“Mashenka” is Nabokov’s first novel, created during the Berlin period. This is one of the works created by the writer in Russian. This article provides a summary of “Mashenka” by Vladimir Nabokov.

about the author

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 into a wealthy noble family. WITH early years spoke French and English. After October revolution the family moved to Crimea, where the aspiring writer achieved his first literary success.

In 1922, Nabokov's father was killed. In the same year, the writer left for Berlin. For some time he made a living by teaching English. In the capital of Germany, he published several of his works. And in 1926, the novel “Mashenka” by Nabokov was published. Summary The chapters are presented below. In addition, the writer is the author of such works as “The Defense of Luzhin”, “Feat”, “The Gift”, “Despair” and, of course, the famous “Lolita”. So, what is Nabokov’s novel “Mashenka” about?

The work consists of seventeen chapters. If we present a summary of Nabokov’s “Mashenka” chapter by chapter, we will have to follow this plan:

1. Meeting between Ganin and Alferov.
2. Residents of the boarding house.
3. Mashenka.
4. Breakup with Lyudmila.
5. Kunitsyn.
6. July evening in Voskresensk.
7. Podtyagin's troubles.
8. First meeting with Mashenka.
9. Gornotsvetov and Colin.
10. Letter from Lyudmila.
11. Preparing for the celebration.
12. Passport.
13. Ganin's fees.
14. Farewell evening.
15. Memories of Sevastopol.
16. Farewell to the boarding house.
17. At the station.

If you present a summary of Nabokov's Mashenka according to this plan, the presentation will turn out to be very lengthy. We need a condensed retelling with a description of the main events. Below is a summary of Nabokov's "Mashenka" in the most abbreviated version.

Lev Ganin

This is the main character of the novel. Lev Ganin is an emigrant from Russia. Lives in Berlin. The work reflects the events of the twenties. There are such characters as Alexey Alferov, Anton Podtyagin, Clara, whom the author describes as “a cozy young lady in black silk.” The boarding house also houses dancers Colin and Gornotsvetov. Where to start with a summary of Nabokov's Mashenka? From a story about the main character. This is the story of a Russian emigrant - one of many representatives of the nobility who were forced to leave their home after the revolutionary events.

Ganin arrived in Berlin not so long ago, but he has already worked as both an extra and a waiter. He saved a small amount, and this allowed him to leave the German capital. What kept him in this city was his disgusted relationship with a woman who was quite boring to him. Ganin is languishing, he suffers from boredom and loneliness. His relationship with Lyudmila makes him sad. However, for some reason he cannot admit to a woman that he no longer loves her.

When presenting a brief summary of Nabokov's Mashenka, it is worth paying special attention to the image of the main character. He is unsociable, withdrawn, even somewhat gloomy, yearning for a foreign land and dreams of leaving Berlin. The windows of his room overlook railway, which every day awakens the desire to escape, to leave this cold and alien city.

Alferov

Ganin’s neighbor, Alferov, is extremely verbose. One day he shows him a photograph of his wife Maria. And from this moment the main events of Nabokov’s novel “Mashenka” begin. It’s not easy to convey the main character’s experiences in a summary. The writer colorfully describes Ganin’s feelings that gripped him after he saw the girl’s photograph. This is Mashenka, whom he loved once upon a time, in Russia. Most of the work is devoted to the memories of a Russian emigrant.

Breakup with Lyudmila

After Ganin found out who Alferov’s wife was, his life completely changed. Mashenka was supposed to arrive soon. Awareness of this gave the hero a feeling of happiness (albeit illusory), a sense of freedom. The very next day he went to Lyudmila and confessed to her that he loved another woman.

Like any person who feels boundless happiness, Nabokov’s hero became cruel in some way. “Mashenka,” a brief summary of which is presented in this article, is a story about a man who delved into memories, protecting himself from those around him. When parting with Lyudmila, Ganin did not feel guilt or compassion for his former lover.

Nine years ago

The hero of the novel is waiting for Mashenka's arrival. These days it seems to him that the last nine years never happened, there was no separation from his homeland. He met Masha in the summer, during the holidays. Her father rented a dacha near the family estate of Ganin’s parents, in Voskresensk.

First meeting

One day they agreed to meet. Mashenka was supposed to come to this meeting with her friends. However, she came alone. From that day on, the touching relationship between the young people began. When the summer came to an end, they returned to St. Petersburg. Lev and Masha met occasionally in the Northern capital, but walking in the cold was painful. When the girl told him that she and her parents were leaving for Moscow, he, oddly enough, took this news with some relief.

They also met the following summer. Mashenka’s father did not want to rent a dacha in Voskresensk, and Ganin had to ride a bicycle several kilometers away. Their relationship remained platonic.

The last time they met was on a country train. Then he was already in Yalta, and this was several years before leaving for Berlin. And then they lost each other. Has Ganin been thinking about the girl from Voskresensk all these years? Not at all. After meeting on the train, he probably never thought about Mashenka.

Last evening at the boarding house

Gornotsvetov and Colin organize a small celebration in honor of the engagement, as well as the departure of Podtyagin and Ganin. That evening the main character adds wine to the already drunk Alferov with the hope that he will sleep through the train on which Mashenka will arrive. Ganin will meet her and take her with him.

The next day he goes to the station. He languishes for several hours waiting for the train. But suddenly she realizes with merciless clarity that that Mashenka from Voskresensk is no longer there. Their romance ended forever. Memories of him are also exhausted. Ganin goes to another station and boards a train heading to the southwest of the country. On the way, he already dreams of how he will get across the border - to France, Provence. To sea…

Analysis of the work

Not love, but longing for one’s homeland is the main motive of Nabokov’s novel. Abroad, Ganin lost himself. He is a useless emigrant. Ganin finds the existence of the other inhabitants of the Russian boarding house pitiful, but he understands that he is not much different from them.

