Essay: Nabokov’s Mary and Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

The state of exile never ends, and the longer one is in exile, the more distanced one becomes from their past and their memories. Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov and Czech writer Milan Kundera both composed works inspired by their exiles to different countries. Recurring themes of memory are prominent in both Nabokov’s Mary and Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. They utilize memory to demonstrate the malleability of the past, and furthermore, of identity.
In Mary, the protagonist is a Russian émigré named Ganin who lives in a pension in Berlin. The way he lives in exile is very stagnant. Ganin claims that one day he will leave Berlin, but he cannot. Even as he is getting dressed one morning, he finds that “The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle” (Nabokov 18). His life is in a state of inertia, and he lives completely in the present, refusing to reflect on his past in Russia. Scholar Eric Laursen bolsters this idea, writing, “Like [Dostoyevsky’s] underground man, Ganin cannot bring himself to act, to move into the future… He refuses to accept that two plus two must equal four and that exile must be forever” (Laursen 57). Comparatively, fellow Russian émigré Podtyagin is constantly yearning for the past in Russia. He talks with Klara about Russia, saying, “If we were in Russia, Klarochka, some country doctor or well-to-do architect would be courting you. Tell me—do you love Russia?” and “We should love Russia. Without the love of us émigrés, Russia is finished. None of the people there love her” (Nabokov 53). These musings on loving Russia indicate how unlike Ganin, Podtyagin is absorbed by his memories of Russia. Like Ganin, however, he is inert and can never move forward.
It is not until Ganin is shown a picture of Mary, his lover from his youth, that his way of life shifts. Mary is coming to Berlin to meet her husband Alfyorov, another Russian émigré living in the pension. When he sees a photograph of Mary, Ganin begins to reconstruct his memories of her. He is “a god, re-creating a world that had perished. Gradually he resurrected that world, to please the girl whom he did not dare to place in it until it was absolutely complete” (Nabokov 33). As he remembers Mary, Ganin begins to make plans to escape the pension and run away with her when she arrives; however “the plans are vague and make no provision for their future” (Laursen 58). Ganin reverses his initial point of view and through the seven day timeline of the narrative, lives almost completely in the past, dreaming of Mary. He is representative of a Bergsonian dreamer, a man “who lives in the past for the mere pleasure of living there, and in whom recollections emerge into the light of consciousness without any advantage for the present situation” (58). Through this fixation on Mary, Ganin begins to redefine his past, with “no discrepancy” between the past and present, and he finds it to be “more real, much more intense than the life lived by his shadow in Berlin” (55). Ganin not only redefines his past, but by merging it with his vision of the present, he is redefining his reality. To him, the past is much more palpable. His imagination also plays a part in his memories, as he deliberately embellishes them as part of his re-creation. For example, Ganin recalls one of the letters Mary sent him:
Ganin remembered getting this letter, remembered walking up a steep stony path on that distant January evening, past Tartar picket fences hung here and there with horses’ skills, remembered how he sat beside a rivulet pouring in thin streams over smooth white stones, and stared through the countless, delicate, and amazingly distinct bare branches of an apple tree at the mellow pink of the sky, where the new moon glistened like a translucent nail clipping, and beside it, by the lower horn, trembled a drop of brightness—the first star. (Nabokov 89)
These visual illustrations he describes are so far from realism—as he would not possibly remember everything so perfectly beautiful and in such detail—that they paint a picturesque but unbelievable scene. He changes his memories to better suit the experience he wants them to give him, thus shaping his own present identity.
Throughout Kudnera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, various characters also use memory to shape their identities. The first example is that of Mirek in the first section of the novel. Mirek believes that “His connection to his life was that of a sculptor to his stature or a novelist to his novel. It is an inviolable right of a novelist to rework his novel” (Kundera 15). Mirek overtly works to construct his identity with memories that he wants to construct his life with. He wants to destroy the lost letters because the love he held for Zdena affects his consciousness, and the letters remind him of her. Kundera observes, “The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past” (Kundera 30-1). In regards to this passage, scholar Eric Berlatsky writes, “the constitution of personal identity through memory-construction is…potentially dangerous… Identity and history are both, then, like the novel, artistic and performative creations that do not represent truth… This passage additionally seems to suggest that the rewriting of one’s own memory is not a liberatory counternarrative…but rather a universal impulse that is…an unavoidable abuse of power ” (Berlatsky 114). It becomes clear that while it is possible to selectively alter one’s memories, Kundera is not sure if people should.
In the section titled “Mama,” the mother character recalls an instance in her life in which she recited a patriotic poem at a school ceremony but forgot the last stanza, and she was greatly ashamed. In her memory, the audience did not notice her mistake and responded with applause. However, Karel—her son—corrects her and highlights flaws in her story. He remarks that his mom would’ve graduated high school the same year the war ended. For a moment, Mama considers her mistake. She recalls that “It was true. She had graduated during the war. Where did the memory of that post-war school ceremony come from?” (Kundera 46). This is particularly interesting, because Mama subsequently does not acknowledge her mistake aloud and later recites the poem again. This action is an “effort to ‘write’ her identity… Mama seems to prefer her own version of the event to the truth, or the official version of the truth, and builds her identity… on her version” (Berlatsky 118). Just as Mirek struggled to write the novel of his life, Mama chooses to cling to her imagined memory to maintain that part of the foundation of her identity.
