Nabokov’s A Guide to Berlin is a beginner’s invitation to understand Nabokov’s loving attention to inconsequentialities as he draws patterns from them all. The work is made up of five vignettes following our emigré narrator’s day in Berlin. The protagonist narrates his journey through prose so meticulously lush with patterns, it borders on poetry. The narrator’s eye, highly engrossed in even the most mundane things, makes the work more of a guide to Nabokov's writing than a guide to Berlin. It teaches us how to read Nabokov; it teaches us to be in awe of the flicker of light in a trashed bottle or a poor boy’s nightly soup dinner. In the narrator’s guide, the fantastical appears in everything shiny and reflective. Glass, palindromes, glimmering fins, ice, metal, glossy buttons, windows, and soup– they offer glimpses into different times. And quite frankly, they're beautiful.

In his guide, the narrator devotes significant care to ceremoniously describe the mundane as it is distorted into something splendid through literal and figurative reflections. In the third vignette, Work, the narrator describes a garbage van driving past him with “rows of emerald-glittering empty bottles,” transforming the bleakness of discarded glass into a shimmering performance passing by (95). The color “emerald” also connotes an expensive green colored jewel; using it, the narrator invokes an ironic sense of rarity in the description of the bottles, their reflection in the light aggrandizing them– making them beautiful. In the earlier vignette, The Streetcar, the narrator notes that “ordinary objects [...] will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times” (94). The mirrors of future times represent the perception of the past distorted in the process of being a reflection. The temporal distance allows the future perspective to be different from the contemporary understanding of the past. For the narrator, this distance fosters a generosity in the future perspective. His affectionate attention to mundane objects is by virtue of the lens through which the future looks back at the past, distorted, beautiful in reflections. 

Nabokov bookends the first vignette with a palindrome creating a reflection at the beginning and end of a scene. On his walk through Berlin, after a night of heavy snowfall, the narrator notices: “Today someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow” that had fallen over the big black pipes” (92). The palindrome, “OTTO” lends itself to the recurring pattern of reflections as the word’s nature is an accurate reflection of itself– it cannot be distorted upon reversal. The palindrome, which is in itself a mirror, is then mirrored in the object upon which it lies: the pipes mimic the shape that the word “OTTO” makes when written down. Nabokov’s game with reflections here describes a moment of synchronicity in which the pipe’s history, having once been a play place for children, is synthesized with the palindrome written on it. The pipe and the writing on it, thus form one object embodying both the past and present. The word nearly appears again at the end of the first vignette. The narrator describes the palindrome’s likeness to the pipe in the word’s “Orifices and iTs Tacit Tunnel” (92). The word’s near reappearance as “OTT,” no longer as perfectly palindromic, lends itself to a slightly altered perspective seen from the other end of the tunnel, or in a metaphorical sense, the future perspective on the past. OTTO serves as a telescope which one looks through to see different times, distorted.

The protagonist subtly notes the space between himself and the world around him– a space he forges as an interpreter, experiencing the present moment as an elusive thing. In the fourth vignette titled Eden, the narrator describes “behind the glass” of the aquarium portholes, the “transparent fishes [which] glid[ing] with flashing fins” (96). Nabokov situates the creatures behind the glass to reinforce the distance between the narrator and the beauty the narrator witnesses– he reinforces their intangibility. Nabokov describes the fish through the narrator’s eyes glimmering in the light, just as translucent as the glass which they are behind, further questioning their presence. If they can barely be seen, and they cannot be touched, are they there? Their bodies are transparent, and their fins are the only thing signifying their existence, beautiful and visible solely through their reflection in the light. He employs a breathy alliteration, focusing on the “f” sound as it is pronounced through the gentle biting of the lower lip and pushing out air, connoting a kind of fast and airy nature to these beautiful creatures; ephemerally visible, delicate, and bright. 

In the opening vignette, The Pipes, the narrator introduces the first reflective surface, characterizing himself as subservient to the passing of time, lamenting the distance between himself and the past. Walking by the big black pipes in the early morning, the narrator describes himself  “cautiously probing the treacherous glaze of the sidewalk” (91). The street which used to serve as a play place for young boys now encumbers our disabled narrator who struggles to walk. Nabokov reveals the man’s walking incapacity and thus hints at the protagonist's old age if not the potential for a traumatic past disabling experience, invoking the man’s agedness. The man is directly contrasted with the young boys who used to play on the street before, flaunting their vigor in conversation with the narrator’s affliction. The iron pipes which were once playthings have become perilous, particularly in their reflection through time. The glaze itself, being a surface that reflects the past and present, is the piece that the narrator describes as treacherous, making the juxtaposition of times the most frightening aspect of the icy street. The narrator is directly characterized in his relationship to time, being a victim of it, playing the subservient role of the affected.