The hero of Vladimir Nabokov's work is a man whose life was calm and measured. Until the revolution broke out. In a sense, Mashenka is an autobiographical novel. The fate of an emigrant is always bleak, even if he does not experience financial difficulties in a foreign country. Ganin is forced to work as a waiter, as an extra - to be “a shadow sold for ten marks.” In Germany he is alone, despite the fact that his neighbors in the boarding house are people with a similar fate, the same unfortunate emigrants from Russia.

The image of Podtyagin in the novel is symbolic. Ganin leaves for the station when he is dying. He cannot know the thoughts of his former neighbor, but he feels his melancholy. In the last hours of his life, Podtyagin realizes its absurdity, the futility of the years he has lived. Shortly before this, he loses his documents. He pronounces his last words addressed to Ganin with a bitter smile: “Without a passport...”. In exile, without a past, without a future and without a present...

It is unlikely that Ganin really loved Mashenka. Rather, she was just an image from a bygone youth. The hero of the novel missed her for several days. But these were feelings similar to the usual nostalgic experiences of an emigrant.

FEATURES OF THE POETICS OF THE NOVEL “MASHENKA”

Features of the organization of artistic space in a work

“Mashenka,” his first novel (which became the last one translated into English by the author), Nabokov considered “a test of his pen.” The novel was greeted with loud applause. At the end of the public reading, Aikhenwald exclaimed: “A new Turgenev! - and demanded that the manuscript be immediately sent to Paris, to Bunin, for subsequent publication in Modern Notes. But the Slovo publishing house published the novel on March 21, 1926, exactly four months after the last point was put in the manuscript. The first reviews were unanimously friendly in tone. However, Nabokov himself valued this book extremely then. Decades later, in the preface to English translation story, the author spoke about it with good-natured skepticism: a nostalgic thing, when it was written, the memories of “first love” were still very vivid, now they, naturally, have faded, although “I tell myself that fate not only saved the fragile find from decay and oblivion, but gave me the opportunity to live long enough to watch as the mummy was revealed to the world" [ 46 , 67].

A number of works by modern domestic and foreign scientists are devoted to the analysis of “Mashenka”. Researchers have identified literary associations and reminiscences: “Pushkin’s theme”, echoes of Fet, analogies with Dante (N. Bux). Some cross-cutting motifs of the work were identified: for example, the motif of the shadow, dating back to Chamisso’s story “ Amazing story Peter Shlemil,” train and tram motifs, the motif of light, which Yu. Levin writes about. V. Erofeev made an attempt to include “Mashenka” in the concept of a meta-novel.

In our opinion, Nabokov’s method of creative memory deserves special attention. Nabokov contributed to the understanding of the role of memory in work of art. His memory turned out to be capable of recreating lost worlds, their most intimate details. The memory system in works is unusually complex. E. Ukhova notes that Nabokov’s memory has “a neo-mythological feature: she is generously endowed with the attributes and powers of a deity, she is given the ancient name - Mnemosyne... The hero can find himself in the past, as in another country: memory gives such density and brightness in the novel’s space and time to the world of memories . Here and there Mnemosyne plunges the heroes into a magical cyclical time, where they find everything that was right and that seemed lost forever" [ 60 , 160-161]. But not only the creative, but also the destructive power of memory is demonstrated. She breaks the usual time, she knows how to deceive and lie, betray and torment. The memories of Nabokov's heroes, despite their vividness, exceptional color and detail, often turn out to be false, and sometimes the reader realizes this too late. Such memory makes reading active and creative process, a challenging and exciting game.

The memory builds the plot and determines the features of the poetics of Nabokov’s first novel “Mashenka”. The novel is preceded by an epigraph from the first chapter of Eugene Onegin:

Remembering the novels of previous years,

Remembering my old love...

“Novels” here have a double meaning: they are love stories, but they are also books about love stories. The epigraph invites the reader to share a memory that is both literary and existential. The first and second are inseparably linked and fill the entire space of the text. The plot of the memory pushes aside the constantly expected renewal love story- until it displaces him beyond the boundaries of books and life. This is deceived reader's expectation necessary for Nabokov as a way to sharply draw a line between his own poetics and the traditional story of a once-experienced past, in which memory plays a subsidiary, rather than a royally central role.

The plot of the novel is constructed in the form of a “loose frame structure, where the embedded text - the hero’s memories dating back to pre-revolutionary times and the period of the Civil War (the time of remembrance) - is mixed with the framing text - the hero’s life in Berlin for a specific period of time, from Sunday to Saturday, in the spring of 1925 year (novel time)" [ 33 , 368]. The past “passes in an even pattern through Berlin everyday life” [ 47, 53].

In the shortest - and, therefore, essentially important - third chapter, the subject and object of the narrative are notably not separated. Some Russian man, like a “clairvoyant,” wanders through the streets, reading fiery letters of advertising in the sky: “Is it really... possible.” What follows is Nabokov’s commentary on these words: “However, the devil knows what was actually playing there, in the dark, above the houses, whether illuminated advertising or human thought, a sign, a call, a question thrown into the sky and suddenly received a semi-precious, delightful answer" [ 47, 53]. Immediately afterwards it is stated that every person is a “tightly boarded up world” [ 47, 53], unknown to the other. And yet, these worlds are interpenetrable when memory becomes “clairvoyance,” when what seemed forever forgotten becomes clearly visible.

In the next chapter, the hero of the novel, Ganin, “felt that he was free.” “A delightful event of the soul” (the reader does not know which one) rearranged “the light prisms of his entire life, overturned the past on him” [ 47, 56].

