Glory by Vladimir Nabokov

During the sumptuous Swiss autumn he felt for the first time that he was, after all, an exile, doomed to live far from home. That word "exile" had a delicious sound: Martin considered the blackness of the coniferous night, sensed a Byronic pallor on his cheeks, and saw himself in a cloak. This cloak he donned at Cambridge, albeit it was only a lightweight academic gown, of a bluish fabric, semitransparent when held up to the light, with many pleats on the shoulders and with winglike half-sleeves that were worn thrown back. The bliss of spiritual solitude and the excitement of travel took on new significance. It was as if Martin had found the right key to all the vague, tender, and fierce feelings that besieged him.

A moment in Nabokov's Glory I thought was really genius: the protagonist, Martin Edelweiss, is staying at the home of young Sophie, with whom he has fallen in love. Sophie's sister Nelly has just died. In the middle of the night, she comes creeping into her sister's bedroom where Martin is staying, and climbs into bed with him. They chat for a while, and he leans over to kiss her, thinking that her emotional state has finally driven her into his arms, and she erupts: Can't you see this is how I used to come to my sister in the middle of the night? Poor, idiot Martin--he doesn't even realize he's been cast in the sibling role.

Martin is a half-Swiss Russian who, as a young child, is forced to flee the Bolsheviks with his mother. He takes up residence in Switzerland with an uncle and eventually goes to Cambridge, where he meets Sophie, the quasi-girlfriend of his good friend Darwin. (Darwin, a jovial Oxbridge pudding type, is a great character of a kind I don't think I've seen in any of Nabokov's work, unless it's some doughy chucklehead student of Professor Pnin's.) Sophie is a tease and a flirt, hardly worthy of the kind of courtly love that Martin imagines foisting upon her, but then again, there's nothing special about Martin, either, whose longings and insecurities are much of the kind that men his age possess. (In the foreword, Nabokov tells us that he pointedly refused to make Martin a writer or any kind of sensitive creative genius; Martin's ordinariness is the point.) Those feelings become concentrated, eventually, on his exile, a word that stands in for what Martin understands about his own nature. Spurned by Sophie, he hatches a plan to achieve a true "exploit"--another way of translating the Russian word of the title--sneaking back into the Soviet Union.

He erupts at Darwin, who doesn't understand why he'd do such a thing: "I thought you of all people would understand!" But the thing is, we don't understand either. What's Martin trying to achieve by something so foolhardy? I think that we're supposed to see that Martin doesn't quite understand it himself. It's a reckless act, one likely to end in Martin's death, and I think Nabokov wants us to reject the idea that Martin has such a deeply rooted connection to the country of his birth that it is a psychic trauma to be apart from it. Nabokov is satirizing that kind of easy nationalism, not giving into it. And it's not lost that Nabokov himself was an exile, leaving the Soviet Union through Crimea just like Martin; some of what I have read about Glory describes it as a practice run for the memoir Speak, Memory. Martin's desire to return to Russia is a myth, recklessly seized but lightly held. He's not at all like some of the Russophiles he meets in the book; he's at home in the cosmopolitan world of Geneva and London. The power of the exile story, then, Nabokov suggests, comes from somewhere else, a kind of childish pique that might, in another context, manifest as a different kind of foolhardiness. I was fascinated by the way that Nabokov depicts Martin's ultimate disappearance from the novel, as if moving beyond the borders of the narrative--the last scene depicts Darwin, trudging up the drive of Martin's Geneva home to tell is mother where he's gone, and that she'll probably never see him again.