Glory

I had never heard of this novel by Nabokov before I saw it in a used book pile. The author tells us in a foreword that this was one of his nine Russian novels, his fifth written in Russian (1932). The Russian title was Podvig, which means roughly “gallant feat or high deed.” It’s “…a story of a rari......more

An early novel written during Nabokov's Russian-language period, Glory is the story of a young man, Martin Edelweiss (the non-Russian surname coming from a Swiss grandfather). After an upper-class upbringing in Russia, the Revolution and the Civil War violently disrupt Martin's idyllic life and he f......more

59th book of 2021. Artist for this review is English painter William Ratcliffe. 4.5. As I continue to potter around in Nabokov's Russian émigré novels (attempting them in some semblance of order, when I manage to get hold of them), I come to Glory, a seemingly forgotten and unread novel from 1932, th......more

Nabokov's prose is brilliant even here, so early in his bibliography. But he commits the rookie mistake of assuming that a personal experience that has been so significant in his life (his own exile from Russia) is interesting per se to readers. Glory offers very little apart from this experience, a......more

1η δημοσίευση, Book Press: [URL not allowed]-pe... "Όσο και αν φαίνεται αστείο…". Έτσι ακριβώς ξεκινάει η "Δόξα" κι αμέσως ο προσεκτικός αναγνώστης καταλαβαίνει πως έχει βρεθεί βαθιά στα χωρικά ύδατα της Ναμποκο-χώρας. Ιδιαίτερη χώρα ετούτη, περιορισμένης μεν έκτασης, σημαίνουσας όμως......more