From this moment the story begins about the process of remembering itself. The story shifts to the past, but it is reproduced as the present. The hero lies in bed after a serious illness in a state of blissful peace and - at the same time - fantastic movement. This strange state is recorded repeatedly, through a repetition similar to a refrain: “you lie as if on a wave of air”, “you lie as if in the air”, “the bed seems to be pushed by the head of the wall... and then it starts moving, floats across the whole room into it, into the deep July sky" [ 47, 57].

It is then that the “creation” of the female image begins to take place, which will be incarnated only in a month. Everything participates in this “creation”: the feeling of flight, the sky, the chirping of birds, the decor in the room, and the “brown face of Christ in the icon case.” Everything is really important here, all the little things and details, because “the emerging image pulled in, absorbed all the sunny charm of this room and, of course, without it it would never have grown” [ 47, 58].

For Nabokov, recollection is not a loving sorting out of cherished details and details, but a spiritual act of resurrection of the individual. Therefore, the process of remembering is not a backward movement, but a forward movement, requiring spiritual peace: “... his memory continuously flew forward, like April clouds across the tender Berlin sky” [ 47, 58].

What arose in Ganin’s memory first: the image of his future/former lover or the sunny world of the room where he lay recovering? Was this world created in her image and likeness or, on the contrary, thanks to the beauty of the world the image is guessed and created? For the recovering sixteen-year-old Ganin in “Mashenka,” a premonitory, emerging image “pulls together” both the experience of flight and the sunny beauty of the surrounding world into a single whole, and this happens unconsciously, against his will. The adult Ganin, immersed in the process of remembering, has a will, there is a law. Feeling like “a god recreating a lost world” [ 47, 58], he gradually resurrects this world, not daring to place a real, and not a premonitioned, image in it, deliberately pushing it away, “since he wanted to approach it gradually, step by step, fearing to get confused, to get lost in the bright labyrinth of memory,” “ sometimes carefully returning to forgotten little things, but without getting ahead of ourselves" [ 47, 58]. The structure of the narrative itself becomes significant, where abrupt transitions from the past to the present are often not indicated in any way, not justified, and the reader is forced to interrupt reading in bewilderment of misunderstanding.

The illusion of Ganin’s complete immersion in memories is so deep that, wandering around Berlin, “he really was recovering, he felt getting out of bed for the first time, weakness in his legs” [ 47, 58]. And immediately follows a short, incomprehensible phrase: “I looked in all the mirrors” [ 47, 58]. Where? In Berlin or in Russia? It gradually becomes clear that we are in a Russian estate, but then we will find ourselves in Berlin again.

In the fifth chapter of Mashenka, Ganin tries to tell his lyrical plot to Podtyagin, and he, in turn, remembers his gymnasium. “It must be strange for you to remember this,” Ganin responds. And he continues: “It’s strange to remember at all, well, at least what happened a few hours ago, a daily - and yet not daily - little thing” [ 47, 63]. In Ganin’s thought, the interval between reality and memory is extremely shortened, which a daily trifle can turn into an important fragment of a not yet clearly formed pattern. “And about the strangeness of the memory,” Podtyagin continues and interrupts the phrase, surprised by Ganin’s smile. Responding to his attempt to talk about his first love, the old poet recalls the hackneyed nature of the topic itself: “Only it’s a little boring. Sixteen years, grove, love..." [ 47, 64]. Indeed, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bunin, not to mention the writers of the second rank, it would seem, have exhausted this plot. Unsuccessful attempt Ganina is significant. Neither monologue nor dialogue is possible here. A different form of storytelling is needed. “Memory in Nabokov’s sense is indescribable, since it occurs with such internal concentration that requires “spiritual loneliness” [ 1, 160].

Not only are Nabokov's characters immersed in memory, but the reader must also be immersed in the text and all its extra-textual connections as in his own personal memory. The need to reread Nabokov’s work, about which N. Berberova wrote [ 10, 235], is connected precisely with this feature. In the simplest everyday version, Nabokov’s texts can be imagined as a crossword puzzle. The person guessing it, having found it the right word, feels satisfied. Let us also imagine an attempt to remember the desired name, date or title - and the satisfaction when what we were looking for finally emerges in consciousness. A person experiences the same thing when, for example, he discovers the etymology of a word, or when he suddenly realizes a familiar fact of everyday life as having a complex history and a certain genesis, as having its own cultural aura. You can look at this from another point of view. An event of the present, an event that has just happened, can suddenly highlight in a completely new way some event of the past that seemed completely insignificant. Or, moreover, it makes you remember what seemed forever forgotten. Many proofs can be given, but they can all be summarized by Plato's formula: knowledge is memory. Nabokov's texts obey it completely.

Nabokov invites to total recollection, the process of resurrection of personality, culture and the world through memory. Let me give you an example. Alferov, speaking about Russia, calls it “damned.” Looking up from solving a chess problem and as if by the way, Ganin reacts only to the “amusing epithet.” Seeing in this aestheticism, indifference to the homeland and civic indifference (emigre criticism applied such reproaches to Nabokov himself), Alferov flares up: “You’ve had enough of breaking the Bolshevik. This seems very interesting to you, but believe me, this is a sin on your part. It’s time for us all to openly declare that Russia is kaput, that the “God-bearer” turned out, as one might expect, to be a gray bastard, that our homeland, therefore, has perished forever.” 47, 52]. “Of course, of course,” Ganin readily agrees to avoid the conversation.

The word “God-bearer” in relation to the Russian people is easy to read: Dostoevsky, “Demons”. Ganin most likely correlates the definition of “cursed”, applied to Russia, with one of the most famous poems by Andrei Bely “Motherland” (1908), with the emphasis poetically shifted in the word “cursed” - “cursed”:

Doomland, icy,

Cursed by iron fate -

Mother Russia, oh evil homeland,

Who made fun of you like that?