Nabokov’s protagonist hallucinates and draws connections between the mundane and excerpts of the past where there are none, suggesting that the narrator suffers from a kind of obsessive nostalgia. In his description of the turn of a train track, Nabokov’s protagonist imagines “the reflection of a still illumined tram” as it “sweeps up like a bright-orange heat lightning” (92). The protagonist sees a past image from when the tracks were once in use reflected in a vessel of the tram. The narrator notes the remembered image’s luminosity as it continues to prevail in the present. He compares its light to the ephemerally quick striking of lightning, grappling with its both lasting and fleeting nature. The narrator also differentiates the lightning as “heat lightning,” an often mysticized form of lightning that is very simply lightning occurring so far away that its thunder goes unheard (92). His word choice is reflective of the distance between the observer and the past of his mise en scène in that its presence can carry extreme intensity as it once had while also missing its accompanying activation of the senses. Nabokov is showing us the narrator’s kind of nostalgic hallucinations in which he sees imagined past events occurring in reflective surfaces. When the narrator is observing fish in the aquarium, he focuses on a star and fabricates a connection between the star and his homeland. The narrator notes that in the tank with the fish lies a red five-pointed starfish. He discreetly reiterates the aforementioned palindrome telling us the “notorious emblem[‘s]” origin lies at the “bOTTOm Of The sea, in The murk Of sunken ATlanTica, which lOng agO lived ThrOugh variOus upheavals while pOTTering abOuT TOpical uTOpias and OTher inaniTies thaT cripple us TOday” (96). The starfish which he references lying in the water, he likens to the red Bolshevik star in referring to it as an emblem, thus ascribing to it symbolic value. The symbolic value is then later defined by the notion of its origins in the formation of a utopia. Hyperbolically alluding to the ancient continent of Atlantica to situate the time of the Bolshevik star, the narrator sees the historied Bolshevik symbol through a lens distorted by glass, water, and the OTTO palindrome. The narrator associates the star with crippling inanities, his perception of Communist Russia informed by his own experience, likely being a Russian exile himself. The narrator and the reader alike both begin to see the past through reflective surfaces in places the past is not. The starfish is a starfish. We become susceptible to Nabokov’s overwhelming patternization of reflections which transport us in time. 

While the above reading may be more evident, it would also be very Nabokovian to indulge in the protagonist’s mania and conclude that the past and present are indeed concurrent. Nabokov’s concept of cosmic synchronization hinges on the idea that time collapses on itself through patterns which allow us to transcend into a different realm. When the narrator reaches his final destination to meet up with a friend at The Pub, the narrator encounters from afar, a boy. The boy is in another room, eating his “soup” while his mother cleans, bar-goers play pool, and his father pours drinks. “Under the mirror, a child sits alone. But he is now looking our way.” The narrator’s companion does not understand the significance of the sight of the young boy. The narrator then addresses his reader: “How can I demonstrate to him that I have glimpsed somebody’s future recollection.” In this final scene, the reflective imagery explodes, appearing several times in the narrator’s description of the pub. By watching the boy watching the pub through the mirror located above the boy, the narrator is able to see from the boy’s perspective what the boy will remember. The narrator thus invokes the present moment as it simultaneously occurs as a past memory in the future. He carefully notes reflective surfaces in the pub to facilitate future retrospection. The “soup,” “the metallic gloss of the bar,” the “window,” the “mirror[s],” and the pipe-like architecture of the bar itself, all serve as passageways to look into the moment as it will be remembered in the future. The actual pub being shaped with two rooms connected by a “wide passageway” can be visualized in the OTTO shape, the hall being wide enough that it is equal to the diameter of the rooms. This shape recurs to allude to the far end of the telescope enabling the viewer to look all the way through it at the routine memories made nightly in this pub. In this final scene, Nabokov superimposes the past, present and future, pleating time through reflections. 

In A Guide to Berlin, reflective surfaces in the émigré's wearisome world signify the pleating of time as it synchronizes and collapses on itself. The work, written in an émigré paper and published on Christmas, serves as an ode to readers like the narrator, in a state of exile-induced limbo. Through Nabokov’s deliberation on time, he constructs a profound rendering of the exile’s psyche, deeply entrenched in nostalgia and temporally disoriented from having been cast out of Russia and displaced in Berlin. Nabokov’s intricate game with reflections not only highlights the beauty found in everyday moments but also emphasizes the complexity of memory and identity in the face of displacement. As the narrator traverses the streets of Berlin, he invites us to see the world through his eyes, revealing how the past and present coexist, entangled in a tapestry of memory. Ultimately, Nabokov's exploration of these themes serves as a reminder of the resilience of the human spirit, demonstrating how, even in the midst of loss and longing, one can find meaning and beauty in the fleeting glimpses of life.