''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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can, at least, make others aware of the existence of
these realms and of the fact that there are, after all,
ways of obtaining knowledge of them. But Nabokov does
not do this for an amorphous mass called "the audience"
or
"society":
A work of art has no importance whatever
to society. It is only important to the
individual, and only the individual reader
is important to
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me.
Chronologically speaking, however, all this is an-
ticipating things a little. Some motifs from the later
novels, it is true, are there in outline in Mary,
Glory and King, Queen, Knave, which G. M. Hyde lists
" under "Three Early Novels"129 even though Glory is not
quite as early as that. But in these novels the motifs
do not yet have, and hardly hint at, the profound
implications they are to assume later on.
Ganin, the hero of Mary130 lives as an exile in a
Berlin pension together with a small number of other
exiles, and his life, and that of the others, has
about it some unreal quality: "his dream life in exile"
(52) it is called, and his surroundings appear just
as unreal to him: Riding on a bus"... Ganin felt that
this alien city passing before him was nothing but a
moving picture" (52). By chance he finds out that his
neighbour's wife, who is about to arrive from Russia
to join her husband, is Mary, the girl he loved in
his youth, and this discovery starts in his mind "a
Proustian act of recreation"131 of the past. He evokes
that past in loving detail, so that, for a few days,
it assumes in his mind more reality than his life in