Boris Averin notes that “the actualization of such connections takes the conversation to a completely different value level than the one that is accessible to Alferov, and to which Ganin does not even consider it necessary to react” [ 1, 162]. Nabokov's reader must be immersed simultaneously in the memories of the novel's text and its literary context. Only by crossing each other do these memories lead to an understanding of meaning.

How are these two artistic spaces organized: the “real” Berlin world and the “imaginary” world of the hero’s memories? “Real” space is, first of all, the space of a Russian boarding house. In the first lines of the second chapter, Nabokov introduces the end-to-end metaphor “house-train”: in the boarding house “city railway trains could be heard day after day and for a good part of the night, and that’s why it seemed as if the whole house was slowly moving somewhere” [ 47, 37]. The metaphor, transforming, runs through the entire text (“It seemed to Clara that she lived in a glass house, swaying and floating somewhere. The noise of the trains reached here, and the bed seemed to rise and sway” [ 47, 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 middle drawer as deep as a hold” [ 47, 38] went to Alferov, and Mashenka’s photograph will be imprisoned in this hold (“...here are the cards in my desk” [ 47, 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 in someone else’s table” [ 47, 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 in the text, except for the incident with the “couple of 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 chair” [ 47, 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, Ganin the creator begins to “recreate the lost world.” His Nabokovian memory, greedy for details, resurrects the smallest details of the situation. Ganin arranges 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” [ 47, 58] and, having re-experienced the joy of recovery, leaves her forever.

The space of “memory” is open, as opposed to the “real” space that is closed 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” [ 47, 84]. Only the 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 plane to another is one of the distinctive features of the poetics of the “mature” Nabokov.

Interesting are the details that are involved in creating 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” [ 47, 57], - are contaminated into “horned yellow deer skulls” [ 47, 39], and “the brown face of Christ in the icon case” [ 47, 39] emigration replaced it with a lithograph of “The Last Supper.”

Ganin meets Mashenka for the first time at a country concert. A cobbled-together platform, benches, a bass voice that had come from St. Petersburg, “skinny, with a horse’s face, erupted like dull thunder” [ 47, 66] - all this refers us to the episode when Ganin remembers how he worked as an extra in a movie: “roughly assembled rows”, and “on the platform among the streetlights there was a fat red-haired man without a jacket”, “who was screaming into a bullhorn until he was stupefied” [ 47, 49-50]. “It is this episode on the set that introduces one of the central cross-cutting motifs into the novel - “selling the shadow,” writes A. Yanovsky [ 69, 845].

The main line of “shadows” runs through Ganin’s entire existence in his Berlin home - “a sad house where seven Russian lost shadows lived” [ 47, 39]; at dinner, “he did not think that these people, the shadows of his exile dream, would talk about the real his life - about Mashenka" [ 47, 71]; on the bus “Podtyagin also seemed to him like a shadow, random and unnecessary” [ 47, 105]; the smell of carbide from the garage “helped Ganin remember even more vividly that Russian, rainy August, that flow of happiness that the shadows of his Berlin life had so annoyingly interrupted all morning” [ 47, 81]. And, finally, an emphatically declarative peak: “His shadow lived in Mrs. Dorn’s boarding house, - he himself was in Russia, experiencing his memory as reality. Time for him was the course of his memories”; and further: “It was not just a memory, but life, much more real ... than the life of his Berlin shadow” [ 47, 73]. So, the surrounding real life is a dream that only frames the true reality of memories. And only Mashenka is his real life. However, there is no clear opposition between dream and reality in the novel.

And only on the last pages of the novel does a double awakening occur, and everything previous turns out to be a “dream within a dream.” It is remarkable that this turn is prepared again with the help of “shadows”: early in the morning Ganin goes out to meet Mashenka, and “due to the fact that the shadows lay in the other direction, strange combinations were created... Everything seemed not so staged, fragile, upside down as in the mirror. And just as the sun gradually rose higher, and the shadows dispersed to their usual places, - in the same way, in this sober light, the life of memories that Ganin lived became what it really was. was - distant past" [ 47, 110-111]. So far this is only an awakening from the sleep of memories, putting the real and the unreal in the place dictated by common sense. But then a second awakening follows - from the “suffering stagnation” of Berlin life: “And the fact that he noticed everything with some kind of fresh love - and the carts that rolled to the market, ... and multi-colored advertisements ..., - this was the secret turn, his awakening" [ 47, 111]. A new impression - workers laying tiles - completes the process. “Ganin... felt with merciless clarity that his romance with Mashenka was over forever. It lasted only four days... But now he has completely exhausted his memory... and the image of Mashenka remained with the dying poet there, in the house of shadows, which itself had already become a memory.

And besides this image, there is no other Mashenka, and there cannot be" [ 47, 111-112].

It is said with declarative clarity and directness - and everything remains unsteady and doubtful. It is only clear that the meeting of past and present, “dream” and “reality” - what the entire novel was dedicated to and led to - is impossible. But what is real and what is illusory? The “real” romance with Mashenka turns out to be an illusion, “in fact” the romance with her was only four days of memories, and what is “real” is not the living woman who will get off the train in an hour, but her image in already exhausted memories. “Sober” and “mercilessly clear” declarations of the “awakened” hero turn out to be the strongest apology for reality, namely memories.”

The theme of reality/unreality hangs in the form of a typically Nabokovian swing, oscillating in the reader’s mind from one “reality” to another. Yu. Levin in “Notes about “Mashenka” by V.V. Nabokov” writes: “... the novel is a “semantic swing”, where what is denied is immediately, at least hidden, affirmed, and vice versa - yet the dominant theme is “non-existence ", "nothing", "emptiness", "refusal"; the novel is an apology for “nothing” and a game of “nothing” [ 33, 370].

