Foreshadowing Is Not Fate: The Strange Slowness of Nabokov’s Glory
Spoiler warning: This essay discusses Martin’s disappearance and the novel’s final scene.
One sentence in Vladimir Nabokov’s foreword to Glory almost confesses both the novel’s beauty and its defect. Its pleasure, he says, lies in minor events echoing and linking until they produce an “illusion of impetus.” The phrase is exact. Forest paths, trains, remote lights, tests of courage and dreams that become facts seem to carry Martin Edelweiss toward his clandestine crossing into Soviet Russia. Yet for much of the novel the action hardly feels as if it is moving at all.
Nabokov constructs a destiny more convincingly than he constructs a decision. The recurring images make Martin’s final act look inevitable in retrospect, while the motives for that act—Sonia, Russia, private glory, danger, duty, death—remain too numerous and too loosely ranked to make it feel inevitable as we approach it.
Motifs predict Martin more powerfully than motives explain him. The result is a novel of retrospective propulsion and forward inertia: beautiful once its pattern closes, strangely static while the pattern is still being laid.
The Path Above the Bed
Martin’s life begins, as he will later understand it, inside a picture.
Above his childhood bed hangs a watercolor of a dense forest and a path disappearing among the trees. In a book his mother reads aloud, a boy steps into just such a picture. Martin prays that she will not notice the resemblance and remove the invitation. Years later he wonders whether his entire life has been that nocturnal journey.
The image gives Martin a way of perceiving events. A path is a summons; distant lights offer another world. On a Crimean precipice, the moon’s wake attracts him as the nursery path did. Years later, a necklace of lights appears beyond a night train, and Martin gets off to find them. His world presents a sequence of thresholds, and his imagination supplies what lies beyond.
Nabokov’s long sentences reproduce that seduction. They move by accretion rather than argument, adding color, sound, remembered detail and spatial depth until an ordinary landscape seems charged with a command it has never actually issued. Martin feels the command because perception has already become narrative. The winding path is powerful not because it explains where he must go, but because it makes going somewhere feel like the shape of his life.
The first half can therefore be both poetic and slow. Its travel, flirtation, Cambridge episodes and Alpine scenery first arrive as atmosphere without an urgent causal line; on rereading, they become rehearsals. The later act changes their meaning, but cannot give every earlier page the pressure of an approaching event. Nabokov earns pattern before momentum.
Martin Edits His Own Life
Martin revises impressions until they recover their glamour. His first sexual encounter with Alla is imagined as a book: their walks and kisses have become “too lengthy a foreword,” while the act promises the “main text.” Experience proves awkward and faintly ridiculous. In the next chapter, Alla is a “frontispiece” that looks coarse when its tissue is removed. Martin replaces the haze, and the colors regain their mysterious charm.
Reality disappoints; composition repairs it. Martin does not lie about what happened so much as alter its lighting. Nabokov restores the haze at the same moment that he exposes the restoration, letting us see both the coarse picture and the beautiful veil.
Martin treats courage in the same way. Terrified of appearing cowardly, he resolves to behave as a fearless man would. Courage begins as a role performed under imagined observation. Alone on a mountain ledge, sick with fear, he sees himself from outside and whistles, as though an audience might convert terror into style. Later he returns under an inward command and tests whether he can light a cigarette above the abyss. He descends with the satisfaction of duty fulfilled.
These episodes establish continuity: Martin repeatedly converts fear into a scene in which he can watch himself overcoming it. But recurrence conceals a change of scale. An empty revolver, a football match, a fight with Darwin, a ledge crossed twice—each trial returns him to ordinary life. The border crossing does not. The rehearsals prepare his self-image without supplying a sufficient reason for this particular act.
When Fulfillment Becomes Permission
The decisive error occurs when Martin interprets repetition as law. Changing before a football match, he reflects that his reveries possess the property of “crystallizing and mutating into reality.” Because imagined matches have become actual matches, he treats this as a guarantee that his new fantasy of a clandestine expedition will also become solid and fill with life.
Here Nabokov joins form to psychology with extraordinary economy. The novel’s echoes have trained Martin to think as the novel thinks. An image returns; therefore it must have been a promise. A fantasy comes true; therefore fulfillment itself becomes a rule. Recurrence turns into precedent, and precedent into permission.
The reader is exposed to the same temptation. Once the forest path, the train and the distant lights have accumulated enough repetitions, the crossing seems to have been waiting from the beginning. A major study of the novel’s recurrent imagery argues that those echoes prepare the ending while also revealing that Martin has answered a call not meant for him. I would extend that insight by separating preparation from explanation. The signs can be perfectly placed and the decision still remain under-motivated. Formal destiny is not causal necessity.
