the 2012 Penguin Classics edition, translated from Russian by Dimitri Nabokov in collaboration with Nabokov himself.
[It should be noted that, for me, the best of Nabokov is all of Nabokov--my muse, my flame :) Every time I read anything of his, I slow down to a dazed crawl because every paragraph, every sentence demands intimate attention. So what occasions this particular focus on Glory? Nothing except Glory happens to be the one I read most recently.
That said, there is something special about this book: in the earliest pages, Nabokov violently, parenthetically tramples upon not one, but two of the things I hold dear: Turkish coffee and the Bosporus. His protagonist Martin Edelweiss--with whom Nabokov confesses to share certain "likes and dislikes," like a nicer, more naive "distant cousin"--dismisses the former at a Greek port as "sweet goo in a tiny cup," while the latter slides out of his sight aboard a ship without leaving a trace. Daggers to my heart!
Yet here I am, forgiving him both these capital offences. Ain't I magnanimous? Not really, for I have every intention of revisiting and vindicating the victims of this inexplicably coarse attack coming from my otherwise all dazzling, diabolical Volodya. Stay tuned for new bits on Turkish coffee--with or without mastic--and the Bosporus mystique. The things I do for a pun.]
p. viii (from the Foreword) One day in early summer Ilya Fondaminski, chief editor of the Sovremennye Zapiski, arrived there from Paris to buy the book na kornyu, 'in the rooted state' (said of grainfields before they are harvested). He was a Social-Revolutionist, a Jew, a fervent Christian, a learned historian, and an altogether delightful man (later murdered by the Germans in one of their extermination camps), and vividly do I remember the splendid zest with which he slapped his knees before rising from our grim green divan after the deal had been clinched!
[My note: If this had been a painting, N. would have been one of those fabled Chinese masters whose work comes to life while the ink is still wet. Five lines or so suffice to make me see, love and mourn for this editor, whom he raises from the dead and holds out to us in the palm of his hand like a seashell. In the meantime, he has also fit into that "grim green divan" the entire story of the blistering poverty he had to endure with his wife Vera in exile, after they'd irrevocably lost their Russia.]
p. 48 The day promised to be lovely; the cloudless sky still had a hazy cast, as a sheet of gauze paper sometimes covers an exceptionally vivid frontispiece in an expensive edition of fairy tales. Martin carefully removed this translucent sheet, and there, down the white steps, swinging her low hips ever so slightly, wearing a bright-blue skirt across which an orderly ripple ran back and forth as, stepping down with calculated unhurriedness, first one foot and then the other extended the tip of its polished shoe, rhythmically balancing her brocaded handbag and already smiling, her hair parted on one side, came a limpid-eyed, slender-necked woman with large black earrings that also swung in rhythm with her descent. Martin went to meet her, kissed her hand, stepped back, and she, laughing and trilling her 'r's,' greeted Sofia, who sat in a wicker armchair smoking a thick English cigarette, her first after morning coffee.
[My note: And then, after some excitement and some inept but well-meaning lovemaking, see how Martin closes the chapter of Alla Chernosvitov ... ]
p. 53-4 Upon her, upon that frontispiece, which, after the removal of the gauze paper, had proved to be a little coarse, a little too gaudy, Martin replaced the haze and through it the colors reassumed their mysterious charm.
[My note: I loved this metaphor for a scene about to unfold in life and/or revisited in memory so much--the gauze paper over an illustration--that I shamelessly ripped it off and used it in a story before I even finished reading the book. Of course, it morphed into something entirely different in my hands, but if the story is published somewhere, you'll recognize it. It's titled "The Third Time."]
p. 60 The thirst she had quenched, only to intensify it, so tormented him during that alpine summer that at night he could not go to sleep for a long time, imagining, among numerous adventures, all the girls awaiting him in the dawning cities, and occasionally he would repeat aloud some feminine name--Isabella, Nina, Margarita--a name still cold and untenanted, a vacant, echoing house, whose mistress was slow to take up residence; and he would try to guess which of these names would suddenly come alive, becoming so alive and familiar that he would never again be able to pronounce it as mysteriously as now.
[My note: What I find charming here is not the gently satirical portrayal of youthful horniness. Those interested in seeing what N. can really do with that subject-matter should read his Ada--I do, every two summers, as a pagan ritual of bounty at this point. It's the idea of a vacant name that fascinates me. Spoken out loud, it floats like a body calling out to its soul. There is some kind of magic here that I don't understand, yet it feels perfectly familiar.
Here I also see another thing that marks N.'s imagination: when he depicts a present moment that is significant for any reason, he immediately, perhaps impulsively, delves into the way that moment would play out in memory. I think of the way Charlotte, Lolita's doomed mother, takes a swim in a lake, floating and gliding through the waves in the way she would like to remember herself, looking back to that moment as a memory, sculpting and curating her own present for a display to her future self. That's what Martin does here: he's registering the empty ring of these names because he foresees his future self fondly remembering the mystery they no longer have. Maybe the magic I speak of has to do with time. Its plastic fullness. Round and round in circles. It's a comforting thought.]