero’s body.

Plot and composition

The epigraph to the novel is a quote from Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”. Pushkin's motifs are clearly visible in the novel. The most obvious of them is a repeated relationship with a former lover who does not marry for love.

The title of the novel is the name of the main character, but the heroine is not the present Mashenka, not the Mashenka from the hero’s youth, but the present memories of Mashenka from the past. That is, this image does not correspond to any personality in reality, main character it simply doesn't appear in the novel. This is a very clear parallel with the homeland, meeting which in 1924 is pointless, and it is impossible to return to the past.

Critics unanimously considered the image of Mashenka a symbol not only of a past ideal love, but also of a lost homeland, paradise, from which both the hero and the writer experienced expulsion.

The present in the novel takes place over 7 days. On Sunday, Ganin meets Alferov, stuck with him in the elevator of a Russian boarding house in Berlin, where he has been living for three months. At dinner, Ganin learns that Alferov’s wife Mashenka is arriving on Saturday. But only on the night from Monday to Tuesday, Ganin, in the wife shown by Alferov in the photograph, recognizes his first love, who remained in Russia when he emigrated in 1919.

From Tuesday to Friday, four days that Ganin will call the best in his life, the hero’s romance-memory with Mashenka lasts, and the relationship with his beloved, which lasted 4 years, is experienced even more acutely than in the past in reality. Ganin dreams of taking Mashenka away from her husband. But on the night from Friday to Saturday, having already given Alferov a drink and gone to the station to meet Mashenka, Ganin changes his mind about leaving: the memories have become a distant past. The house passed away, “and there was a wonderful mystery about it.” The affair with Mashenka ended forever, and these 4 days of the affair were, perhaps, the happiest time of his life. Ganin gets rid of the burden of the past, breaks up with it, leaves the image of Mashenka “in the house of shadows along with the dying poet.”

Retrospection is the most important compositional device novel. The retrospective part begins in chapter 3. Ganin remembers himself as a 16-year-old recovering from typhus. The starting point for the chronology of the novel is the year of Alferov and Mashenka’s wedding. They got married in Poltava in 1919, a year later Alferov fled and lived in exile for 4 years. Consequently, the novel takes place in 1924, and Ganin is the same age as Nabokov in the same year - 25 years old.

The romance between Ganin and Masha began 9 years ago, in 1915. The young people spent the summer together at the dacha, met in fits and starts in the winter, and on the second summer, during their only meeting, Ganin realized that he had stopped loving Mashenka. In the winter of 1917 they did not see each other, but in the summer, on the way to the dacha, Ganin accidentally met Mashenka in the carriage and realized that he would never stop loving her. He never saw Mashenka again, but their romance continued in letters. Ganin received 5 letters from Mashenka in 1919, when he was in Yalta and she was in Poltava. In her last letter, a courting gentleman with a yellow beard appears, obviously Alferov. This is how the past and the future are closed compositionally.

Heroes of the novel

Lev Glebovich Ganin – main character novel. His image has autobiographical features of Nabokov. The 69-year-old writer, in the preface to the English edition of the novel, wrote that he invaded privacy in the novel, took himself out in the first novel, receiving relief and “getting rid of himself.”

In the novel there is no “objective” author’s point of view on the characters and events. Each hero is shown from the point of view of other heroes. Alferov notes that the name Ganin obliges, it requires “dryness, firmness, originality.” Alferov is either programming Ganin’s character, or guessing him.

The portrait of Ganin is given through the eyes of Klara, who is in love with him: “A sharp, somewhat arrogant face... gray eyes with shiny arrows radiating around especially large pupils, and thick, very dark eyebrows... beautiful, wet-white teeth.” Ganin's features seem sharp to her. The duality of the hero is indicated by eyebrows that look like pieces of fur, sometimes converging into one line, sometimes spreading out like the wings of a bird.

Ganin lived in the boarding house for 3 months. He arrived a year ago and did not disdain any kind of work: in a factory, as a waiter, as an extra in a film (“selling his shadow”). The reader learns that before emigrating, Ganin studied at the Balashov School in St. Petersburg and managed to enter the cadet school.

