p. 110: Death Scene

As Ganin views the dying Podtyagin, he has this reflection:

“. . . gripping the edge of the bed with a strong white hand, looked in the old man’s face, and once again he remembered these flickering, shadowy doppelgängers, the casual Russian film extras, sold for ten marks apiece and still flitting, God knows where, across the white gleam of a screen. It occurred to him that Podtyagin nevertheless had bequeathed something, even if nothing more than the two pallid verses which had blossomed into such warm, undying life for him, Ganin, in the same way as a cheap perfume or the street signs in a familiar street become dear to us. For a moment he saw life in all the thrilling beauty of its despair and happiness, and everything became exalted and deeply mysterious—his own past, Podtyagin’s face bathed in pale light, the blurred reflection of the window frame on the blue wall and the two women in dark dresses standing motionless beside him.

I read this as a moment where Ganin is facing his own doppelgänger, i.e., himself, in a confrontation with the death of self and past that reveals the concealed mystery behind the mundane and, thus, another element in Nabokov’s fictional dialectic that stretches across his canon: the mystery of the ordinary and the ordinariness of mystery.