Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0004575, Wed, 17 Nov 1999 09:44:18 -0800

Subject
Paris-Laure Troubetskoy (fwd)
Date
Body
Laure Troubetskoy

"GLORY as Exorcism:
The Dream of a Return to Russia in Nabokov's Poetry and Prose"

GLORY is not only one of Nabokov's most autobiographical novels
but actively interechos with his poetry. Indeed, GLORY's hero achieves the
dream that appears as a pervasive motif of Nabokov's poetry of the
twenties and early thirties -- an actual physical return to Russia. Being
objectified in the novel, this dream reveals its own ambivalence:
the craving for
the lost paradise (which is), in its own way,an attraction to death.
The hero's fate seems to serve as a catharsis, for after GLORY, Nabokov's
dream of a reurn is modified: the return to his native land is
increasingly conceived as a return though (artistic) creation (after
Martyn crosses the border, only Nabokov's anti-alter ego Vadim Vadimovich
does so), and the dark image of Zoorlandiya is isolated from the image of
the lost paradise.
The abrupt change in the treatment of the return theme is
conditioned by the peculiarities of Nabokov's poetics of the novel
(rommanyi poetiki). If in his poems the theme is treated chiefly in the
spirit of a Symbolist double world, in GLORY, the decisive episode is
shown only obliquely. We are dealing with a unique poetic catharsis
closely connected with the poetics of correspondences, patterns,
"enchantment," "unusual lining" of reality.