Dear Mr. Nakobov

By R.Z. Sheppard

MARY by Vladimir Nabokov. 114 pages. McGraw Hill. $6.95.

Many thanks for the copy of Mary, your first novel. We receive a great many first novels from new authors anxious to have their work appraised in these columns. Unfortunately it is difficult to accommodate all but a small percentage of promising new fiction in our limited space.

In your case, there is an added difficulty. Mary appears to have been written 45 years ago in Russian. Furthermore, your introduction contains many things that the average English-speaking reader may have trouble with. You say, for example, that the novel was originally titled Mashenka, with the accent on the first a (pronounced as in ask) and a palatalized n as in mignon. Even among my colleagues, all of whom pronounce mignon correctly, your instructions caused a considerable phonetic tangle, not to mention knots of rather nasty plosives and fricatives.

In addition, you refer to certain similarities between your own recollections, which you note having recorded in some sort of memory book, and those of Ganin, the main character in Mary. You seemed puzzled at having found that many of said details were more vivid in their fictional context than when you set them down years later as autobiography. However, your explanation that Ganin was closer in time to the details than you were as an autobiographer is too hasty. May I direct your attention to Ada, a bestseller about time and memory in which an elderly gentleman conjures up his distant past with the most palpable details imaginable.

Apart from such matters, there remains the remoteness of Mary's subject and theme. A 1924 Berlin boardinghouse full of colorful Russian emigres simply does not have the broad appeal of Hotel. And your hero, who has been forced to flee Russia, where he apparently enjoyed a privileged life, is not likely to attract much sympathy today.

Nevertheless, Mary does show a great deal of talent. Ganin's sweet memories of pre-Revolution Russia and of his love encounters there with Mary are very promising. The sense of intimacy and sadness is worthy of Chekhov. Your descriptions of the countryside would have been the envy of Turgenev. May I commend you especially on the book's inventiveness and control. Having the depressed Ganin find new vitality through his memories while awaiting Mary's arrival from the Soviet Union creates a natural suspense of great force. Making Mary the wife of a bland squirt who also lives at the boardinghouse ensures a tasty intrigue. And finally, having Ganin realize that Mary and Russia can never be repossessed except by memory, establishes a motif that certainly warrants fuller development in any other novels you may be planning to write. Next time, however, please try to get the book to us sooner.

Yours truly, sb RZ. Sheppard

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