An Old Daydream

By Martha Duffy

GLORY by VLADIMIR NABOKOV 205 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

Of Nabokov's nine emigre novels, written in Russian mostly during the '20s and '30s, this is the last to be published in English. One regrets at once that there will not be more. Though a brand-new novel is promised for late this year, it will not be prefaced by the thunderbolt from Montreux, which has become customary in these translations, in which the author instructs his Johnny-come-lately audience in his older works.

Nabokov has become shameless in his attempts to control (and bamboozle) readers in these introductions. This time, without naming him, he gives particular hell to Critic Andrew Field --"a desperate saphead in the throes of a nightmare examination"--who had the effrontery to read Glory in Russian and beat the author to a published criticism.

The result is that one embarks upon this gossamer fiction with a head stuffed full of what it does not mean. No, Field notwithstanding, the romantic hero, Martin Edelweiss, is not motivated toward self-eclipse by his parents' early separation. No, there is no connection between Glory's dream world of Zoorland and Pale Fire's Zembla. Though the author admits that Martin might be "a distant cousin with whom I share certain childhood memories," one is enjoined against "flipping through Speak, Memory [Nabokov's autobiography] in quest of duplicate items." Instead, the dutiful reader --always feeling vaguely inferior to the ideal Russian reader--is urged to concentrate on "the echoing and linking of minor events, in back-and-forth switches, which produce an illusion of impetus: in an old daydream."

Martin, who owes his flowery last name to a Swiss grandfather, is a dreamy Russian youth who is pried from his comfortable calendar of winters in St. Petersburg and vacations in the Crimea by the 1918 revolution. He emigrates via Yalta to Greece, Switzerland, and England, where he eventually studies at Cambridge. There he is overwhelmed both by unrequited love for a bitchy girl named Sonia Zilanov and by seductive images of his lost Russia infracted "through the prismatic wave of memory."

One day when Sonia is behaving less churlishly than usual, she and Martin dream up a northern place called Zoorland. Abruptly, Martin embraces the imaginary country as his homeland and is last seen embarking on a trip across its borders. Unfortunately, Zoorland's physical equivalent is the Soviet Union, where the balmy pilgrim will almost certainly be shot as a spy. But his disappearance hardly seems tragic, for he is so patently a repository of memory and romance. Indeed, one of his earliest temptations is to step into a picture in his Crimean bedroom showing a path that disappears into a wood. He is very much like one of Nabokov's most delightful creations, Art Longwood of the poem "Ballad of Longwood Glen," who climbs a tree and simply disappears.

Glory is the painstaking work of a brilliant young writer who is still testing his skills, as Martin tests experience, "with different acids." Nabokov has mastered so many narrative techniques that one sometimes forgets that like most great novelists, he is usually telling the same story. It is no flaw that Glory resembles Speak, Memory as well as his first novel Mary, and even Ada. In it, as in all his work, he caresses his opulent memory and exalts it. This fresh and graceful book is pervaded by what, in an aside, Nabokov calls "a writer's covetousness (so akin to the fear of death), a constant anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle."

. Martha Duffy

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.