A turning point in Ganin’s life was an episode in a movie when he saw himself in the background as an extra. He realized that he himself had turned into a shadow, an extra, his love for Lyudmila was “mechanical.” At the moment of recognizing himself in the film, Ganin “felt not only shame, but also the transience and uniqueness of human life. It seems to Ganin that his shadow is becoming a double and will separately reign throughout the world. The motif of shadow and duality, popular in mythology and literature, especially among romantics, is embodied in the image of Ganin. For example, Ganin feels sorry for Lyudmila and at the same time wants to throw her away, “a feeling of honor and pity interferes with him.” The real Ganin is completely a thing of the past: “His shadow lived in Mrs. Dorn’s boarding house, - he himself was in Russia, experiencing his memory as reality.” And this life was more intense than the life of the Berlin shadow.

Subsequently, the reader learns from Ganin’s revelations to Podtyagin that he lives on a false Polish passport, has a different last name, and three years ago he ended up in a partisan detachment in Poland, dreaming of getting into St. Petersburg and starting an uprising.

Ganin is shown as a young man who has changed a lot since emigrating. In the old days, he walked on his hands or jumped over 5 chairs, controlled by willpower, but today he could not tell a woman that he did not love her, he “went limp.” From his fleeting love, Ganin was left with only tenderness for Lyudmila’s pitiful body.

Ganin in the past was a man of action. Therefore, tasteless idleness, devoid of dreamy hope, weighs on him. Nabokov defines his property as follows: “He was from the breed of people who know how to achieve, achieve, overtake, but are completely incapable of either renunciation or escape.” Reliving old novel, Ganin again became energetic and active, but these were internal actions: “He was a god recreating a lost world.” The past comes to life, but not in reality, not in the world, but in a separate universe - the consciousness of Ganin himself. Therefore, Ganin is afraid that the world he has recreated will burst and die with him.

Mashenka from the protagonist's past is described over several years. At the moment of meeting Ganin, what catches his eye is his chestnut braid in a black bow, the dark blush of his cheek, the corner of his Tatar burning eye, and the thin curve of his nostril. There is nothing remarkable in Mashenka’s portrait: charming, perky eyebrows, a darkish face covered with the finest silky down, a mobile burr, a dimple on her open neck.

Even at the age of 16, Ganin associates Mashenka with her homeland and nature.

It’s impossible to understand both, but from which you experience a “bright languor.” Separation from Mashenka and separation from Russia, put on the same line and written separated by commas, are equivalent for Ganin.

Ganin recalls that his past love for Mashenka was not ideal: he had a relationship with a lady whose husband fought in Galicia, he was relieved to part with Mashenka on winter period, and the next summer, “in one short hour I fell in love with her more than ever and fell out of love with her as if forever,” having traveled 50 miles to meet.

Introducing the reader to Alferov It starts with smell and sound. He has a lively and annoying voice, a warm, lethargic smell of a not entirely healthy man. Then a portrait appears: light sparse hair, a golden beard, something popular, sweetly evangelical in features. And only then does the characterization of the hero appear. His gaze was brilliant and absent-minded; to Ganin he seemed like a cheeky gentleman. When Alferov gets drunk at the end of the novel, his golden beard turns into a beard the color of dung, his eyes become watery.

Alferov is a mathematician who “has been pumping up his whole life on numbers, like on a swing.” This self-characteristic explains his lack of soulfulness and intuition. He opposes himself to his wife, calling her coltsfoot. Ganin very aptly refers to this opposition as “a number and a flower.”

Alferov’s statements pretend to be aphoristic, but they are banal: “Beautiful Russian femininity is more complex than any revolution, it will survive everything - adversity, terror,” “Russia is over. They washed it off, as you know, if you smear it on a black board with a wet sponge,” “Russia is kaput, the “God-bearer” turned out to be a gray bastard.”

Alferov is Ganin’s antagonist, anti-hero. This is a vulgarity, so hated by Nabokov in life and introduced by him into everything works of art. From Nabokov’s point of view, vulgarity is a collection of ready-made ideas, the use of stereotypes, clichés, and banalities. A vulgar person is a mediocre conformist who loves to impress and be impressed, “a pseudo-idealist, a pseudo-sufferer and a pseudo-sage.” So Alferov does not directly answer Ganin’s question about who he was in past life, and mysteriously darkens: “I don’t know... maybe an oyster, or, say, a bird, or maybe a math teacher.”

Lyudmila- Ganin’s “false” beloved. Her portrait is given through the eyes of Ganin, who almost hates her: “Yellow shaggy hair, cropped along the face... languid darkness of the eyelids, and most importantly, lips painted to a lilac sheen.”

