Mashenka

“Mashenka” (1926) is the first and largely autobiographical novel written by Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin, dedicated to the writer's Russian past. The young emigrant Lev Ganin relives the story of his first love, interrupted by the revolution, in a German boarding house. The power of creative memory allows him to overcome the physical separation from Mashenka (whose prototype was Nabokov's beloved Valentina Shulgina), the images of pre-revolutionary Russia recreated by his imagination turn out to be more significant and vivid than the surrounding decor of the present.