It was written by V. Nabokov shortly after his wedding to Vera Slonim in Berlin in 1925 (and, by the way, dedicated to her) and published in the Berlin “Slovo” in 1926. This was Nabokov’s first novel. A novel about first, childhood love...
They say that Nabokov called “Mashenka” a “failed book”, and when signing it for someone, he drew a butterfly doll on the title page as a sign that it was still far from perfect... Then there would be “Lolita”, “Other Shores”, “ Luzhin's defense...
Some consider the novel autobiographical, even despite the author’s own assurances that he never “sticks anyone in his things.”

The novel takes place in 1924 in Berlin, in a boarding house where emigrants from Russia live. Lev Ganin, looking at the family photographs of his neighbor Alferov, suddenly unexpectedly recognizes his first love in his wife... Mashenka... “a wondrous, dazzling memory of happiness - a woman’s face, emerging again after many years of everyday oblivion...”(With)

Memories of childhood came flooding back... Russia nine years ago, he was then sixteen years old, and while recovering from typhus in a summer estate near Voskresensk, he created a female image for himself, which he met in reality a month later. It was Mashenka. They met not far from the estate all summer and then again, when they both moved to St. Petersburg... and then Mashenka’s parents took her to Moscow, and their last meeting on the train could be called accidental...

And now she is the wife of another, and in a few days she arrives in Berlin... Ganin sets himself the goal of returning Mashenka. Having given Alferov a drink the day before, he goes to the station instead... Already some moments separate him from happiness. And what... At the very last moment he understands “with merciless clarity that his romance with Mashenka was over forever. It lasted only four days - these four days were perhaps the happiest time of his life. But now he has completely exhausted his memory, has become completely satisfied with it, and the image of Mashenka remains with the dying old poet there, in the house of shadows, which itself has already become a memory.”(With)

And seeing the train approaching noisily, he grabs his suitcases and decides to go to another station.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899 in the capital of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, into a noble and wealthy family. In the eventful 1917, his father was briefly among the ministers of the Kerensky government, and when the Bolsheviks came to power in the country, the Nabokovs were forced to emigrate. In 1919, Vladimir entered Cambridge University and graduated in 1922. In March of the same year in Berlin, during an assassination attempt on the head of the Cadet Party, Pavel Miliukov, Nabokov’s father died, shielding Miliukov from the bullet of a monarchist terrorist.
Nabokov spent the twenties and thirties in Berlin, then lived in Paris, and in 1940 moved to the USA. A brilliant mind and an excellent sense of humor allowed Nabokov to become an excellent writer. A characteristic feature of his works was not so much the vividness of images, ideas and the twist of the plot, but his masterly command of English - a language not his native one. The writer translated “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and “Eugene Onegin” into English. In 1961, he and his wife settled in Switzerland. Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977 at the age of 78.

Other works:

“Camera Obscura”, “The Gift”, “Lolita”, “The Defense of Luzhin”, the book of memoirs “Other Shores”, etc.

Dedicated to my wife

Remembering the novels of previous years,
Remembering my old love...
Pushkin

Lev Glevo... Lev Glebovich? Well, what’s your name, my friend?
You can dislocate your tongue...
“It’s possible,” Ganin confirmed rather coldly, trying
to see the face of your interlocutor in unexpected darkness. He
was irritated by the stupid situation in which they both found themselves, and
this forced conversation with a stranger,
“I inquired about your name for a reason,” carefreely
continued the voice, “In my opinion, every name...
“Come on, I’ll 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 combination. It's from you
requires dryness, hardness, originality. I have a name
more modest; and his wife’s name is quite simple: Maria. By the way,
Let me introduce myself: Alexey Ivanovich Alferov. Sorry, I
It seems like you stepped on your foot...
“Very nice,” said Ganin, groping in the dark
hand, which was poking at his cuff. - What do you think, are we still
How long will we stay here? It's time to do something. Crap...
“Let’s sit on the bench and wait,” it sounded again
in his very ear a lively and annoying voice. - Yesterday, when I
arrived, we ran into you in the corridor. In the evening, I hear
you cleared your throat like a wall, and immediately decided from the sound of the cough: fellow countryman.
Tell me, have you been living in this boarding house for a long time? -- For a long time. Matches
you have a? -- No. I do not smoke. And the boarding house is a bit dirty, despite the fact that
Russian. You know, I have great happiness: my wife is from Russia
arrives. Four years, is it a joke... Yes, sir. And now not
long wait. It's already Sunday.
“What darkness...” said Ganin and cracked his fingers.-
I wonder what time it is...
Alferov sighed noisily; a warm, sluggish smell gushed out
a very healthy, elderly man. There's something sad about
such a smell.
- So, there are six days left. I guess she's in
Saturday will arrive. I received a letter from her yesterday. Very
funny she wrote the address. It's a pity that it's so dark, otherwise I showed
would. What are you feeling there, my dear? These windows don't open. --
“I don’t mind breaking them,” said Ganin. - Come on, Leo
Glebovich; Shouldn't we play some petit-jo? I know
amazing, I compose them myself. For example, think of some
two-digit number. Ready?
“Excuse me,” said Ganin and slammed his fist twice into
wall.
“The doorman has been sleeping for a long time,” Alferov’s voice floated up, “so
that knocking is useless.
- But you must admit that we can’t stay here all night
Here.
- It seems that I will have to. Don’t you think, Lev Glebovich,
that there is something symbolic in our meeting? While still on
Terra Firma, we didn’t know each other, but it so happened that
returned home at the same hour and entered this room
together.

Kaliningrad State University

Course work

Subject: Russian language

Topic: “The artistic world of space in the novel “Mashenka” by V.V. Nabokov"

Completed by: KSU student, Faculty of Philology

Suraeva Svetlana

1. Introduction

1. A brief analysis of the main characters of the novel “Mashenka”
2. The central motif of the novel by V.V. Nabokov
3. Organization of artistic space in the novel “Mashenka”
4. Female images in the novel “Mashenka”
5. Digital symbolism of the novel by V.V. Nabokov
6. The ending of the novel

Introduction

A favorite comparison of Vladimir Nabokov, the largest representative of the Russian diaspora, was the comparison of literary creativity with the game of chess. In chess, it is important not only to find the only correct solution, but also to mislead the opponent, develop a system of deceptively strong moves, or, if you want, to deceive.

Of course, chess, and even at such a high intellectual level, is not a game for everyone. Likewise, Nabokov’s works are designed for an intelligent, experienced reader who is able to grasp the play of artistic images, unravel the chain of allusions, and bypass the author’s linguistic and stylistic “traps.” Reading some pages of Nabokov's prose, you often catch yourself thinking that you are solving a complicated crossword puzzle, and a lot of time and effort are spent on unraveling the ingenious plan. But then, when the intellectual difficulties are behind you, you begin to understand that your energy and time were not wasted: Nabokov’s world is unique and his heroes will remain in memory forever.