A “real” love affair (the hero’s romance with Lyudmila) is boring, uninteresting, painful, even unnatural. Hence Ganin’s refusal from Mashenka at the moment when she tells him: “I am yours. Do with me what you want” (after this “Ganin... thought that it was all over, he had stopped loving Mashenka” [ 47, 86]). On the contrary, when they met by chance a year later on the carriage platform, had an insignificant conversation and “she got off at the first station,” then “the further she walked away, the clearer it became to him that he would never stop loving her,” and later, having hit the wave emigration to Istanbul, “he felt how far from him... that Mashenka whom he had loved forever” [ 47, 87]: a peculiar version of “love for the distant”.

What really happened was as if it didn’t exist: “He... didn’t remember exactly when he saw her for the first time” [ 47, 65]; “He didn’t remember when he saw her again - the next day or a week later” [ 47, 67]. “Nothing”, unrealized - anticipations, memories - are infinitely more important and valuable than the “real”. The climax of the novel comes on the eve of meeting Mashenka and after the final abandonment of her, framing the hero’s novel in a fable-like manner. First: “And that moment when he was sitting on the windowsill... and thought that, probably, never, never would he get to know the young lady with a black bow on the delicate back of her head... - Ganin now rightly considered this moment to be the most important and sublime in his entire life" [ 47, 67]; second: “Ganin... felt with merciless clarity that his romance with Mashenka was over forever. It lasted only four days [memories] - these four days were, perhaps, happiest times his life" [ 47, 111].

“In this apology for “nothing”, dreams, memories - in correlation with the emptiness and incoherence of the “real” - one can see the expression of a specifically emigrant consciousness” [ 33, 373-374].

However, A. Dolinin believes that the term “swing” is not entirely appropriate. “We are talking about a spiral-circular movement, which is associated with the Nietzschean theme of “eternal return” [ 20, 10]. One cannot but agree with this position. Meetings in someone else's estate already introduce the theme of departure, separation, the estate itself is a “platform with columns,” and the privacy of the lovers is violated. Then comes the winter wanderings, phone conversation with the interjection of someone else's voice, a failed meeting and the final extinction of love. A new turn and rise of love begins with a chance meeting on a train and subsequent separation. In Crimea, Ganin again remembers the beginning of love, and everything else seems pale, conventional, unreal and begins to weigh on him. Crimea is for Berlin Ganin “a memory within a memory.” The narrative describes a “closed spiral”, since Mashenka’s letters already mention the poet Podtyagin and future husband The Alferovs are Ganin’s current neighbors in the boarding house. The Crimean period ends with flight from Russia to the south, wanderings and adventures.

Thus, the past reality is finally restored, brought back to life and finds its continuation in the life of Berlin: Ganin again begins to live in anticipation of adventure, again leaves his beloved woman and makes a new escape. This turn is again interpreted as the morning “rearrangement of shadows.” The image of Mashenka remains in the “house of shadows”, and the hero says goodbye to her image “forever”. The building of the house at the end is a metaphor for the completion of a literary novel. Copyright presence at the end of the novel brings closure and a break from the circle. The main axis is set by the parallel of filming in “shadow life” and building a house in “real life”. In the first case - lazy workers, “freely and indifferently , like blue angels" [ 47, 111], moving from beam to beam high above - and below there was a crowd of Russians filming “in complete ignorance of the general plot of the picture” [ 47, 49]. In the second case - “on a light binding in the morning sky chenille figures of workers. One moved along the ridge itself easily and freely , as if he was about to fly away... this lazy, even transmission had a calming effect..." [ 47, 111]. These worker angels are above everything that is happening “below”, in Ganin’s world, and in this sense they are the author’s agents in the text, signs of a “different” reality. Nabokov’s “metaphysics” is already contained here literary text: “For Nabokov... attitude art world and the author’s consciousness is a hypothetical model for unraveling the “mystery of the universe,” the mystery of the relationship between the humanly knowable and transcendental worlds” [ 16, 214].

On the other hand, the ending of the novel is quite ambivalent. It is not very clear whether fate is preparing a new return for Ganin - then his behavior can be assessed as a Nietzschean acceptance of return and liberation from the burden of history (from the “common fate” of emigration) - or his movement is “overcoming and spiritualizing the circle” [ 10, 10], that is, a forward and upward movement, forming a spiral.

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? [ 47, 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 - the distant past” [ 47, 111]. Mashenka remains “together with the dying old poet there, in the house of shadows, which itself has become a memory” [ 47, 112]. A revolution takes place in the hero’s consciousness: “everything seems out of place, fragile, upside down, like in a mirror” [ 47, 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 trembling and gentle companion who accompanied him, lay down at his feet as a grayish shadow, and spoke” [ 47, 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 was yellowish and dim” [ 47, 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” [ 47, 41], the faces of the extras “in purple and yellow stains of makeup” [ 47, 49]; and at a party in the dancers' room, the lamp was wrapped in a purple piece of silk. And although Ganin’s memory “rearranged the light prisms of his entire life” [ 47, 56], the color opposition turns out to be partially 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...” [ 47, 68]. And “heavy bumblebees sleep on pale lilac scabiosis pads” [ 47, 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” [ 47, 73]. However, from here arises the contrast between the natural color of the “open” Russian space and artificial - “closed” Berlin.

