Nabokov, the unripe one. Masen’ka, story of the writer’s first love

Reading Nabokov often elicits tears. It is a question of a lilial emotion, from which we let ourselves be enveloped with pleasure. It seems possible, in those moments in which he describes and remembers precious, ethereal, very fragile “fragments of the past”, to dispense with the belief that he is nothing more than a “Great Mysterizer”, as Pietro Citati defined him. The distortion of reality in which Nabokov indulges is that of an idea of ​​literature as pure invention. “The great writer” – we read at the beginning of his “Literature Lessons” – is the one who brings together the qualities of the storyteller, the teacher and the enchanter, “but it is the enchanter who prevails”. And that the more he lets himself be fascinated by magic, the more he will be able to live, and make his readers live, as “free citizens of their dreams”. However, it is very rare to have happy, fully realized dreams. «Even the most beautiful dream – wrote Adorno – remains associated, like a stain with its difference from reality, the awareness of the purely illusory character of what it gives. This is why the most beautiful dreams are as if furrowed by invisible cracks ».

It is this same conviction that inspires Nabokov’s work, perennially suspended between the concupiscent and dreamlike thrill of Mnemosine and the desperate admission that everything, in the sweet time of childhood and early youth, is “finished, swept away, destroyed”. Everything seems to go on dying and going through a great number of resurrections at the same time, only to die again and again. As happens, in “Speak, I remember”, in evoking his cousin Yurij, who died as soon as a child, and who had seemed to his mother to relive for a moment, when, slipping his hand into the recesses of an armchair, he pulled out a tiny unsaddled cuirassier , whose bow legs still clutched an invisible mount; or, in “Pnin”, when the protagonist sadly thinks about the young, fragile, pretty Mira, deported to a concentration camp and killed with an injection of phenol in her heart, but who in her mind continues to live in opalescent gardens on the surface and translucent in the depths; or again, in “Maria”, when, after years in exile in Berlin, Ganin finds his beloved Masen’ka, to immediately redefine her in the “haunted house”, because only in it “everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change , no one will ever die ».

Ganin is today the most present character in the imagination of Nabokov’s readers, for having Adelphi sent to the bookstore, at the autumn return, in the clear translation of Franca Pece, the first novel published by Nabokov in 1926 for the types of the Berlin-based Slovo , a small émigré publishing house. Long relegated to oblivion, without too much regret on the part of Nabokov, who was the first to notice certain harshness and above all an excessive concession to his never too reviled story of himself, it was translated into English with the collaboration of the same author in 1970, with the title of “Mary”, which seemed to agree well with the neutral simplicity of the Russian title, “Masen’ka”, now moreover rightly preferred to that, indeed too evocative of neorealistic atmospheres à la Lalla Romano, of “Maria”, chosen instead for the first Italian edition, edited, in 1971, by Ettore Capriolo for Mondadori.

Masen’ka, whom Ganin now discovers married to the faded Alfërov, a guest like him of a dilapidated boarding house for emigrants fleeing Bolshevik Russia, had been, like Tamara for Nabokov, his first great love. Tamara, a fictitious name that has “the same shade of color as the real one”, was actually called Valentina Šul’gin. Fifteen at the time when the future writer, in the summer of 1915, in the Vyra estate, fell in love with her, two years later she was swallowed up by the coils of the October Revolution, leaving behind her the echo of a throbbing throbbing . For some time, when the Nabokov family was already “perched on the southern ledge of Russia”, about to leave for Europe, every time a mailbag reached Crimea, there was always a letter from Valentina, intended for receive without too much delay response. In the same way Ganin, despite the distress and difficulties of the civil war, had tried to correspond with Masen’ka; and “there was something moving and wonderful about the way their letters made it through the terrible Russia of that time, like white cabbage butterflies flying over the trenches.”

In rereading those letters, written in a small and round handwriting, as if running on tiptoe, Ganin repeated a gesture that had already been Nabokov’s: a “broad exhumation” that differs from the Proustian intermittences, because it is completely foreign to the ‘unexpected, involuntary sensation that innervates the latter, and rather confident in the resources of writing, since – the admired Kafka would have said – «dealing with ghosts». It is only in writing, an ante somnum vision par excellence, that it seems in fact possible to see Vyra, Valentina, their parents still immersed in an atmosphere of safety, well-being, warmth, and therefore not believing in time, so as to indulge in the illusion of its even momentary absence. For Nabokov, this is ecstasy, “and behind the ecstasy there is something difficult to explain”: a void into which everything dear to us pours, and which, by breaking layers of thought, it is possible to see wrapped in a diaphanous sheet of paper like a precious fruit. In this way one takes part – Sebald observed – in the séance organized by Nabokov, “and people and objects at the same time foreign and familiar appear in the foreground, irradiated by that claritas that since the time of Thomas Aquinas is considered the stigma of a true epiphany ».