The writer penned works in both Russian and English. The most famous of them are the novels “Mashenka”, “The Defense of Luzhin”, “Camera Obscura”, “The Gift”, “Lolita”, “Pnin”. In addition, Nabokov is the author of translations into English of “Eugene Onegin”, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, studies on Gogol, lectures on Russian literature.

Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the central themes of his work is the theme of Russia. This is the same Russia, the image of which emerges from the pages of the prose of Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Bunin. And at the same time, Russia is different, Nabokov’s: an image-memory, colored by the bitter awareness of a forever abandoned homeland.

The novel “Mashenka” (1926) is especially indicative in this regard.

Nabokov's man is usually shown as a doll, a corpse, a mechanism - that is, as an alien and incomprehensible, “tightly boarded up world, full of miracles and crimes” (“Mashenka”).

The main theme of Nabokov's books is the adventures of a lonely soul rich in feelings in a hostile, mysterious world of foreign countries and alien, incomprehensible and incomprehensible doll people. This is a different principle of creative “montage” of the soul. Therefore, we had to stylize the Motherland as well. The writer often talks about external life, false and unnecessary, and internal life, real and the only desired one. Its heroes preserve and protect their complex, endless feelings, setting aside and sharply assessing the external “alien” world and the “other” person. Any external epic action destroys the magical world of internal lyrical movements.

The complex metaphorical language of Nabokov's prose hides a simple and monotonous plot, strives to distract, captivate, and enchant the reader with exotic beauty and permanent novelty. But it’s worth overcoming its magic, the obsessive rapture of an exquisite style and starting over, with the novel “Mashenka”, to see how the plot formula, which is then repeated many times, takes shape. She is quite poor, needs constant “scheduling”, new moves and verbal embellishments.

The main character of the novel, Ganin, has a dream, love and memory, and he lives by them, combining them in the symbolic image of Mashenka, who is still traveling to him from Russia. These complex, beautiful feelings, starting from the poor and alien outside world to the dreamer (the Berlin boarding house and its vile inhabitants), fill the emptiness of a solitary and inactive life. They are what Ganin needs, but the real Mashenka began to interfere with his dreams already in Russia: “He felt that from these imperfect meetings love was becoming smaller and worn out.” Real truth and Nabokov’s “beautiful” image are incompatible. Therefore, the novel logically ends with Ganin’s flight on the eve of Mashenka’s long and painfully awaited arrival. He left to groom and cherish his subtlest sensations and thoughts, protecting them from the invasion of a “stranger” real person. And in vain Nabokov’s sister reminded that the novel describes a house in Rozhdestveno. Ganin, like the author of the book, does not need a house and Mashenka is not needed, he will wander with his dreams in boarding houses, despising their dirt and vulgar inhabitants, and will die completely alone, as Bunin predicted after an unsuccessful dinner with Nabokov.

This attitude to the plot, Oblomov’s escape from action, real events and their replacement with branched descriptions of the dialectic of a dreaming, inactive soul and revealing catalogs of “eliminated” objects immediately created problems for Nabokov the novelist. The genre of the novel itself was weakened and blurred by all this, its scale, objectivity and epicness were lost.

A brief analysis of the main characters of the novel “Mashenka”

The work of the young Nabokov, despite its apparent simplicity and traditionality, reveals the poetic features of his mature prose. The text “grows” from a central metaphor, the elements of which unfold in the novel into independent thematic motifs. An indication of the metaphor is the technique of literary allusion, which in Nabokov’s later works was brought to the point of exquisite secrecy, but in “Mashenka” it is implemented with the author’s unique frankness - with a direct naming of the addressee. The reference is placed in the conventional core of the text, at a point of high lyrical tension, at the moment of the hero’s symbolic acquisition of a soul, in the scene on the windowsill of the “gloomy oak dressing room”, when 16-year-old Ganin dreams of Mashenka. “And that moment, when he sat... and waited in vain for Fetov’s nightingale to click in the poplars, Ganin now rightly considered that moment the most important and sublime in his entire life.”

A. Fet’s poem “The Nightingale and the Rose” not only appears in the text in the form of hidden quotation, but becomes the dominant metaphor of the entire novel. The dramatic nature of the plot of Fetov's poem is due to the different temporal involvement of the lyrical protagonists: the rose blooms during the day, the nightingale sings at night.

You sing when I'm dozing

I bloom when you sleep...

Wed. from Nabokov: Ganin is a character of the present, Mashenka is a character of the past. The connection of heroes is possible in a space devoid of time dimensions, such as a dream, a dream, a memory, meditation... Nabokov’s structural solution to the theme refers us to such works as Byron’s “Dream”, a poem about the poet’s first love, addressed to Mary Ann Chaworth, “Ode to a Nightingale” by J. Keats and to the already named poem by A. Fet “The Nightingale and the Rose”.

The main character of the novel, Ganin, has some features of a poet whose work is expected in the future. Evidence of this is his dreamy idleness, vivid imagination and ability for “creative exploits.” Ganin is an exile, his surname is phonetically encoded in his emigrant status, he lives in Berlin, in a Russian boarding house, among the “shadows of his exile dream” Wed. from Fet:

Eternal exile from Paradise,

I am a spring guest, a singing wanderer...

The second line of the quote is echoed in the text of “Mashenka” as follows: “... longing for a new foreign land especially tormented him (Ganina. - N.B.) in the spring."

In the portrait of Ganin there is a hint of bird-like features: eyebrows that “spread open like light wings”, a “sharp face” - cf. sharp beak of a nightingale. Podtyagin says to Ganin: “You are a free bird.”

The nightingale is a traditional poetic image of the singer of love. His songs make you forget about the dangers of the day and turn the dream of happiness into a tangible reality. This is precisely the peculiarity of Ganin’s dreams: for him, the happy past is transformed into the present. The hero says to the old poet: “I have begun a most wonderful romance. I'm going to see her now. I am very happy".

The nightingale begins to sing in the first days of April. And in April the action of the novel “Tender and Foggy Berlin, in April, in the Evening” begins, the main content of which is the hero’s memories of his first love. The repetition of the experience is reflected in the parodic spring emblem that marks the (internal) space of the Russian boarding house where the hero lives: sheets from the old calendar, “the six first days of the month of April,” are attached to the doors of the rooms.

The nightingale's singing occurs at dusk and lasts until the end of the night. The memories of love that Ganin indulges in in the novel are always of a nocturnal nature. It is also symbolic that the signal to them is the singing of Ganin’s neighbor in the boarding house, Mashenka’s husband: “Ganin could not sleep... And in the middle of the night, behind the wall, his neighbor Alferov began to hum... When the train trembled, Alferov’s voice mixed with hum, and then surfaced again: tu-oo-oo, tu-tu, tu-oo-oo.” Ganin comes to Alferov and finds out about Mashenka. The plot device parodies an ornithological observation: nightingales flock to the sounds of singing, and the voice of another is immediately heard next to one singer. The example of old singers influences the beauty and duration of songs. The nightingale's singing is divided into periods (knees) of short pauses. This compositional principle is maintained in the hero’s memories; Berlin reality serves as pauses in them.

