The Woman Beyond the Image: Nabokov’s Mary and The Original of Laura
Spoilers for the ending of Mary and the surviving Original of Laura cards.
In the first pages of Mary, two Russian émigrés stand in a stalled Berlin lift, unable to see each other. Alfyorov fills the darkness with talk, including the news that his wife is coming from Russia; Ganin wants the light back. Later, he will recognize the woman in a photograph as his former lover. The lift has already arranged the problem: Alfyorov has news of his wife in a letter, Ganin has the image of a girl he once loved, and Mary herself is absent from both versions. When the bulb comes on, it reveals only the irritating neighbor beside Ganin; Mary will enter the novel through talk, a photograph, letters, and memory.
I read this first novel beside Nabokov’s last unfinished project, The Original of Laura, because the distance between them changes the problem. In Mary, a completed story follows a man who builds a lover from memory and then decides how to live after that work is done. In the surviving Laura cards, a woman becomes the subject of a book inside the book, while her husband devises a way to erase himself as a written figure. The cards record what Nabokov was trying on the page without exactly revealing the novel he would have made from them. We could only infer it would've been possibly very good.
Mary: Ganin’s memory and the letters he misreads
The Berlin pension is crowded with substitutes. Its doors carry the first six dates of April cut from an old calendar; the landlady has distributed a dead husband's furniture so that a desk and its stool, a pair of armchairs, and the volumes of an encyclopedia occupy separate rooms. Passing trains lend the stationary building an illusion of movement. Ganin, meanwhile, has sold his anonymous image as a film extra. A date, an armchair, a desk, or a filmed body persists as a detachable piece of someone’s life.
Ganin begins imagining Mary before he meets her. Recuperating from typhus as a boy, he traces paths through the roses on his bedroom wallpaper. A screen, pictures, a little jet of water from the washstand, noises from outside, and the light caught in the bed's brass knobs fill his slow hours. The girl he will encounter a month later takes shape in this furnished anticipation. Years later, remembering Mary means reentering that room—its wallpaper paths, washstand, sounds, and reflected light. Nabokov gives desire a physical history because Ganin's longing returns to a landscape he had already learned to inhabit.
Nabokov makes the familiar bond between lost love and lost country persuasive through material perception. As Ganin walks in Berlin, the earlier Russian summer gathers around him, so that a foreign street and a remembered landscape occupy the same day. Wallpaper, light, odors, garden paths, and train sounds carry the ache of recovering Mary from the place where he first wanted her. The visual pressure nevertheless slackens in the middle: after the precisely partitioned pension, long stretches follow a recollection whose emotional direction is easy to anticipate. I found the memory richly furnished but increasingly predictable in its course.
Mary's letters resist the direction Ganin gives the past. He keeps five from their separation during the war. Their hesitations and changes of mood make a different person audible: she asks him to write even trifles, wonders whether she has forgotten how to say goodbye affectionately, worries at his silence, and wants to know what their feelings would be if they met. In the fourth letter she proposes that they “meet and verify one’s feelings,” making a future encounter the test of either person's account of the other.
Ganin reads all five immediately before her arrival in Berlin. The last, written years before, says she loves him and hopes they will meet again; he concludes that she still loves him now. We can feel why the letters make him happy without mistaking past love for a current promise. Even Mary's handwriting is described as though it were alive and capable of retracting a word. Her old marks carry her voice to Ganin, but he supplies the present promise himself.
Mary’s ending: Ganin at the station
For much of Mary, I wanted the novel to ask more of Ganin than the longing it renders so well. He ends his relationship with Lyudmila bluntly; Klara, a fellow lodger, mistakes him for a thief after finding him searching Alfyorov's room for Mary's photograph. He knows of the mistake and leaves without correcting it. When Alfyorov drunkenly asks him to set an alarm for Mary's train, Ganin sets it hours late. Each action occupies very little narrative time. Together they make his freedom cost something outside his memory, even if the book offers no single moral verdict on him.
At the station, Nabokov returns to the detailed eye that dominates the opening and directs it toward work occurring in the present. Ganin reaches a public garden in time to meet Mary; beyond it, workers are roofing a house. Two men, lying one above the other on the frame, pass red tiles to a third as the fresh timber catches the morning light. A train once lent motion to an immobile pension. Now a piece of a house advances through real hands while Ganin sits still.