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 who is 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" [ 47, 36]. Ivan Tolstoy called Nabokov a master of exposition: “There is no dynamics in his books, the events in them are only brewing, 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.” [ 58, 29]. The elevator carrying the future antagonists gets stuck. Darkness falls. “...what a thin floor here. And underneath there is a black well" [ 47, 36]. Alferov is confused about his companion's first and patronymic names. Alferov’s unrealized handshake (Alferov’s hand pokes into Ganin’s cuff) suggests that there is “something symbolic” in their meeting. “What is... the symbol?” - Ganin asked gloomily. “Yes, here, at a stop, ... in this darkness. And in anticipation. Today... Podtyagin... argued with me about the meaning of our emigrant life, our great expectation" [ 47, 36]. Meanwhile, in the elevator are exactly the two who will be waiting for Mashenka’s arrival throughout the entire novel. (And in the end, already behind the curtain, the situation will change sign, and it will not be met nobody). Suddenly the elevator starts moving and stops in front of an empty platform: “Miracles,” Alferov repeated, “have risen, but there is no one. Also, you know, a symbol..."[ 47, 37]. For no reason the elevator ascended and stopped in front of an empty platform, as well as anticipation, is indeed a “symbol” of the novel.

Alferov lives in an “April Fool’s” room (the rooms are numbered with sheets of a tear-off calendar), and at the end of the novel Ganin arranges something like April Fool's Day Prank. Throughout the novel, he is busy with preparations for the ghostly arrival of Mashenka, and his businesslike activity - “empty troubles” - unfolds parallel to the course of Ganin’s memories, his “real romance” with her. Even the glass that Alferov knocks off the table is empty . At the end of the novel, at a party, he takes an empty bottle, swings it widely at the open window - and does not throws. Thus, the theme of “unreality and unrealization” of the antihero is revealed.

Alferov, Ganin and the reader are waiting for Mashenka to appear, but “Chekhov’s gun, hanged in the first act, misfires in the last, Nabokov-style, - the heroine never appears in the “real” time of the novel” [ 69, 848].

Raising an event into a symbol is not alien to Ganin: “... on that black, stormy night when, on the eve of leaving for St. Petersburg for the start of the school year, he met her for the last time... something terrible and unexpected happened, a symbol, to be maybe all the future sacrileges" [ 47, 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" [ 47, 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: “It’s already Sunday... That means there are six days left” [ 47, 36]. “Think about it, my wife is coming on Saturday. And tomorrow is already Tuesday..." [ 47, 51]. “Three, four, five, seven,” Alferov counted again and winked at the dial with a blissful smile.” 47, 105]. Ganin: “Four days left: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And now I can die..." [ 47, 59]. “And tomorrow Mashenka is coming,” he exclaimed to himself, circling the blessed ones slightly with frightened eyes ceiling, walls, floor..." [ 47, 94]. “Yes, this is happiness. We will meet in twelve hours" [ 47, 98].

Such analogies “blur” the opposition, expanding the possibilities of reader perception and, consequently, different interpretations of the text. Thus, V. Erofeev believes that Ganin commits an “unethical act” and “does not feel the slightest remorse” [ 24, 17]. Thus, an atmosphere of not only semantic instability, but also moral ambiguity is created in the text.

But there are also elements in the text that weaken the opposition. They can be conditionally called signs-signals that mark a change in the situation, critical plot points and changes psychological state heroes.

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..." [ 47, 53]. Here the old man “signals” the beginning of the plot. The second time it occurs in climax- a few hours before the arrival of the “Northern Express”: “By wide street A hunched old man in a black cape was already walking, tapping his stick, and, groaning, bent down when the tip of the stick knocked out the cigarette butt" [ 47, 105].

The “shadows” motif is marked in a similar way. It is introduced into the text with a description of filming. Ganin recalls “lazy workers, freely and indifferently, like blue angels, moving from beam to beam high above...” [ 47, 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 was moving along the very ridge, easily and freely, as if it was about to fly away" [ 47, 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” [ 47, 77]; "a bow that opened its wings" [ 47, 68]. This comparison turns the detail into a multi-valued symbol for Nabokov’s poetic system. 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” [ 47, 85].

We meet another character in the novel, Clara, at a tram stop with a paper bag of oranges pressed to her chest. She dreams of a merchant from whom she “buys oranges on the way to work” [ 47, 61]. At the dancers' party, Clara drinks orange liqueur. 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...” [ 47, 103-104].

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

A system of often very deeply hidden repetitions or, more precisely, implicit matches Nabokov makes readers immerse themselves in the memory of the text readable work. Then they begin to appear" secret signs"explicit plot. So unexpected episode or new fact suddenly it can make a person see the connection of those events that were previously not connected in any way with each other - and instead of an endless accumulation of lines, a meaningful pattern begins to emerge.

Plot

The main character Ganin lives in a Russian boarding house in Berlin. One of the neighbors, Alferov, keeps talking about the arrival of his wife Mashenka from Soviet Russia at the end of the week. From the photograph, Ganin recognizes his former love and decides to sneak her away from the station. All week Ganin lives with memories. On the eve of Mashenka’s arrival in Berlin, Ganin gets Alferov drunk and sets his alarm clock incorrectly. IN last moment, however, Ganin decides that past image you can’t return it and goes to another station, leaving Berlin forever. Mashenka herself appears in the book only in Ganin’s memoirs.

Mashenka and her husband appear later in Nabokov's novel The Defense of Luzhin (Chapter 13).

In 1991, a film of the same name was made based on the book.

The image of Russia in the novel

V. Nabokov describes the life of emigrants in a German boarding house.

These people are poor, both materially and spiritually. They live in thoughts about their past, pre-emigrant life in Russia, and cannot build the present and future.

The image of Russia is contrasted with 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, “they 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 “metamppsychosis.” Russia is called damned. Alferov declares that Russia is kaput, “that the “God-bearer” turned out, as one might have expected, 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 remembers his Motherland most of the time. 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 hero’s memory, the nature of Russia mainly emerges, its detailed description: smells, colors... For him, separation from Mashenka is also separation from Russia. The image of Mashenka is closely intertwined with the image of Russia. Clara loves Russia and feels lonely in Berlin.

Podtyagin dreams of apocalyptic Petersburg, and Ganin dreams of “only beauty.”

The heroes of the novel remember their youth, studying at the gymnasium, college, how they played Cossacks - robbers, lapta; remember magazines, poems, birch groves, forest edges...