Ganin plunges into “living dreams of the past” at night; His signal phrase is: “I’m going to her now.” It is characteristic that all his meetings with Mashenka are marked by the onset of darkness. The hero first sees Mashenka “on a July evening” at a country concert. The semantics of the nightingale's song in the novel is realized in the sound accompaniment of the scene. I quote: “And among... the sounds that became visible... among this flickering and popular music... for Ganin there was only one thing: he looked in front of him at the chestnut braid in a black bow...”.

Ganin and Mashenka meet “one evening, in a park gazebo...”; all their dates are at the end of the day. “On a sunny evening” Ganin walked out “from the bright estate into the black, murmuring dusk...”. “They didn’t talk much, it was too dark to talk.” And a year later, “on this strange, cautiously darkening evening... Ganin, in one short hour, fell in love with her more keenly than ever and fell out of love with her as if forever.”

The dates of Ganin and Mashenka are accompanied by the accompaniment of sounds of nature, while human voices are either muffled or completely “turned off”: “... the trunks creaked... And to the sound of the autumn night he unbuttoned her blouse... she was silent...”. Another example: Silently, with his heart beating, he leaned towards her... But there were strange rustling sounds in the park...”

The last meeting of the heroes also takes place at nightfall: “It was getting dark. The country train has just arrived...” Characteristic in this scene is a change in orchestration: the living voices of nature are drowned out by the noise of the train (“the carriage rumbled”) - this sound is associated with the hero’s expulsion. So, about the boarding house: “The sounds of morning cleaning mixed with the noise of the trains.” It seemed to Ganin that “the train was passing invisibly through the thickness of the house itself... its roar was shaking the wall...”.

The relived romance with Mashenka reaches its climax on the night before her arrival in Berlin. Looking at the dancers, “who were silently and quickly dancing in the middle of the room, Ganin thought: “What happiness. It will be tomorrow, no, today, because it’s already after midnight... Tomorrow all his youth, his Russia, is coming.” In this last night scene (cf. the first meeting at the country concert), the dance serves as a hint of music. However, the music does not sound, the repetition fails (“What if this complex solitaire game never comes out a second time?” thinks Ganin), and happiness is not realized.

The disappearance of music in the finale can be read in the context of the leading thematic motif of the novel, the musical motif: the song of the nightingale. It is the sound content that gives Ganin’s memories the meaning of nightingale melodies. “Mashenka,” Ganin repeated again, trying to put into these three syllables everything that sang in them before - the wind, and the hum of telegraph poles, and happiness, - and some other hidden sound that was the very life of this word. He lay on his back, listening to his past.”

The singing of the bird subsides at dawn (cf. Nabokov: “through the window the night died down”). And along with him, the magical reality disappears, “the life of memories that Ganin lived”; now it “became what it really was far away.

As the day approaches, the hero's exile begins. “At dawn, Ganin climbed onto the captain’s bridge... Now the east was turning white... On the shore somewhere the dawn began to play... he felt piercingly and clearly how far away from him was the warm bulk of his homeland and that Mashenka whom he had loved forever.” The images of the homeland and the beloved, which, as researchers have repeatedly noted, come together in the novel, remain within the limits of the nightingale's song and are transformed from biographical to poetic; in other words, they become the theme of creativity.

The image of the heroine, Mashenka, takes on the features of Fetov’s rose. This is evidenced by numerous examples of hidden citations. So, from Mashenka’s letter to Ganin: “If you return, I will torture you with kisses...”. Wed. from Fet: “I’ll kiss you, pump you up...” Ganin constantly recalls the tenderness of Mashenka’s image: “tender dark complexion,” “black bow on the delicate back of her head.” Wed. from Fet: “You are as tender as morning roses...”. Alferov about Mashenka: “My wife is pure.” From Fet: “You are so pure...”. The poet Podtyagin says about the lover Ganin: “It’s not for nothing that he is so illuminated.” From Fet: the rose gives the nightingale “dawn dreams.”

The image of a rose occupies the main place in the capacious system of flower codes. The rose is a symbol of love, joy, but also mystery. And it is no coincidence that in the novel, where many flowers are scattered, the rose, symbolizing the hero’s first love, is not named even once. This is a mirror reflection of the naming technique: the heroine, whose name the work is titled, never appears in reality.

A hint of the hidden meaning inherent in the name is made already in the first lines of the novel: “It was not without reason that I inquired about your name,” the voice continued carefree. “In my opinion, every name... every name is binding.”

The image of a rose as an allegory of Mashenka appears in an encrypted reference to the phraseology of another language. So, Ganin, sitting next to Alferov, “felt some kind of exciting pride at the memory that Mashenka gave him, and not her husband, her deep fragrance.”

Love in the hero's mind is associated with mystery. So, about the summer romance of Ganin and Mashenka: “they didn’t know anything at home...”. And later, in St. Petersburg: “All love requires solitude, cover, shelter...”.

Reliving his feeling in Berlin, Ganin hides it, limiting himself to hints that only emphasize the mystery of what is happening. Ganin tells Clara: “I have an amazing, unheard of plan. If he comes out, then the day after tomorrow I won’t be in this city.” Ganin makes a pseudo-confessional statement to the old poet about the beginning of a happy romance.

An example of the desacralization of feelings, disclosure of secrets, demonstrativeness and its corresponding loss is the behavior of Lyudmila, Ganin’s mistress, in the novel. Lyudmila tells Klara “the details that have not yet cooled down, terribly certain”, invites her friend to the cinema with Ganin to “flaunt off her novel...”.

The concealment of the iconic image of the heroine, similar to the technique of withholding the true name, can be read in Nabokov’s novel as an allusion to Shakespeare’s sonnets addressed to his beloved. The features named in the poems served as the definition of her conventional image; in Shakespearean studies she is called the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets.” The parody of the reference is due to the external similarity of the heroines and their spiritual contrast.

On the other hand, Mashenka’s “tender dark complexion” is a poetic echo of the “Song of Songs.” Wed. “Don’t look at me that I’m dark; for the sun has scorched me...” Another condition of the allusion is the aroma associated with the iconic image of the heroine, the rose maiden - in the “Song of Songs” - associated with the image of the beloved: “... and the fragrance of your colors is better than all fragrances!”

The third source with which the image of Mashenka, the rose maiden, is associated is “The Flowers of Evil” by Charles Baudelaire. A parodic reference to the poet's beloved mulatto Jeanne Duval, unnamed in the texts, is associated with the title of the collection. While maintaining the lyrical content, the allusion to Nabokov's image leads to Baudelaire's Prose Poems, in particular to L'Invitation au Voyage, in which the poet addresses his beloved using the metaphor of flowers.

