Originally written in Russian, it’s Nabokov’s shortest, virtuoso novel. My mind speaks English, my heart speaks Russian and my ear speaks French,” Vladimir Nabokov said about himself. “ I am an American writer, born in Russia, educated in England, where I studied French literature before moving to Germany for fifteen years. It was published in Berlin in 1926 under the pen name Vladimir Sirin. Nabokov returned to the idea of writing the novel in the spring of 1925, having married Vera Slonim (his wife of 52 years), to whom he eventually dedicated the novel. By the end of the year, two chapters had been written, but the writer destroyed the manuscript, retaining only a fragment that was published in January 1925 under the title ‘A Letter to Russia’. “The thick happiness of first love is unique,” Nabokov would later note in his ‘Laughter in the Dark’. At the last moment, Ganin decides that time travel to the past is impossible and abandons both Berlin and Mary, forever. Mary is the blast from the past, a dreamlike symbol of a bygone era and happiness, in other words, “ all his youth, his Russia”. Ganin plots a devious plan to meet her at a train station, after many years. The protagonist, émigré Lev Ganin, is caught unawares when he finds out that his neighbor’s wife is his former first love, Mary. The novel is set in a Russian boarding house in Berlin.

Nabokov’s debut novel, initially entitled ‘Happiness’, has a lot of autobiographical details.

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