Turkevich Naumann is a professor at Douglas College, Rutgers University. In the following excerpt, she offers her interpretation of the significance of the imagery in "A Guide to Berlin."
Berlin is the city that is almost always a background theme in Nabokov's early stories. For him Berlin did not have the special, personal, social, or political connotation that Paris had for Balzac or London had
for Dickens. It assumed importance because it actually surrounded him as he wrote. Apropos of this, Nabokov said: "I have always been indifferent to social problems, merely using the material that happened to be near, as a voluble diner pencils a street corner on the table cloth or arranges a crumb and two olives in a diagrammatic position between menu and salt cellar." Berlin is the setting for his novels Mashen'ka.....
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