Harte, Tim. ‘Transforming Defeat Into Victory’: Jack London and Vladimir Nabokov’s Glory. 2017

This study explores the role that Jack London played in Russian modernist culture, particularly within the work of Aleksandr Kuprin and Vladimir Nabokov. London, who fostered an unabashedly masculine literary persona, wrote prolifically about adventure, courage, wilderness, and athletics, all of which appealed to writers like Kuprin and Nabokov as they broadened the scope of Russia’s literary culture at the start of the twentieth century and in the post-Revolutionary period. London’s unprecedented, albeit fleeting popularity as a writer of fiction and non-fiction insured that he helped shape the development of Russian literature in meaningful ways, both democratizing it, as is clearly reflected in Kuprin’s fiction, and providing a vigorous, “manly” burst of energy for literature that a young Nabokov drew upon once in exile in Western Europe. In Nabokov’s 1932 novel Glory (Podvig), the influence of London and, in particular, his 1909 novel Martin Eden can be most notably discerned. Martin Eden, this article suggests, provided an important, unappreciated subtext for Glory, the novel that most vividly reflects Nabokov’s debt to the American novelist and to his unique, masculine brand of adventurism. While Nabokov never emulated London’s style per se or his ideological outlook, so much of Glory can be interpreted through the retrospective prism of Jack London and his once celebrated Martin Eden.