The category of smell is established in Mashenka as the tangible presence of the soul. The text embodies the entire semantic range: smell - spirit of the flesh - spirit - breath - soul. The creative function of memory is realized in the restoration of the smells of the past, which is understood as the animation of images of the past: “... as you know, memory resurrects everything except smells, and then nothing resurrects the past so completely as the smell that was once associated with it.”

The uniqueness of the smell is equal to the uniqueness of the soul. So, Ganin about Mashenka: “... this incomprehensible, unique smell of her in the world.” Mashenka’s scent captures the sweetish aroma of a rose. “And her perfume was inexpensive, sweet, called Tagore.” The parody move - the use in the name of the perfume of the name of the famous Indian poet R. Tagore, the author of fragrant and sweetish poetic works - is associated with his famous poem “The Soul of the People”, which became the national anthem of India. This ironic mention of Tagore by Nabokov was apparently provoked by the enormous popularity of the Indian poet in Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

So, Nabokov’s resurrection of memories is associated with the resurrection of his living spirit, smell, carried out literally: how to breathe a soul into an image. The artistic embodiment of the motif “smell - spirit - breath - soul” goes back to the biblical text: “And the Lord God created man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” Wed. Nabokov about Panin: “He was a god who recreated the lost world...”.

The smell enlivens the first scenes of the hero’s memories: “Summer, the estate, typhus... The nurse... she gives off a damp smell, an old-maiden coolness.” At the country concert, where Tanin sees Mashenka for the first time, “it smelled of candy and kerosene.”

The condition of resurrection - inhalation of the spirit - smell - of the soul is realized not only in relation to the images of the past, but also in relation to the author of the memoirs, Ganin. On a Berlin street, Ganin smells carbide: “...and now, when he accidentally inhaled carbide, he remembered everything at once...”, “he was leaving the bright estate into the black murmuring twilight...”. The hero comes to life in the living past, although just recently, before the news about Mashenka, he felt “lethargic”, “limp”, turned into a shadow on the screen , that is, those who have lost their living soul.

Development phase of the “soul” motif - breathing" is associated with the arrival of love. The hero’s conditional acquisition of a soul occurs in the already mentioned scene with “Fetov’s nightingale”] I will quote in full: “Ganin opened the frame of the colored window wider, sat down with his feet on the windowsill... and the starry sky between the black poplars was such that I wanted take a deep breath. And this minute... Ganin now rightly considered the most important and sublime in his entire life.” The text also embodies the opposite option: the loss of love leads to the death of the soul. So, Ganin, having left his homeland, Mashenka, feels like “his soul is hidden.” Ganin's resurrection is connected with his returning feelings for Mashenka. “Mashenka, Mashenka,” Ganin whispered. - Mashenka... - and took in more air and froze, listening to how the heart is beating.

In the novel, Ganin, a poet whose work is supposed to be in the future, gains a new breath, while the old poet, Podtyagin, whose work belongs to the past, suffocates and dies. The scene is played twice; such a rehearsal of death frees the plot from possible melodrama. At night, during a heart attack, Podtyagin knocks on Ganin: “leaning his head against the wall and catching the air with his open mouth, old Podtyagin stood... And suddenly Podtyagin took a breath... It was not just a sigh, but the most wonderful pleasure, from which his features immediately perked up. " At the end of the novel, Podtyagin dies. “His breathing... the sound is... scary to listen to,” Ganin tells Mrs. Dorn. “...The pain dug like a wedge into my heart, and the air seemed unspeakable, unattainable bliss.” “Mashenka” also presents a parody of the theme of the loss of the soul, like the loss of a passport, the reason that actually causes Podtyagin’s heart attack and death. The hero informs Clara about this: “Exactly: he dropped it. Poetic license... Lost your passport. There’s a cloud in my pants, there’s nothing to say.”

Life thereby imitates art; a parallel arises within the parodic theme of the passport as a bureaucratic identification of the soul. Russian emigrant poet Podtyagin dies after losing his passport. Indicative in this context is Nabokov’s statement: “The true passport of a writer is his art.”

The central motif of the novel by V.V. Nabokov

The central motive of the novel. The starting condition for resurrecting images of the past is a picture, a snapshot. Ganin plunges into a novel-memory after seeing a photograph of Mashenka. Alferov, husband, shows it to Ganin. “My wife is lovely,” he says. -...Very young. We got married in Poltava...” Poltava - the place of the marriage of the elderly Alferov and the young Mashenka - a parody reference; A. Pushkin’s poem “Poltava”, where young Maria runs to the old man Mazepa.

As the space of the past comes to life in the hero’s memory, acquires sounds and smells, the Berlin world loses its living signs and turns into a photograph: “It seemed to Ganin that the alien city passing in front of him was just a moving photograph.”

For the old poet Podtyagin, Russia is a picture; he says about himself: “... because of these birches I spent my whole life overlooked all of Russia." The selected single visual registration of the world determines the nature of his creativity. Accordingly, Podtyagin’s picture poems were published in the “World Illustration” and “Picturesque Review” magazines.

The loss of signs of real existence, in particular the smell-soul, causes the transformation of a living image into a visual object, which is equivalent to its dying, destruction. Hence Russia, which remains only in the visual memory of other characters in the novel, disappears from reality. “And the main thing,” Alferov kept babbling, “after all, it’s over with Russia. They washed it off, as you know, if you smear it with a wet sponge on a black board, on a painted face...”

This condition is realized many times in the novel. Thus, Podtyagin’s death is preceded by the conditional transition of his image into photography. “The picture was definitely wonderful: an astonished, swollen face floating in a grayish haze.” Wed. further: “...Clara gasped when she saw his dull, upset face.”

The wind is proclaimed in the novel to be one of the active forces that destroys smell. Ganin, meeting with Mashenka in St. Petersburg, “in the wind, in the cold,” feels how “love is becoming smaller and worn out.

The ominous image of the wind destroying the smell/living presence of the soul is transformed in the narrative into the “iron drafts” of exile. The destructive function of the wind is a reference to A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve”.

Black evening.

White snow.

Wind, wind!

The man is not standing on his feet.

Wind, wind,

All over God's world!

It is precisely this destructive role that the wind plays in the fate of the old poet Podtyagin. Going with Ganins to the police department, “he shivered from the fresh spring wind.” At the imperial, Podtyagin forgets his hard-earned passport because “he suddenly grabbed his hat and a strong wind was blowing.”

Already in “Mashenka” the technique of literal reading of phraseological turns appears, which was widely used in Nabokov’s mature works. An example is the hat mentioned above. Leaving the police department, Podtyagin joyfully exclaims: “Now it’s in the bag,” believing that he will finally get out of Berlin. On the way to get a visa at the French embassy, ​​the wind blows his hat off, and, grabbing it, the poet forgets his passport on the seat.