Not only is the girl’s appearance fake (and ostentatiously fake, the artificiality of her dyed hair is emphasized by the unshaven hairs on the back of her head), the whole of Lyudmila is artificial. She is falsely sensitive and does not notice that Ganin does not love her. Her nails are fake, her lips are bulging. In the smell of perfume, Ganin detects something unkempt, stale, elderly, although she is 25 years old. Even her body does not correspond to her age: it is puny, pathetic and unnecessary.

The smell of Lyudmila’s perfume is contrasted with the “incomprehensible, unique in the world” smell of Mashenka, which is not interfered with by her sweet, cheap Tagore perfume.
For Gagin, a three-month affair with Lyudmila is “a difficult deception, an endless night,” payback for a night on the shaking floor of a taxi.

Lyudmila is contrasted with her friend Klara, Ganina’s neighbor, “a full-breasted, very cozy young lady all in black silk.” She is in love with Ganin and could make him happy, but the hero does not need this relationship, so Clara is a failed lover.

Klara could not renounce her unrequited love, even when she saw Ganin in the absent Alferov’s room and mistook him for a thief. The unheard monologue of a 26-year-old girl betrays her feelings: “My poor man, what life has brought him to.”

In addition to lived love (Mashenka), false love (Lyudmila), failed love (Klara), Nabokov describes the caricatured love of Colin and Gornostaev. Homosexual relationships between dancers are unattractive, although Nabokov claims: “One could not blame the dovelike happiness of this harmless couple.” Nabokov emphasizes the feminine faces and expressions of the boys, thick thighs (feminine features), but at the same time Nabokov emphasizes the dirtiness of the boys’ bodies and their rooms.
Podtyagin is a well-known Russian poet who was stuck in Berlin on his way to Paris. If for Ganin Berlin is a stage, a step, then for Podtyagin it is a dead end, a stop. He has a presentiment of his death. Obviously, something in the hero himself hinders his movement: “How much a person needs to suffer in order to get the right to leave here.” But even after receiving a visa, Podtyagin cannot leave because he cannot communicate in German. And when Ganin helps Podtyagin explain himself to the officials, the old man loses his passport. This makes his stop final: “I can’t leave here. It was written in my family.” Heart disease will obviously lead to quick death, which is the only way out for Podtyagin.

Podtyagin becomes a symbol of Russia that failed to survive emigration. He looks like a Chekhov intellectual: a neat, modest old man in pince-nez with an unusually pleasant, quiet, soft, matte voice. Podtyagin has a full and smooth face, a gray brush under his lower lip, a receding chin, intelligent, clear eyes with gentle wrinkles.

Nabokov deliberately belittles this ideal portrait, dooming Podtyagin to resemble in profile a large, graying guinea pig. There are several allusions in this image: it is an overseas animal, a sacrificial animal, and a sympathetic innocent creature forced to live in captivity.
Podtyagin considers his life to be a waste: “Because of these birches, I overlooked my whole life, all of Russia... I myself emasculated life with poetry, and now it’s too late to start living again.” That is, Podtyagin put what he had to live into poetry, which was not bad, but rather mediocre.

The poet is like a random and unnecessary shadow, and at the same time does not fully understand his uselessness: “Russia must be loved. Without our emigrant love, Russia is finished.”

Artistic originality

From the very beginning of the novel, Nabokov plays with words and symbols. First of all, we are talking about the names of the heroes. All of them have literary sources. For example, Anton Sergeevich Podtyagin combines a Chekhovian name with a Pushkin patronymic, and his funny surname hints at his own plight and his insignificant role in Russian literature.

Alferov endlessly makes mistakes when pronouncing the name of the main character. The unknownness of the name speaks of the unknownness of the person, because Alferov never learned about Ganin’s role in the life of his own wife.

Podtyagin, on the contrary, feels the main character well and guesses about his new love.

Nabokov endows Ganin with his own poetic ability to feel the word, which often makes the reader laugh. So the thirteen-year-old hero perceives the word prostitute as a prinstitutka - a mixture of a princess and a prostitute. Vermicelli, according to his youthful hooligan explanation, are Misha’s worms, small pasta until they grow on a tree.

Expat life in Berlin is like living in a stopped, dark elevator. Another parallel is a Russian boarding house, in which the trains of the city railway could be heard, “and therefore it seemed as if the whole house was slowly moving somewhere.” Ganin even imagined that each train “passes invisibly through the thickness of the house itself.” It seems to Clara that she lives in a glass house, swaying and floating somewhere. Here, transparency and fragility are added to the image of unstable balance and movement, because Clara is so afraid to open up.