Mashenka. Feat. Nabokov V.V.

The book was compiled by two autobiographical novels by Vladimir Nabokov, written in Berlin under the pseudonym V. Sirin: “Mashenka” (1926) and “Feat” (1932). The young emigrant Lev Ganin in the German boarding house is reducing the history of his first love, ragged by the revolution. The strength of the creative

memory allows him to overcome physical separation from Mashenka (the prototype of which was Valentina Shulgina's beloved Nabokova), the pictures of pre -revolutionary Russia recreated by his imagination are more significant and brighter than his decorations of the present.

in The “feat” the topic of returning home, to Russia, is picked up in a different way. Having rethought in the book a model of the classic “Roman of Education”, Nabokov gives his touching hero some of his own features and circumstances. A graduate of Cambridge with a floral name

Martyn Edelweiss, another Russian refugee abroad, dreams of committing something exceptional. He travels around Europe and in vain searches for the use of his abilities. The vague desire that never left him gradually acquires outlines, and he decides on a feat similar to a mythical descent to the Hades - go to the border of the possible and return to his own Russian childhood.