The destruction of smell as the presence of a living soul is contrasted in the novel with its preservation by translation into creativity, which is identified with translation into immortality. So, Ganin, looking at the dying Podtyagin, “thought that after all Podtyagin left something, at least two pale verses, bloomed for him, Ganin, a warm and immortal existence: this is how one becomes immortal” cheap perfume...". Eternal flowering, preservation of aroma/soul is possible for poetic images that belong to the creative space. Wed. lack of fresh flowers in the ghostly world of exile: in the boarding house there are two empty crystal vases For flowers, "faded

from fluffy dust" Ganin's life before the memories of Mashenka is "colorless melancholy."

The route of the “smell-soul” motif, reaching the category of immortality, returns to the original dominant image of the novel - the rose, the flower of the underworld, which is also associated with the idea of ​​resurrection.

The novel “Mashenka” realizes the poetic resurrection of the world of the past, the hero’s first love under the sign of sub rosa, which creates a parodic opposition to the canonical literary image of a rose - a symbol of past love and lost youth.

Organization of artistic space in the novel “Mashenka”

In the novel “Mashenka” all female images are associated with a flower code. The hostess of the boarding house, Mrs. Dorn, in German: thorn, is a parody detail of a withered rose. Mrs. Dorn is a widow (the thorn in flower symbolism is a sign of sadness), “a small, deaf woman,” that is, deaf to the songs of the nightingale. Outwardly, she looks like a dried flower, her hand is “light, like a faded leaf,” or “a wrinkled hand, like a dry leaf...”. She held "a huge spoon in a tiny withered hand."

Ganin’s mistress Lyudmila, whose image is marked by mannerisms and pretentiousness, “dragged behind her lies... exquisite feelings, some orchids that she seemed to passionately love...”. In the novel "Mashenka" the orchid flower - the emblem of "exquisite feelings" - is a parodic allusion to its similar embodiment in the poetry of the beginning of the century.

Images of birds and flowers, most exoticized in the poetry of the beginning of the century, are reproduced by Nabokov with lyrical simplicity, which determined their renewal.

The image of Clara is associated with the flowers of the orange tree, a symbol of virginity. Every morning, going to work, Clara buys “oranges from a hospitable merchant.” At the end of the novel, at the party, Clara is “in her unchanged black dress, languid, flushed from cheap orange liqueur.” A black dress in this context is mourning for a woman’s failed happiness, i.e., a parody of eternal femininity.

The smell motif in the novel, associated with the symbolism of flowers, takes on the meaning of character characteristics. So, Clara’s room “smelled of good perfume.” Lyudmila “smells of perfume, which was something unkempt, stale, elderly, although she herself was only twenty-five years old.” Neither Klara nor Lyudmila are attracted to Ganin, although both are in love with him.

The smell of Alferov, a worn-out soul that has lost its freshness, is similar to the smell of Lyudmila. “Alferov sighed noisily; the warm, lethargic smell of a not entirely healthy, elderly man gushed out. There’s something sad about that smell.”

Researchers noted that the inhabitants of Russian Berlin in the novel “Mashenka” are reproduced as inhabitants of the world of shadows. Nabokov's emigrant world contains a reference to "Hell" in The Divine Comedy. This is also reflected in the smells. I will give two examples. At the police department, where emigrants come to get an exit visa, there is a “queue, a crush, someone’s rotten breath.” Ganin tore up Lyudmila’s farewell letter and “threw it off the windowsill into the abyss, from where the smell of coal emanated.”

The image of Lyudmila is also associated with the profanation of smell as a sign of the soul. Receiving her letter, the hero notices that “the envelope was heavily perfumed, and Ganin briefly thought that scenting the letter was the same as spraying perfume on boots in order to cross the street.” Ganin’s interpretation is a parody of one of the names of the orchid (the flower-sign of Lyudmila) - Sabot de Venus.

Smells and sounds enliven the space of Mashenka. It is symptomatic that the first scene of the novel takes place in the dark; sounds and smells become signs of the manifestation of life, the beginning of action. Ganin notes Alferov’s “lively and annoying voice,” and Alferov recognizes Ganin by the sound, whose national identifiability takes on a grotesque meaning. Alferov says: “In the evening, I heard you clear your throat behind the wall, and immediately from the sound of the cough I decided: fellow countryman.”

The motif of sounds in the novel goes back to the image of a nightingale. Ganin and Alferov turn out to be rivals and display similar “bird” traits. Alferov “whistled saccharinely” and had a “buttered tenor.” Ganin hears him singing with happiness at night. His singing is a parody version of the nightingale’s songs: “...Alferov’s voice mixed with the roar of the trains, and then emerged again: tu-oo-oo, tu-tu, tu-oo-oo.”

In the very first scene of the novel, both rivals, like two birds, find themselves locked in a “cage” of a stopped elevator. To Ganin’s question: “What were you in the past?” - Alferov answers: “I don’t remember. Is it possible to remember what you were in a past life - perhaps an oyster or, say, bird...".

Just as the female characters in the novel are marked by floral symbolism, the male characters reveal a connection with songbirds. In the appearance of male characters, the voice is primarily highlighted. So, about the poet Podtyagin: “He had an unusually pleasant voice, quiet, without any elevation, the sound was soft and matte.” The sound of the voice reflects the nature of Podtyagin’s poetic talent; the epithet “matte” refers to his picture poems, published in magazines about painting.

The images of a bird and a flower go back to the dominant metaphor of the novel - “the nightingale and the rose”, hence their obligatory paired appearance in the text. The repeated parodic projection of metaphor creates variability in pairs in the novel.

The image of Mashenka in the novel is marked by another embodiment of the soul - a butterfly. Ganin recalls how “she ran along a rustling dark path, a black bow flashed like a huge mourning dress...”

The leading images of the novel, a bird and a flower, appear like watermarks in the marginal details of Mashenka, preserving the playful variety of options. Leaving Lyudmila, Ganin looks “at the painting of the open glass - a bush of cubic roses and a peacock fan.” In the Estate where Ganin lived, there was a “tablecloth embroidered with roses” and a “white piano” that “came to life and rang.” In the final scene of the novel, Ganin goes out into the morning city and sees “a cart loaded with huge bunches of violets...” and how « With the black branches were fluttering away... sparrows.”

The symbolism of the nightingale and the rose, vector images of the text, states their involvement in both the real and other worlds, which not only justifies the presence of these images in the two-world space of the novel, but also ensures its fusion. Ganin “it seemed that this past life, brought to perfection, passed in an even pattern through Berlin everyday life.”

Female images in the novel “Mashenka”

The organization of artistic space in the novel “Mashenka” deserves special attention. It seems that the world of the past, Russia, and the world of the present, Berlin, turn out to be conditionally overturned into each other. “What happened that night, that delightful event of the soul, rearranged the light prisms of his entire life, overturned the past on him.” At the end of the novel, Ganin, having relived his love for Mashenka, leaves the house at dawn - the past and the present are demonstratively disconnected: “Everything seemed out of place, fragile, upside down, as in a mirror. And just as the sun gradually rose higher and the shadows dispersed to their places, in the same way, in this sober light, that life of memories that Ganin lived became what it really was - a distant past.”

