A story of a saddened young man running a roster and suffering the consequences:

as soon as the protagonist fully possesses his love, his liaison/relationship with the women becomes a deceit:

He was powerless because he had no precise desire, and this tortured him because he was vainly seeking something to desire. He could not even make himself stretch out his hand to switch on the light. The simple transition from intention to action seemed an unimaginable miracle. Nothing relieved his depression, his thoughts slithered aimlessly, his heartbeat was faint, his underclothes stuck unpleasantly to his body. At one moment he felt he should at once write a letter to Lyudmila explaining firmly that it was time to break off this dreary affair, then at the next he remembered that he was going to the cinema with her that evening and that somehow it was much harder to make himself ring her up and cancel today's date than it was to write a letter, which prevented him from doing either.

How many times had he sworn to himself that he would break with her tomorrow and had had no trouble in concocting the appropriate things to say, only to fail utterly to visualize that final moment when he would press her hand and leave the room. It was that action –turning round, walking out– which seemed so unthinkable. He belonged to the sort of people who can get whatever they want, achieve, surpass; but he was quite incapable of renunciation or flight– which are, after all, one and the same thing. He was held back by a sense of honor and a sense of pity which blunted the will of a man who at other times was capable of any kind of creative enterprise, any exertion, and who would set about a task eagerly and willingly, cheerfully intent on overcoming everything and winning all.

He no more knew what kind of external stimulus would give him the strength to break off his three-month-old liaison with Lyudmila than he knw what was needed to get him up from his chair. Only for a very short time had he been genuinely in love–in that state of mind in which Lyudmila had seemed wreathed in a seductive mist, a state of questing, exalted, almost unearthly emotion, as when music plays at the very moment when one is doing something quite ordinary, such as walking from a table to pay at the bar, and gives an inward dancelike quality to one's simple movement, transforming it into a significant and immortal gesture.

Enthralled by his vision of Mary and unable to let Alfyorov have her, Ganin contrives to reunite with Mary, who he believes still loves him. He tries to contrive a meetup with her, then thinks better of it at the last minute after getting Alfyorov good n drunk.

Like Ganin, Nabokov was separated from Tamara by the Russian Revolution and forced into Berlin as an émigré.

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