His Mary is a twin sister of my Tamara, the ancestral avenues are there, the Oredezh flows through both books, and the actual photograph of the Rozhestveno house as it is today-beautifully reproduced on the cover of the Penguin edition ( Speak, Memory, 1969) could well be a picture of the pillared porch in the “Voskresensk” of the novel. Readers of my Speak, Memory (begun in the Nineteen Forties) cannot fail to notice certain similarities between my recollections and Ganin’s.

It is one of the very few common rules I have accepted. The beginner’s well-known propensity for obtruding upon his own privacy, by introducing himself, or a vicar, into his first novel, owes less to the attraction of a ready theme than to the relief of getting rid of oneself, before going on to better things. Otherwise, it has remained untranslated for the impressive span of forty-five years. A German version, which I have not read, appeared a couple of years later (Ullstein, Berlin, 1928). It was finished by the beginning of the following year and published by an émigré book company (Slovo, Berlin, 1926). I started working on it in Berlin, soon after my marriage in the spring of 1925. In casting around for a suitable substitute (Mariette?, May?) I settled for Mary, which seemed to match best the neutral simplicity of the Russian title name. The Russian title of the present novel, Mashenka, a secondary diminutive of Maria, defies rational transliteration (the accent is on the first syllable with the “a” pronounced as in “ask” and a palatalized “n” as in “mignon”).

Mary by vladimir nabokov