However, throughout the entire narrative, the novel's space forms a vertical structure of two spheres facing each other (past and present), separated by a water surface that ensures their mutual reflection. The role of a watershed in the novel is played by a river, a canal, a sea, tears, a mirror, shiny asphalt, window glass, etc.

The river, which in Ganin’s past is connected with his love (“He met Mashenka every day, on the other side of the river...”), in Podtyagin’s poems - with Russia (“The full moon shines above the edge of the forest, / Look how the river wave shines” , p. 138), in the present changes the semantic content, from a symbol of happiness becomes a symbol of its loss. Water takes on the significance of the border between the living world of the homeland and the other world of exile. A synonym for the river is the sea, crossing which the hero finds himself in the space of the world of shadows. “The ship on which he (Ganin. - N. B .) got caught, it was Greek, dirty... a thick-headed Greek child began to cry... And a fireman climbed out onto the deck, all black, with eyes lined with coal dust, with a fake ruby ​​on his index finger.” “The Greek ship” in the context of Ganin’s emigration can be read as a reference to the “Odyssey”, the hero of which, on his sea voyage, ends up in a “other” world. The image of a “stoker with a ruby ​​on his index finger” is an allusion to Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The parodic resemblance of a fireman to a demon, namely in Dante's poem Charon, is a demon. I quote from M. Lozinsky’s translation: “And the demon Charon calls together a flock of sinners, turning his gaze like coals in the ashes.” gives Ganin’s journey the meaning of crossing the Acheron.

A hint of Acheron appears again in the novel when Ganin and Podtyagin go to the police department to get a passport. Podtyagin, who finally has hope of moving to France (to another country of emigration; cf. Dante: Acheron separates the second circle of hell from the third), turns to Ganin: “The water sparkles gloriously,” Podtyagin noted, breathing with difficulty and pointing with an outstretched hand on the canal.”

The very episode of the two poets going to the police department, the setting of which resembles the description from the III song of “Hell,” is a parodic reference to the “Divine Comedy.” There, the older poet, Virgil, accompanies the younger, Dante; in Nabokov, the younger, Ganin, accompanies the older, Podtyagin. The parodic similarity between Podtyagin and Virgil is enshrined in the sound of the voice. Virgil appears before Dante, hoarse from a long silence. Podtyagin speaks “in a dull, slightly lisping voice.” Virgil is a deceased poet, Podtyagin is still a living person, but as a poet he has already died. He tells Ganin about himself: “Now, thank God, I don’t write poetry. Basta." The last Italian word is another ironic reference to Dante.

The water border is a horizontal section of the vertically organized artistic space of the novel. Russia and the past find themselves immersed in the bottom of memory/bottom of water. The condition of immersion in water is realized in the participation of various characters in the novel in the seabed. So, Podtyagin “looks like a big gray-haired guinea pig,” Alferov says that in a past life he was “perhaps an oyster, Mashenka’s voice trembles in the receiver, “like in a sea shell,” in one of the letters to Ganin she admires the poem: “ You are my little pale pearl."

Podtyagin, looking at the sugar at the bottom of the glass, thinks “that there is something Russian in this spongy piece...”. In Clara’s room hangs “a copy of Böcklin’s painting “Island of the Dead”.” The island depicted in the picture becomes synonymous with the Russian boarding house, which remained above the surface of the water into which the homeland was submerged. The condition is fixed in the topography: one side of the house faces the railway track, the other faces the bridge, which makes it seem as if it is standing above the water. Clara, whose windows overlook the bridge, has the impression that she lives in a house “floating somewhere.”

Diving to the bottom of the water as a variant of the parodic plot device is reproduced several times in the novel. So, Ganin, leaving his abandoned lover, hears how “in the yard a wandering baritone roared in German “Stenka Razin”” . In the folk song, Ataman Stenka Razin, at the request of his comrades, throws the Persian princess he loved into the Volga.

With a powerful swing he lifts

He is a beautiful princess

And throws her overboard

Into the oncoming wave.

Another example of the parodic use of the drowning situation: the meeting of Ganin and Mashenka in St. Petersburg, where their summer love actually dies, “they met under the arch where - in Tchaikovsky’s opera - Liza dies.”

Death, oblivion, the transition to the status of the past are embodied in the novel by a downward movement. Thus, the dying Podtyagin feels that he is falling “into the abyss.” Ganin's departure into emigration, from Sevastopol to Istanbul, is embodied in the geographical route down to the south. The last meeting of Ganin and Mashenka on the platform of the blue carriage ends with Mashenka “getting off at the first station,” that is, she goes down and becomes a memory.

It is from the bottom of memory that the hero retrieves his past. Ganin is endowed with “mirror-black pupils.” The past, into which he peers so intently, appears as a reflection, and from the space of the bottom/bottom moves to height, above the mirror surface of the water boundary. “And suddenly you rush through the city at night... looking at the lights, catching in them a dazzling memory of happiness - a woman’s face, popped up again after many years of everyday oblivion.”

The resurrection of the image of Mashenka is associated with its spatial movement in height, i.e., on the other side of the mirror. ““Is it really... possible...” - the letters appeared in a fiery, cautious whisper,” repeating in the sky Ganin’s thought about Mashenka’s return to his life. Carried away by his memory/reflection, Ganin himself seems to move to the center of this resurrected past, now located in the upper part of the novel’s space, which is why the world of Berlin, in turn, shifts and seems to him to be located below. Ganin goes out to walk around Berlin, “he... climbed onto the top of the bus. At the bottom the streets were flooded."

The world of the homeland and the world of exile are reflected in each other. In Ganin’s estate there is a picture: “a pencil-drawn head of a horse that, with its nostrils flared, swims through the water.” At the end of the novel, while packing things into a suitcase, Ganin discovers “a rosary, yellow as a horse’s teeth.” In the gazebo, while meeting Mashenka, the hero notices with annoyance “that the black silk sock has torn at the ankle.” In Berlin, among his things, he finds “a torn silk sock that has lost its pair.” The effect of reflection is sometimes realized literally in this first novel by Nabokov, for example, “in the hallway mirror he (Ganin. - N.B.) I saw the reflected depth of Alferov’s room... and now it was scary to think that his past lay in someone else’s table” - in Alferov’s table there is a photograph of Mashenka.

A parodic indication of the vertical axis of the novel world is the words of the drunken Alferov: “I’m completely blown away, I don’t remember what perpe... perped... perpendicular is, - and now there will be Mashenka...”. The vertical organization of space in the novel “Mashenka” is a structural reference to Dante’s poem. “Washed” by immersion in Lethean waters, the reference returns to another Nabokov text: in the novel “The Defense of Luzhin” in the hero’s office “a bookcase crowned... Dante in bathing helmet."