The one recurring character in Kundera’s novel, Tamina, also shapes her identity through memory. Rather than trying to change memories that already exist for her, Tamina attempts to construct memories of her dead husband that she has lost. Her husband and her love for her husband are facets of who she is, and so she wants to use notebooks of love letters to rebuild her memory. When she cannot do that, she “attempts to remember her husband by drawing pictures of him from an old passport photo and eventually imagines superimposing his features on every man she sees” (Berlatsky 119). Unfortunately, this method does not work for her, and she realizes that her efforts “only showed that her husband’s image was irrevocably slipping away” (Kundera 117). Because Tamina is unable to recover her memory of her husband, she travels to the island of children and relinquishes her memory. She drowns in the water, signaling the disappearance of her identity.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting opens with a short description of a famous political photograph in which a group of leaders stand on a balcony and look out on a crowd. Communist leader Gottwald stands in the middle wearing a fur hat. Next to him is Clementis, who gave Gottwald the hat. Four years after the picture was taken, Clementis was accused of treason and executed. The propaganda machine doctored any reproductions of the photograph, effectively erasing Clementis from history. Kundera simply states, “Where Clementis stood, there is only the balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head” (Kundera 3-4). Photographs are the best example of manipulating memory, since they are physical objects that depict a moment in time but can still be changed. Berlatsky highlights the danger in this power: “Where Clementis once stood as a symbol of the brotherhood and good feeling of Communism in its optimistic youth, now he is erased, no longer useful for a totalitarian regime” (Berlatsky 103). The regime utilizes the mutability of the past as a weapon and demonstrates just how easily political history and identity is altered through a photograph.
Photographs can also be used in the construction of personal identity, as Mirek indicates in “Lost Letters.” Mirek’s desire to erase his memories of Zdena is clear, and the easiest way for him to conceptualize this is through picturing his life like a photograph:
He wanted to efface her from the photograph of his life, not because he had not loved her but because he had. He had erased her, her and his love for her, he had scratched out her image until he had made it disappear as the party propaganda section had made Clementis disappear from the balcony where Gottwald had given his historic speech. Mirek rewrote history just like the Communist Party, like all political parties, like all peoples, like mankind. (Kundera 30-1)
The idea of physically erasing Zdena resonates with Mirek. He wants to erase her not just from his memories, but from history, from all time, as the Communist regime did with Clementis. This is indicative of how deeply he is pained by the memories he holds of Zdena, and how much they affect his identity.
Nabokov also explores the effect of photographs on memory and the past. In Mary there are two important notable photographs. The first photograph is of Lyudmila, Ganin’s lover at the pension. Already, she does not appeal to Ganin. He finds that she is disguising herself, even though he used to be fascinated with her. She is in fact artificial. Nabokov writes, “the falsity which she trailed around everywhere like her scene, the falsity of her baby talk, of her exquisite senses, of her passion for some imaginary orchids, as well as for Poe and Baudelaire, whom she had never read” (Nabokov 11). Her superficiality is confirmed when Nabokov adds that whenever she had a real or vulnerable moment, “she remembered that she should be fascinating [Ganin] with poetry, scent and sensibility, and at once began putting on her act” (12). Lyudmila’s artificial personality is reflected in the framed photograph she keeps of herself at the pension. The photograph has been physically retouched. Ganin strips away “the layers of disguise that surrounded the crudely painted Lyudmila, revealing in her the futility and desperation of this existence” and breaks up with her so that he may pursue his plan to escape with Mary (Laursen 58). Though Lyudmila is viewed by the protagonist as shallow and desperate, her efforts to put on an act and change the perception of her appearance are no worse than how he embellishes his own memories of Mary.
The second photograph in Mary is the photograph of Mary that triggers Ganin’s reverie into his past.  It is a photo taken by a stranger of Mary sitting in a garden in a white summer dress. It is not doctored physically; however, Ganin’s mental reconstruction of Mary does alter the photograph. He sees their past, and thus Mary, through rose-tinted glasses. The picture is the center of the fantasy life that rapidly develops in Ganin’s mind. Laursen explains that in a different essay, “Nabokov asserts: ‘The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail'” (Laursen 58). Ganin, in this case, would be a bad memoirist—the photograph of his past is no longer the truth.
Jay Tolson of The Hedgehog Review explains, “the past does not always exist as a hard, objective, or factual reality—something ‘out there’ to be grasped and appropriated. In our individual lives and our collective remembrances, the past can be reconfigured, altered, and even invented… The past can be a weapon” (“The Uses of the Past”). Through memories, people have access to events and feelings that inevitably have shaped who they are presently. By manipulating their memories, the characters in Mary and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting reconstruct their own identities and choose their paths for the future. Sometimes this method of remembering can be used as a tool to forget a negative experience, and other times the power of memory can be abused to erase an entire person from the historical consciousness. The more times a memory is revisited, the more it becomes warped and altered—continually editing the photograph of one’s life until perhaps one day it is unrecognizable.
Works Cited
Berlatsky, Eric. “Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus.” Cultural Critique
55.1 (2003): 101-51. Project Muse. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1980.
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Laursen, Eric. “Memory in Nabokov’s Mary.” Russian Review 55.1 (1996): 55-64. Web.
27 Oct. 2016.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Mary. New York: Vintage International, n.d. Print.
“The Uses of the Past.” The Hedgehog Review (2007): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct.
2016.