However, with the truly Nabokovian perversity, the symbolic interpretation of the pattern somehow remains valid, even though undermined through overuse, and the reader is forced to vacillate between recognition and denial of the symbolic order.

The reader is expected to recognize the deceptiveness of the symbolically motivated imagery, and attempt to decipher the pattern behind. Symbols become clichés, platitudes, killing imagination while ostensibly promising an entry into the other world. Instead of freeing one from the tyranny of the solid objects, this tendency to constantly search for symbols creates a totalitarian discourse in which the ready-made associations mask the true pattern of reality. However, the symbolic order in Nabokov’s novel works as a trap for the reader. Every single object, situation, emotion gains here symbolic meaning, pointing outside the drudgery of the nightmarish alien world – to the uncertain but hopefully less hostile unearthly dimension. This existence outside the frame of time and space in the spectral dimension of semi-transparent memories (paradoxically still more alive than the actual citizens of Berlin), seems to breed an atmosphere of significance and suspense.

The novel’s setting reflects the marginal reality of the day-to-day life of the Russian emigrants in Berlin, resembling nothing as much as the hopeless waiting of the lost souls in the purgatory. Symbolism as a favorite ploy of the modernist authors becomes a target for Nabokov’s irony in his first Russian novel Mary.

Mary by vladimir nabokov