The up/down movement is literally implemented in the novel “Mashenka” as the mechanics of the beginning and end of the story. In the first scene, Ganin takes the elevator to the boarding house (this subsequently corresponds to the rise from the bottom of the memory of the past) - in the finale, the hero goes down the stairs, leaves the boarding house, and his past again sinks to the bottom of memory.

The vertical movement of the plot, ascent/descent, is projected onto one of the main techniques of the novel’s poetics. It can be formulated as a decrease in the traditional pathos of love lyrics, pathetic clichés and a parallel elevation/poeticization of the category of simple, sweet, natural, assessed as homely, everyday, dear. One example of the decline is the scene already cited above of the hero’s conditional acquisition of a soul, which takes place on the windowsill of a “gloomy oak dressing room.” In the name of reducing the pathos of the theme of resurrection, this locus was chosen by the author as the point of contact between two worlds: Russian and Berlin. In Mrs. Dorn's boarding house: "a toilet cell on the door of which there were two crimson zeros, deprived of their legal tens, with which they once made up two different Sunday days in Mr. Dorn's desk calendar."

Along with this, in the novel there is a poeticization of the “simple”, “native”. Thus, Mashenka’s “cheap perfume”, “sweetness from a grass stem”, “landrin lollipops”, funny silly songs, banal sentimental poems, and even the simple name of the heroine: “To him (Ganin. - N.B.) it seemed these days that she must have some kind of unusual, sonorous name, and when he found out that her name was Mashenka, he was not at all surprised, as if he knew it in advance - and this simple name sounded for him in a new way, with charming significance " The name of the heroine takes on the meaning of sweet simplicity, warm naturalness, touching tenderness.

Following Dante, Goethe, Solovyov, Nabokov created in his novel the image of Eternal Femininity, but in its simple, sweet, homely form. And at this level, Nabokov’s “Mashenka” represents the lyrical antithesis of A. Blok’s “Poems about a Beautiful Lady.”

Digital symbolism of the novel by V.V. Nabokov

The digital presence is associated with the marginally reproduced theme of mathematics as an earthly, logical science that opposes itself to poetry. She is personified by Alferov, who forms a pair with Mashenka: “a number and a flower.” The motif of numbers thus competes with the motif of the nightingale song in the novel, revealing the poetic content of digital signs.

Let me give you examples:

Nine. The meeting of Ganin and Mashenka took place “nine years ago.” And, plunging into memories, Ganin again strives to get closer to the image of Mashenka “step by step, just like then, nine years ago. Ganin fell in love with Mashenka when they were both 16 years old. Nine years later, Mashenka arrives in Berlin, but on the morning of her arrival, the hero realizes that she has actually died for him, has become a “distant past.”

25 years is a fatal age for other heroines of the novel. Lyudmila (she is 25 years old) after Ganin’s words about the breakup “lay like dead.” Clara says that on the phone “she had a voice from beyond the grave.” Clara turns 26 on the last night of the novel, but she remains with the other boarding house residents in the “house of shadows.”

Five - a number traditionally associated with the rose, symbolizing its five petals. Five in the novel is Mashenka’s number. Ganin keeps her “five letters.” Having learned about Mashenka’s arrival, Ganin sees how in the sky “letters appeared in a fiery, cautious whisper... and remained shining for a full five minutes...”. He goes out into the street and notices “five cabs... five sleepy... worlds in merchant liveries...”. The resurrection of the image of Mashenka is felt by the hero as his own resurrection, the sign of which is the return of the five senses.

Seven."Seven Russian Lost Shadows" live in a Berlin boarding house. The characters' involvement in the other world can be read as a reference to the seven deadly sins. The number “seven”, which is associated with the completeness of the human image, acquires an obvious parodic meaning in its novel embodiment,

The novel lasts seven days, a closed cycle, a week, the time of the creation of the world. Wed. the quotation already given above that Ganin “was a god recreating a lost world.” Seven, the number of the completed period, is usually associated with the transition to the new, unknown, open, which is how Ganin sees his future path.

The ending of the novel

At the end of the novel, Ganin leaves the Russian boarding house and leaves Berlin. “He chose a train that left in half an hour for the southwest of Germany... and with pleasant excitement thought about how he would get across the border without any visas - and there was France, Provence, and then the sea.” Even earlier, in a conversation with Clara, Ganin says: “I need to leave... I’m thinking of leaving Berlin forever on Saturday, heading to the south of the earth, to some port...”. What is the meaning of Ganin’s route, to the south of the earth, to the sea, to the port?

Even before the memories of Mashenka, Ganin, “feeling longing for a new foreign land,” goes for a walk around Berlin: “Raising the collar of an old mackintosh, bought for one pound from an English lieutenant in Constantinople... he... staggered along the pale April streets... and looked for a long time in the window of the shipping company at the wonderful model of Mauritania, at the colored cords connecting the harbors of two continents on a large map.”

The described picture contains a hidden answer: colored cords mark Ganin’s route - from Europe to Africa. Ganin, a young poet, feels like a literary descendant of Pushkin. Pushkin is Nabokov's unnamed Virgil, whose name, like the main image of the novel, is encrypted through allusion.

The hero's surname - Ganin - phonetically arises from the name of Pushkin's famous African ancestor - Hannibal. Significant in this context is the scientific detail of the leading image of the novel, the nightingale, the symbol of the singer of love, the poet, that is, Ganin himself. “Two European species of nightingale are well known: eastern and western. Both species winter in Africa." Ganin's path in the opposite direction repeats Hannibal's path: Russia - Constantinople/Istanbul - Africa. The stop in Berlin is perceived by the hero as a painful pause. Ganin’s longing “for a new foreign land” and the proposed route are an allusion to Pushkin’s poems:

Will the hour of my freedom come?

It's time, it's time! - I appeal to her;

I'm wandering over the sea, waiting for the weather,

Manyu sailed the ships.

Under the robe of storms arguing with the waves,

Along the free crossroads of the sea

When will I start free running?

It's time to leave the boring beach

Elements that are hostile to me,

And among the midday swells,

Under the sky my Africa,

Sigh about gloomy Russia,

Where I suffered, where I loved,

Where I buried my heart.

This 50th stanza from the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, as well as Pushkin’s note about his African origin, made to it, became the object of Nabokov’s research many years later. It was published under the title "Abram Hannibal" as the first appendix to the Commentary and translation of "Eugene Onegin". The scientific research that formed the work was carried out by Nabokov, of course, later, but his interest in Pushkin began in his early youth, and careful peering/reading into the works and biography of the poet coincides, at least, with the choice of his own writing path. Hence, in the image of Ganin, the hero of Nabokov’s first novel, a young poet, a conditional descendant of Pushkin, signs of the biography of the famous Pushkin ancestor appear. Wed. the principle of mirror reflection of the past and present in Mashenka. So, Ganin has “two passports... One is Russian, real, but very old, and the other is Polish, fake.” Wed: Abram Hannibal was baptized in 1707. His godfather was Peter I, and his godmother was the wife of the Polish king Augustus II.