Thus, the heroes have an ambivalent attitude towards Russia, each of them has their own ideas about the Motherland, their own memories.

Memory in a novel (using the example of Ganin)

Ganin is the hero of the novel “Mashenka” by V. Nabokov. This character is not inclined to action, apathetic. Critics of literature of the 20s They consider Ganin a failed attempt to present a strong personality. But there is also dynamics in the image of this character. We need to remember the hero’s past and his reaction in a stopped elevator (trying to find a way out). Ganin’s memories are also dynamics. The difference between him and other heroes is that he is the only one leaving the boarding house.

Memory in V. Nabokov's novel is presented as an all-encompassing force, as an animated being. Ganin, seeing Mashenka’s photograph, radically changes his worldview. 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 his youth, where he met his first love. Mashenka’s letter to Ganin awakens in him memories of a bright feeling.

Sleep in the novel is equal to falling. Nabokov's hero passes this test. The means to awakening is memory.

The fullness of life returns to Ganin through memory. This happens with the help of Mashenka’s photograph. It is from contact with her that Ganin’s resurrection begins. As a result of the healing, Ganin remembers the feelings he experienced during his recovery from typhus.

The memory of Mashenka, the hero’s appeal to her image, can be compared to an appeal to the Virgin Mary for help. N. Poznansky notes that Nabokov’s memories in their essence resemble “prayer-like conspiracies.”

So, memory plays a central role in the novel. With its help, the plot is built; their fate depends on the memories of the heroes.

That. memory is a kind of mechanism through which the dynamics in the novel are realized.

[When writing this section, the article by Dmitrienko O.A. was used. Folklore and 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, but only close people. If you are not one of them, take the trouble to call her less affectionately. Works with the title “Mashenka” Mashenka (novel) ... ... Wikipedia

Mashenka 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 this surname, see Kachanov. Wikipedia has articles about other people named Kachanov, Roman. Roman Kachanov Birth name: Ruvim Abelevich Kachanov Date of birth ... Wikipedia

This term has other meanings, see Lolita. Lolita Lolita

In 1926 the first prose work Nabokov's 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 the whole human type- Russian intellectual emigrant." 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, which 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 refers to early period Nabokov’s work is, perhaps, the most “classical” of all the works he created, but the game with the reader characteristic of the writer is also present here. It is unclear what serves as the root cause: either emotional experiences deform 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 recollection of his former life in Russia, cut short by the revolution and Civil War; The narration is told in third person. In Ganin’s life before emigration there was one thing: an 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, country estate, three poplars, a barn with a painted window, even the flickering 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 you can’t 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 disconnection from life. The question arises: why do they live? Ganin acts in films, selling his shadow. Is it worth living just 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 settle down, 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 black affectionate 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 that remained where love had once slipped very fleetingly - made him press without passion to the purple rubber of her yielding lips...” Did Ganin have real 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 making him smaller true love" In Nabokov's world happy love impossible. It is either connected with betrayal, or the heroes 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, signifying 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. This is primarily due to the ghostly image 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.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is one of the most interesting writers XX century. His work has caused and continues to cause a lot of controversy and controversial judgments. Therefore, it is quite fascinating to analyze Nabokov. “Mashenka” is not just a novel, but the writer’s first novel, which makes it even more significant and valuable.

Nabokov's works

Vladimir Nabokov represents the unsolved mystery and inexplicable enigma of twentieth-century literature. Some consider him a genius, others do not recognize him as a talented writer at all. He was born in XIX century in St. Petersburg and died at the end of the last century in Switzerland. Most of his life was lived abroad, but not forgotten Russian childhood. Nabokov wrote both in his native language and in English language, translated his novels, gave lectures on philology.

Many of his texts anticipated the era of modernism, and the style of his works is so original that it has no analogues either in Russian or in foreign literature. The ambiguity and heterogeneity of his creations make it impossible full analysis Nabokov. We take “Mashenka” for study not only because it is Vladimir Vladimirovich’s first novel, but also because it is the first work he wrote in exile.

History of creation

So, let's begin the analysis of Nabokov (“Mashenka” is the focus of our attention). The novel was written in 1926 in Berlin. It has many biographical motives, primarily related to longing for the Motherland, the unbearable sadness of an emigrant for a lost home.

In the Niva magazine, immediately after the release of the novel, a review of it was published: “Nabokov embroiders his fate according to the outline of his works... reflects the fate of an entire human type - the Russian emigrant intellectual.” Life abroad was like for many who left home country people is difficult. The only thing Nabokov could find solace in was memories of the past, where there was joy, love, home. It was these bright thoughts that formed the basis of the novel.

Video on the topic

Before we begin the analysis, let us turn to a retelling of the plot of the novel “Mashenka”. The summary should begin to be described in the spring of 1934 in Berlin. The main character, Ganin Lev Glebovich, lives in a boarding house for Russians, where, in addition to him, live:

• Alferov Alexey Ivanovich (mathematician);
• Podtyagin Anton Sergeevich (old poet),
• “cozy young lady” Klara, in love with Ganin and working as a typist;
• a couple in love - ballet dancers Colin and Gornotsvetov.

Ganin arrived in Berlin a year ago, during which time he changed several jobs: orderly, worker, waiter. He managed to save enough money to leave, but first he needs to part with Lyudmila, with whom he has been in a relationship for three months, which the hero is terribly tired of. But Ganin cannot find a pretext for the breakup. The windows of his room, as luck would have it, overlook the railway, and the desire to leave becomes irresistible. In a fit of overwhelming feelings, Lev Glebovich announces to the hostess of the boarding house that he is leaving on Saturday.

First love

A lot of Nabokov’s own feelings and experiences were reflected in the work “Mashenka”. The summary of the novel (especially Ganin’s memories of the past) also proves this.

