Martin Edelweiss’s Quest for Glory, Guided by Prospero and Other Wizards

Abstract

Nabokov’s novel Glory (Podvig, 1932) was often viewed as a “regression” to traditional novel writing and, therefore, perceived as untypical for the innovative modernist Nabokov (Sirin). More recently there have been critical voices reading the novel as marked by Silver Age aesthetics, not least for its fantasy and fairytale elements and its inclusion of subtexts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My article argues the later approach, specifically examining in detail the allusions to Shakespeare’s play as a vital key to a new interpretation. In my reading, Martin Edelweiss, the novel’s dreamy protagonist is an Ariel figure and his earthbound opposite and friend and rival Darwin, a Caliban figure. It examines the question whether there are no other ways to cross forbidden borders than physically traversing them and that the “wizard” who created both Martin-Ariel and Darwin-Caliban used them as symbolic figures and pointers to his own artistic mission which – in the tradition of the “shipwreck survivor” Arion – is to accept survival as a means to salvage Russian literary culture in spite of the Soviet-Zoorlandian threat to it, but also émigré resistance to “cosmopolitan” innovation and accusations of having “betrayed” true Russian values.