Pushkin's hidden presence is also manifested in the dominant metaphor of the novel. Perhaps Fet borrowed the plot of the poem “The Nightingale and the Rose” not directly from an oriental source, but from Pushkin. See his poems “O Rose Maiden, I am in Chains”, “The Nightingale”. It is symptomatic that the reference to Pushkin contains, along with the male and female, the central image of the novel. For example, the description of Mashenka in the above-mentioned dates between lovers in winter (“The frost, the blizzard only revived her, and in the icy whirlwinds... he bared her shoulders... the snow fell... onto her bare chest”), is read as a reference to the heroine of Pushkin’s poem “Winter. What should we do in the village?

And the maiden goes out onto the porch at dusk:

Her neck and chest are exposed, and the blizzard is in her face!

But the storms of the north are not harmful Russian rose.

How hot the kiss burns in the cold!

So, it is Pushkin’s lines, in turn, that serve as an indication of the hidden, unnamed image of Mashenka - a rose.

Discovering the addressee of Nabokov's allusion is extremely important for looking at the structure of the novel. Researchers of “Mashenka” noted the “lax frame structure” of the work, “where the embedded text - the hero’s memories - is mixed with the framing text - the hero’s life in Berlin.”

Literature

1. V. Nabokov, Circle. Poems, novels, stories, M., 1991

2. V.V. Nabokov, Stories. Invitation to execution essay, interviews, reviews, M., 1989

3. Raevsky N.A., Memories of V. Nabokov, “Space”, 1989 No. 2

4. V. Nabokov, Mashenka

5. Sakharov V.I., Gone by Fate. Several indisputable and controversial thoughts about Russian emigration and emigrants., Russian Federation today, 1998

6. Nora Books, Scaffold in the Crystal Palace. About Russian novels by V. Nabokov, New Literary Review, 1998

Brief summary of works of Russian literature of the first half of the 20th century (collection 2) Yanko Slava

Mashenka – Novel (1926)

Mashenka – Novel (1926)

Spring 1924 Lev Glebovich Ganin lives in a Russian boarding house in Berlin. In addition to Ganin, in the boarding house live the mathematician Aleksey Ivanovich Alferov, a man “with a thin beard and a shiny plump nose,” the “old Russian poet” Anton Sergeevich Podtyagin, Klara - “a full-breasted, all in black silk, a very cozy young lady” who works as a typist and is in love with Ganina, as well as ballet dancers Kolin and Gornotsvetov. “A special shade, a mysterious affectation” separates the latter from other boarders, but, “speaking in all conscience, one cannot blame the pigeon happiness of this harmless couple.”

Last year, upon his arrival in Berlin, Ganin immediately found a job. He was a worker, a waiter, and an extra. The money he has left is enough to leave Berlin, but to do this he needs to break up with Lyudmila, whose relationship has been going on for three months and he is pretty tired of. But Ganin doesn’t know how to break it. His window looks out onto the railroad track, and therefore “the opportunity to leave teases me relentlessly.” He announces to the hostess that he will leave on Saturday.

From Alferov, Ganin learns that his wife Mashenka is coming on Saturday. Alferov takes Ganin to his place to show him photographs of his wife. Ganin recognizes his first love. From that moment on, he is completely immersed in the memories of this love; it seems to him that he has become exactly nine years younger. The next day, Tuesday, Ganin announces to Lyudmila that he loves another woman. Now he is free to remember how nine years ago, when he was sixteen years old, while recovering from typhus in a summer estate near Voskresensk, he created for himself a female image, which a month later he met in reality. Mashenka had a “chestnut braid in a black bow,” “Tatar burning eyes,” a dark face, a voice “moving, burr, with unexpected chest sounds.” Mashenka was very cheerful and loved sweets. She lived in a dacha in Voskresensk. Once, with two friends, she climbed into a gazebo in the park. Ganin started talking to the girls, they agreed to go boating the next day. But Mashenka came alone. They began to meet every day on the other side of the river, where an empty white manor stood on a hill.

When, on a black stormy night, on the eve of leaving for St. Petersburg for the beginning of the school year, he met her for the last time in this place, Ganin saw that the shutters of one of the windows of the estate were slightly open, and a human face was pressed against the glass from the inside. It was the watchman's son. Ganin broke the glass and began to “beat his wet face with a stone fist.”

The next day he left for St. Petersburg. Mashenka moved to St. Petersburg only in November. The “snowy era of their love” began. It was difficult to meet, wandering for a long time in the cold was painful, so both remembered summer. In the evenings they talked on the phone for hours. All love requires solitude, but they had no shelter, their families did not know each other. At the beginning of the new year, Mashenka was taken to Moscow. And it’s strange: this separation turned out to be a relief for Ganin.

Mashenka returned in the summer. She called Ganin at the dacha and said that her dad never wanted to rent a dacha in Voskresensk again and she now lives fifty miles from there. Ganin rode to her on a bicycle. I arrived already dark. Mashenka was waiting for him at the park gate. “I am yours,” she said. “Do whatever you want with me.” But strange rustling sounds were heard in the park, Mashenka lay too submissively and motionless. “It seems to me that someone is coming,” he said and stood up.

He met Mashenka a year later on a summer train. She got off at the next station. They never saw each other again. During the war, Ganin and Mashenka exchanged tender letters several times. He was in Yalta, where “a military struggle was being prepared,” it was somewhere in Little Russia. Then they lost each other.

On Friday, Colin and Gornotsvetov, on the occasion of receiving the engagement, Clara’s birthday, Ganin’s departure and Podtyagin’s supposed departure to Paris to visit his niece, decide to organize a “celebration”. Ganin and Podtyagin go to the police department to help him with a visa. When the long-awaited visa is received, Podtyagin accidentally leaves his passport on the tram. He has a heart attack.

The holiday dinner is not fun. Podtyagin is getting sick again. Ganin gives the already drunk Alferov something to drink and sends him to bed, while he imagines how he will meet Mashenka at the station in the morning and take her away.

Having collected his things, Ganin says goodbye to the boarders sitting at the bedside of the dying Podtyagin and goes to the station. There is an hour left before Mashenka's arrival. He sits down on a bench in the park near the station, where four days ago he remembered typhus, the estate, Mashenka’s premonition. Gradually, “with merciless clarity,” Ganin realizes that his romance with Mashenka is over forever. “It lasted only four days - these four days were, perhaps, the happiest time of his life.” The image of Mashenka remained with the dying poet in the “house of shadows”. But there is no other Mashenka and there cannot be. He waits for the moment when an express train coming from the north passes over the railway bridge. He takes a taxi, goes to another station and boards a train going to southwest Germany.

Song Myung Moon (born 1926) Founder of the Unification Church. Son Myong Moon (aka Sun Myung Moon, or simply Moon) was born on January 6, 1926 in North Korea in a family of followers of the Presbyterian Church. In his youth, he briefly joined the Pentecostals, then joined the sect