Glory [Hardcover]

Recommended.

The hero of the book is Martin Edelweiss, a young Russian of Swiss ancestry. Like Nabokov's own family, Martin and his mother are forced to leave Russia following the Communist revolution of 1917, and take refuge in Switzerland, where Martin's mother marries his Uncle Henry, a cousin of his late father. Martin is sent to be educated in Cambridge; after graduating, he refuses to find a profession for himself, but travels around Europe, taking casual employment in Berlin and the south of France. The book ends with Martin performing the "exploit" of the Russian title, a clandestine crossing of the Soviet border from Latvia, but the ultimate outcome of this deed is left obscure.

Nabokov's two Russian titles for the work are both significant. Martin is a man of artistic temperament but without artistic gifts. He is bored and restless, something he has in common with the "superfluous men" of earlier Russian literature, such as Eugene Onegin or Pechorin from Lermontov's "Hero of our Times" (a novel Nabokov translated). (There is also, possibly, an echo of their obsession with duelling and honour in the rather ridiculous boxing match between Martin and his Cambridge friend Darwin). There are, however, important differences between Martin and these earlier anti-heroes. Their restlessness and boredom lead them into cynical, callous nihilism; Martin's lead him into a search for sense of purpose, something he remains optimistic about finding. As another reviewer has put it, he sees life as a "series of romantic possibilities." Whereas their sense of purposelessness is internal, arising from something in their characters, Martin's is external, deriving from his situation as an involuntary exile, cut off from his country by political events. It is notable that when he goes to Cambridge he chooses to study Russian literature and culture, rejecting Henry's advice that he should follow a vocational course. Memories of his childhood take on great importance for him; he chooses, for example, to live and work for a time in a particular French town because of the (mistaken) belief that it was the town whose lights he once briefly glimpsed during a night-time train ride as a boy.

Although the story is told in the third person, it is similar to a first-person narrative in that the whole of the action (except the last few pages after he has disappeared) is told as it appears to the central character. One of the most striking features of the work is the vividness of its descriptions of the physical world. Whether the scene is set in the Crimea, Greece, Switzerland, Cambridge, Berlin or Provence, there are plentiful references (at times in almost every sentence) to not only the sights of the locality but also to its sounds, smells, tastes and sensations. Martin is highly sensitive to the beauty of the world around him (something else, incidentally, that he shares with Pechorin)- lights seem from a train, the moon shining on the sea, a jay flying through blue sky above a snow-covered forest, or the scents of a Crimean summer.

Because Martin is so much at the centre of the book, the other characters are less prominent, although there are one or two sharp portraits- Uncle Henry, whose cautious pragmatism contrasts with Martin's romanticism, Martin's first love, the married Decadent poetess Alla Chernosvitova, Sonia Zilanova, the fickle, flirtatious daughter of another émigré family with whom he later conducts an on-off romance, and Darwin. (Darwin, incidentally, is not a fop, as some have called him. "Fop" seems an odd word to use about a winner of the Victoria Cross, and he often seems more practical and down to earth than Martin himself).

The motivation for Martin's "gallant feat" is left as obscure as its outcome. Was it some secret mission on behalf of his fellow émigrés? A desire for adventure? An attempt to impress Sonia? Nostalgia for his native land? Simple bravado? Nabokov provides no definitive answer to this question. Unlike some other reviewers, however, I did not find that the book was spoilt for me by the deliberately vague ending. In literature, as in life, mystery and ambiguity can be as interesting as precision and hard fact. Certainly, "Glory" is not a novel of the traditional sort, with a well-rounded plot with a beginning, a middle and an end, and should not be read as such. The fun of "Glory" lies elsewhere (to quote its author in a different context). The sensuous prose and the memorable portrait of a romantic young man in an age when romanticism was perhaps not in fashion make this a superb novel.

Why did Martin Edelweiss march off towards his glory?

The complete population of Nabokov's novel - Martin's mother, his uncle, his best friend, his lady acquaintance (Sonya is not really his girlfriend, is she?), her relatives, the adventurous Gruzinov, unafraid to boldly go into blood-soaked Soviet Russia through secret passageways - all of them cannot find an answer to this question.

But let's rephrase it. Could Martin *not* march off towards his glory?

Strictly speaking, yes. Should Sonya agree to come to Provence and lead a peaceful rustic life with him, among snakes, heat and garlic. But she had refused, and Martin ran out of options.

He couldn't really spend his life working as a tennis coach in Berlin, throwing balls to elderly pupils - the balls he so deftly held in his hand, five at once.

Nabokov gave to Martin the precious droplets of his own experience, something that was called the happiest childhood of Russian literature. He gave him the anglophile tradition, the old Cambridge ramparts, the glow of Riviera sand, the hot afternoon hours of Southern France, the smell of petrol in Berlin. He allowed him to lose his virginity easily and happily - before that, all Russian classical writers had bashfully neglected this crucial moment - probably none of them happened to be so lucky as Martin. Who else in Russian literature dared sleep with a prostitute with a feeling of such freshness and vigour, and no remorse at all? There is no overlapping in Martin's sexual and romantic life; tough luck, sure; but in contrast to a multitude of other Russian fictional characters, he does not turn it into a tragedy, or renounce both in a fit of despair.

Having endowed his hero with nobleness, health, intellect, sense of humour, Nabokov did not give him any vocation. Martin never wrote anything longer than a postcard. Butterflies flip-flap their wings around him from time to time, but not a single one is given a name in the novel. He plays tennis well enough, but still he's only an amateur; he doesn't seem to play chess at all. In Cambridge, at first, he wants to do everything, but then he chooses the easy way and goes into Slavic studies, losing an excellent tutor on the way because of the latter's sexual preferences (squeamish, isn't he). Nabokov consistently denies his creation all of his own great passions. Even Martin's university studies are only mentioned fleetingly; they are not of real interest to anyone, to Martin himself in particular.

Martin with a gift - that is the character of Nabokov's later novel, "The Gift", the writer Godunov-Tscherdyntsev. His future fiancée would have dog-eared the book of his poetry before even meeting him. But what is left to Martin, who does not write any poetry? "Without a profession, he'll go nuts", says uncle Heinrich.

So he did.