Lev Glebovich learns from Alferov that his wife, Mashenka, will arrive on Saturday. In the photograph of the mathematician's wife, Ganin recognizes the girl with whom he first fell in love. He is captivated by memories of the past, and he even feels ten years younger. And the next day he tells Lyudmila that he is in love with someone else. Ganin feels freedom and gives himself entirely to his memories.

He is sixteen years old, he is in a summer estate, where he is recovering from typhus. Out of boredom, the young man creates in his thoughts the image of an ideal lover, whom he meets exactly a month later. It was Mashenka - a girl with a “chestnut braid in a black bow”, burning eyes, a dark face and a “moving, burry” voice. She was always cheerful and loved sweets. Once Ganin met her with her friends, and they agreed to go boating, but the next day Mashenka came without her friends. From that time on, young people began to meet near the empty estate.

When they saw each other for the last time on the eve of leaving for St. Petersburg, Ganin noticed that the shutters at one window were slightly open and a face could be seen in the glass. It turned out that the watchman's son was spying on them. Ganin became so angry that he beat him severely.

In the next morning main character left. Mashenka moved to St. Petersburg only in November. Now it has become more difficult for young people to meet - it’s freezing outside, you can’t go out for a long time. The only consolation was the telephone - in the evenings they could talk to each other for hours. And shortly before the New Year, Mashenka’s family moved to Moscow. To his surprise, Ganin felt relief from this.

In the summer they had the opportunity to meet again. The only problem is that this year Mashenka’s father rented a dacha fifty miles from the Ganins’ estate. The young man went to his beloved, but arrived already after dark. She greeted him with the words: “I’m yours, do whatever you want with me.” But there were too many rustles around, it seemed to Ganin that someone was coming, so he quickly left.

They last met a year after that on a train and have not seen each other since then. Only exchanged a few letters during the war.

Completion of the novel

As you can see, realistic and very life story Nabokov draws in his novel.

In the morning, Ganin says goodbye to the boarders and goes to the station. There is an hour left until the train arrives. Gradually, thoughts begin to creep into Ganin’s head that his romance with Mashenka ended a long time ago. Without waiting for the woman to arrive, he goes to another station and leaves.

Theme and idea

The analysis of the novel “Mashenka” by Nabokov should begin by defining the theme and idea. It seems that the theme of love in the work comes first and is the leading one, but this is not the case. In fact, the novel is dedicated exclusively to the lost homeland - Russia. All other subthemes and motifs are grouped around this image.

In the work, Nabokov, and with him the main character, are trying to regain their lost happiness and regain paradise. But the outcome turns out to be disappointing - what was lost cannot be returned, everything is over, all that remains is wandering, there is no turning back.

Conflict in the novel

The conflict that Nabokov created in the novel is very interesting and specific. “Mashenka” (analysis of the work) allows us to conclude that the main contradiction is based on contrasts: genuine - fake, everyday - unusual. Dreams about Russia become more real than life in exile, and the everyday life of Berlin is replaced by the exclusivity and unusualness of the expanses of the native country.

Plot and plot

If you conduct a thorough analysis of the novel “Mashenka” by Nabokov, it turns out that there is no plot in it as such. The content of the work is more reminiscent of a stream of consciousness: Ganin’s constant internal monologues, character dialogues, descriptions of places where this or that event occurs.

Of course, one cannot call the novel built on this alone. There is an outside view here - the narration is told from a third person, the description of space is characterized by a certain objectivity, the reader hears not only the voice of the hero, but also the speeches of other characters. However, the entire plot of the novel can be reduced to several events: Ganin is getting ready to leave, learns about the arrival of his long-time lover, remembers the feelings he experienced in his youth, is going to revive them, but at the last moment refuses this and leaves. It is in this paucity of actions that the originality and unusualness of Nabokov’s work is expressed, what makes him unlike either Russian or foreign writers.

Image of Ganin

The image of the main character was largely copied from Vladimir Nabokov. “Mashenka” (an analysis of Ganin’s feelings and experiences as an emigrant) once again confirms this. In Berlin, no one needs him, and he doesn’t care about anyone either. Lev Glebovich is lonely and unhappy, depressed, his soul has been taken over by hopeless melancholy. He has no desire to fight anything or change anything.

Only memories of Mashenka revive the hero. Thoughts about the past revive his soul and body, illusory happiness warms him, pushes him to action, and gives him hope for the future. But this euphoria does not last long. Sitting at the station, waiting for Mashenka, he suddenly realizes that it is impossible to return the past, oh paradise lost(The Motherland) can only be dreamed of, but it will never be able to be found again.

Mashenka's image

It is impossible, when analyzing the story “Mashenka” (Nabokov), not to pay attention to the image of the main character, even if she appears only in Ganin’s dreams. Only the brightest and brightest are associated with Mashenka in the work. happy memories. The image of the girl becomes the personification of forever lost happiness, Russia even before the war and revolution.

The fact that Mashenka, merging with the image of the Motherland, never appears in the novel speaks of the unattainability of paradise (Russia). It appears only in memories and dreams; more is inaccessible to emigrants.

The peculiarity of the end of the novel

Very often in this work, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov plays on deceiving the reader’s expectations: Mashenka (the analysis of her image is presented above) never appears, the supposed love triangle, to which the arrangement of the main characters is pushing, turns out to be nothing, and the ending does not at all correspond to traditional literary techniques.

The end of the novel is more philosophical than psychological character. Nabokov does not allow the characters to meet not because of deep emotional experiences, but because there is no return to the past.

Conclusion

Thus, the originality and certain mystery of the work is confirmed by Nabokov’s analysis. “Mashenka” in this context is not only the author’s first novel, but also a statement about his unusual talent, which in later works just developed.