Russian émigrés, it follows Lev Ganin, a young man drifting through a stagnant present while obsessively reliving his first love, Mary, from his youth in pre-revolutionary Russia. When he learns that Mary is about to arrive in Berlin, Ganin retreats ever more deeply into idealized recollection, measuring the vividness of memory against the emptiness of his current life.

The novel explores nostalgia not as comfort but as illusion, suggesting that the past survives only as an artistic reconstruction. Gentle, elegiac, and stylistically assured, Mary already reveals Nabokov’s fascination with time, memory, and the creative power of consciousness.