This differentiation accounts for the curious pressure of the prose. Nabokov’s images do not push Martin forward; they wait for him ahead. They are stations at which the same private myth becomes visible again. The novel therefore accumulates confirmation without acceleration. Its movement is fugal, as Nabokov calls it, but a fugue can repeat and transform a subject without producing the inevitability of plot.
Too Many Motives for One Destiny
Sonia gives Martin’s fantasy its strongest human pressure. Their scenes are the novel’s most beautiful because her opacity interrupts his self-enchantment. She is alive in a way his symbols are not: dry, wounded, playful, cruel, dutiful, suddenly imaginative, never reducible to the role he has prepared for her. Their love feels impossible almost from the moment it becomes possible to name. That impossibility has what the expedition lacks: resistance from another will.
Sonia also supplies a language Martin can appropriate. Mourning her sister Nelly, who has died in childbirth, she speaks of a duty with “inner importance,” something within a person that must be performed. Martin misunderstands the intimacy of the moment and tries to kiss her; later, however, the phrase returns as a model for his own secret purpose. On a day outside Berlin, he and Sonia invent Zoorland, the forbidden northern country into which ordinary people cannot enter. Their shared game gives his private border crossing a landscape.
Irina’s history darkens that landscape. Martin learns how, during the civil war, she was sexually tormented by men in a crowded railway car, how her father was forced through a moving train’s window, how typhoid left her without ordinary speech. The narration turns her into a living emblem of national damage, and Martin immediately imagines entering Zoorland as a free pilgrim, into woods where children are tortured. Irina’s background is a serious motive, alongside exile, his attachment to Russia, his need to master fear, and his longing to return to Sonia bearing a story that will transform him in her eyes.
The problem is not absence but, in fact, superabundance. When a French traveler asks the purpose of his expedition, Martin offers science, then rejects it; offers sport, then says sport is not all; finally gathers “glory, love, tenderness for the soil” and a thousand mysterious feelings into one answer. Later he imagines the expedition, his love and Pushkin’s ode to autumn held together by an inexpressible bond. The bond is atmospheric: it does not choose among motives or show why they require twenty-four illegal hours inside Soviet Russia.
A historical account of Podvig and its literary subtexts places this refusal of public purpose within Nabokov’s resistance to historical necessity and reads the deed as pure will, needing no spectators. That clarifies the kind of exploit Nabokov wanted. However, it seems that the earlier courage scenes keep installing a spectator inside Martin. The anti-historicist design explains why the crossing has no political program; it still does not create private compulsion or abolish the problem of experienced pace. In other words, explaining why Martin’s crossing serves no public cause is not the same as making us feel why he must cross—or making the long wait for that decision compelling.
Darwin Inherits the Path
Darwin finally asks the plain question the novel has postponed: what is the purpose of the crossing?
Martin expects instant understanding. Darwin tries politics, a message, nostalgia and pure risk; Martin rejects each answer and falls silent. The exchange does not expose a hidden motive. Not one. But it tells us about Martin’s conviction that the pattern should now be legible without explanation.
Then Martin disappears. Nabokov does not show the crossing, much less confirm a death. He transfers the last movement to Darwin, who tells Sonia and travels through rain and thaw to Martin’s mother. The car overturns without serious harm—one more adventure whose danger is real but survivable—and Darwin walks the rest of the way.
After the unseen conversation, he returns along a wet forest path. Water runs under the snow; roots cross the trail; the path winds picturesquely and mysteriously between dark trunks.
It is an excellent ending because it refuses the one scene Martin has spent the novel composing. We receive consequence without exploit, grief without corpse, pattern without disclosure. The nursery picture returns, but Martin is no longer there to interpret it. Darwin inherits the path and, with it, the burden of looking at a design that cannot tell him what happened.
The ending therefore justifies much of Glory’s slowness, but not all of it. It reveals that the scattered episodes were making a consciousness capable of mistaking echoes for instructions. It turns travel into rehearsal and reverie into evidence. Still the revelation remains retrospective. While reading forward, we can feel long stretches in which exquisite sentences create weather, pressure and possibility without making the next act necessary.
That is the novel’s peculiar achievement and limitation. Nabokov can make a life look destined without making its decisive action compulsory. Martin crosses from imagination into the picture because he has taught himself to read recurrence as fate.
Glory almost persuades us to do the same. Almost.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, Glory, translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author (Vintage International, 1991). Primary text and Nabokov’s 1970 foreword.
Penguin Books, Glory. Edition and publication context.
Leona Toker, “Glory: ‘Good Example of How Metaphysics Can Fool You’”, in Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures. Used for the account of recurrent imagery, the misdirected call and the novel’s ethical pressure; the essay agrees with that formal reading and extends it through the distinction between motif and motive.
Alexander Dolinin, “On Some Contexts and Subtexts of Nabokov’s Podvig”, Slavica Revalensia 7 (2020). Used to qualify the essay’s causal argument through the novel’s rejection of political and historical necessity.
Comments