Watching the roofers releases Ganin from the remembered summer. The new wood seems more alive to him than his vivid reconstruction of the past, and he understands the affair to be over. He watches Mary's train enter the station, then takes his cases to another station and leaves Berlin. Because each tile advances from hand to hand, the house acquires visible form in the present; Ganin's planned meeting would return him to a past he has already staged in detail.
He leaves Mary on the train, unseen. The narration adopts Ganin's conviction that no Mary exists beyond his image—a precise account of his exhausted relation to her, and a disturbing account if allowed to define her existence. His deception keeps Alfyorov asleep, while his departure keeps Mary outside the scene that explains him—a choice whose aesthetic fitness, as Leona Toker argues, does not cancel its human cost.[1] Mary's fourth-letter request sharpens that cost: she once proposed a meeting as a test, whereas Ganin preserves the version he can finish alone. Nabokov renders the roof with exactness and leaves Ganin's obligations to Alfyorov and Mary unresolved.
I think Mary is a good novel whose ending exceeds the familiarity of its premise. I would still place it well below Nabokov's last finished novel, Look at the Harlequins! The surviving Laura cards pose a different problem of seeing another person.
The Original of Laura: writing and erasing a body
Flora first appears at a party speaking about her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild. She asks to be taken somewhere quiet, later dismisses a lover by telephone, and dodges his attempt to pin her against a wall. Nabokov then turns from her movements to a precise, intrusive inventory of her body. Within a sentence, anatomical observation becomes literary composition: her bones supply the frame of a hypothetical novel, as if a book could be made from what lets her body stand.
After admitting that nobody can tell what goes on in Flora's head, the narrator speculates anyway; the page is far more certain of her hips and spine than of her thoughts. Its erotic catalog lingers over the body while claiming an exceptional power to render the encounter, an authority her speech and refusals have not surrendered. Flora keeps moving beyond these descriptions. That excess of action over portraiture might have become the novel's subject, but the fragment does not establish how fully it would have.
Later cards introduce a published novel called My Laura. Its account says that the book's first-person narrator destroys his mistress while portraying her. The details are claimed to be faithful to an “original,” crowding likeness, possession, and harm into a few lines. Because the assertion belongs to an inset fiction, it establishes the violent ambition of My Laura; these cards do not establish a completed fate for Flora. In the opening cards she is alert and evasive, with actions the portrait cannot finish even when other characters use her as material.
The published cards move from Flora's portrayal to Wild's imagined body. On the dark surface of his closed eyelids he cannot hold a convincing image of his body, so he settles on a vertical chalk line divided into legs, torso, and head; the line is also the pronoun “I.” Rubbing away its base brings the physical pleasure of imagined toe removal. At one point he leaves the mark erased, opens his eyes, and sees that his toes are intact. He then tries to stand and reports that he cannot feel them. From the inner blackboard to the failed attempt to stand, the sequence leaves perception, sensation, and expectation out of alignment.
Where Ganin furnishes another person in memory, Wild reduces himself to a chalk line and lets a “thumb of thought” erase its foot. The experiment carries a bodily cost in its own telling, though the surviving cards never settle how it relates to Flora or My Laura. The published sequence ends with a list of alternatives for erasure, a working note that cannot tell us how Nabokov would have concluded the novel.
Mary moves from a remembered summer to red tiles passed among workers, and Ganin makes his choice while Mary remains on the arriving train. The Laura cards turn portraiture and self-erasure into a more violent and comic experiment; their prose can be magnificent, awkward, or cheap. Ganin can leave Berlin after exhausting his remembered Mary. The surviving cards supply no comparable resolution for Wild or Flora: his imagined erasure and her shifting portraits remain separate experiments whose final relation we will never know.
Sources and notes
1. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Cornell University Press, 1989), ch. 3, pp. 36–46. Her analysis distinguishes the aesthetic fitness of Ganin's withdrawal from its human and moral cost. The present essay extends that tension through Mary's letters and the contrast with the surviving Laura cards. Open-access edition.
2. Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny in collaboration with the author (Vintage International ebook), especially chs. 1–2, 4, 13, 16–17. The English quotations and diction here refer to that translation.
3. Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Vintage International ebook), original-card transcription, especially cards 1–20, 59–74, 79–86, 122–38. Dmitri Nabokov's introduction and the edition's note describe the posthumous publication and editorial presentation; the surviving cards do not establish a final authorial arrangement.
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