Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character’s disappearance into the realm of pure art. The end is incredibly haunting. Martin’s English friend Darwin (a very suggestive name) brings news of Martin’s disappearance to his mother. There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art. It’s very hard to do this in the practice of fiction – you can’t be too schematic and theoretical, but you can’t underplay the narrative hand, either.
Now you’ve chosen Nabokov’s Glory.
I love Glory and am in a minority group among Nabokov fans in that. Andrei Bitov, a prominent Russian author who had first read Nabokov in Soviet samizdat, once declared that you were either a Gift-ist or a Glory-ist. If I had to choose I would say I am a Glory-ist. In some ways, it is the most purely Nabokovian novel.
What is it about?
In the aftermath of the Russian revolution, Martin (in Russian, Martyn) Edelweiss, a part-Swiss Russian émigré, finds himself at Cambridge, where Nabokov himself went. Estranged from his surroundings, Martin contemplates crossing the border from Latvia into the Soviet Union where he plans to do something, perhaps political subterfuge. But really it is not essentially about politics or ideology but about the character’s disappearance into the realm of pure art. The end is incredibly haunting. Martin’s English friend Darwin (a very suggestive name) brings news of Martin’s disappearance to his mother. There is a path winding through the woods. The end. Nabokov hinted at wanting to take all the people out of fiction so that it should be more like a landscape painting, a pure realm, a path winding into perfect art. It’s very hard to do this in the practice of fiction – you can’t be too schematic and theoretical, but you can’t underplay the narrative hand, either. Imagine, the years are 1930-32, Nabokov was still a young writer, it was his fourth novel, and in a sense his vision here is so complete. Glory is a Russian novel written in Berlin, originally serialised in an émigré quarterly, and many years later translated into English by Dmitri Nabokov and his father – very well translated, I think.
Read full interview
Maxim D Shrayer (www.shrayer.com) immigrated to the United States from Russia in 1987. A bilingual author and translator, Dr Shrayer is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College. His publications on Nabokov include The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Nabokov: Themes and Variations (in Russian). Shrayer has edited and co-translated two volumes of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov. In 2007 Shrayer received the National Jewish Book Award for An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer’s recent books are the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration and the collection of stories Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. He says a revisionist biography of Nabokov is due, one that comes to terms with the Jewish influence on his work.
