Mashenka

"Mashenka" (1926) is the first and largely autobiographical novel written by Vladimir Nabokov in Berlin, dedicated to the writer's Russian past. A young emigrant, Lev Ganin, relives the story of his first love, cut short by the revolution, in a German boarding house. The power of creative memory allows him to overcome the physical separation from Mashenka (the prototype of whom was Nabokov's beloved Valentina Shulgina), and 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.