Glory

Glory is a Russian novel written by Vladimir Nabokov between 1930 and 1932. The novel has been seen by some critics as a kind fictional dress-run-through of the author's famous memoir Speak, Memory. Its Swiss-Russian hero, Martin Edelweiss, shares a number of experiences and sensations with his creator: goal-tending at Cambridge University, Cambridge fireplaces, English morning weather, a passion for early twentieth-century rail travel. It is, ho... more

Glory is a Russian novel written by Vladimir Nabokov between 1930 and 1932. The novel has been seen by some critics as a kind fictional dress-run-through of the author's famous memoir Speak, Memory. Its Swiss-Russian hero, Martin Edelweiss, shares a number of experiences and sensations with his creator: goal-tending at Cambridge University, Cambridge fireplaces, English morning weather, a passion for early twentieth-century rail travel. It is, however, the story of an émigré family's escape from Russia, a young man's education in England, and his (perhaps) disastrous return to the nation of his birth—the "feat" of the novel's Russian title. The text was translated by the author's son, Dmitri Nabokov, and published in English in 1971. The Russian title, Podvig, also translates as "feat" or "exploit." Its working title was Romanticheskiy vek (romantic times) as Nabokov indicates in his foreword and continues to characterize Martin as the "kindest, uprightest, and most touching of all my... less