Query: After so many years since Stegner
wrote about The Exploit this Russian novel, quite probably, has
already been published, translated and appears under the same or
another title, in this case it might even be one I'm already familiar
with. What is it's actual title in Russian and in English?
EDNote: The Exploit is Podvig, in English changed to Glory
because VN disliked the verbal meaning of "exploit" (see the
foreword).~SB
JM: As it came out as the "Subject", Stegner's "Escape"
contrasts with what I read in the indicated Foreword ( written in Montreux,
1970).
Here Nabokov confesses that he didn't
bestow any artistic talent on his hero and adds "how cruel to prevent him from finding in art - not an 'escape' (
which is only a cleaner cell on a quieter floor), but relief from the itch of
being!"
And yet, Stegner's idea, so it seems to me,
doesn't consider art as a form of elaborated "escapist fantasies": he
suggests that beauty and aesthetic pleasures were valued by Nabokov
as a full-fledged religion. The full title of his book s Escape
into Aesthetics. It seems to blend in with the entire project connected
to "Glory". In VN's words: "my happiest thing"..."it soars to
heights of purity and melancholy that I have only attained in the much later
ADA". VN considered that " 'Fulfillment' would have
been,m perhaps, an even better title for the novel". He chose the oblique
"glory' for "the glory of high adventure and disinterested achievement; the
glory of this earth and its patchy paradise; the glory of personal pluck; the
glory of a radiant martyr."..."Fulfillment is the fugal theme of his destiny; he
is that rarity - a person 'whose dreams come true'."
When VN wrote that "fulfillment is
the fugal theme.." I don't think he was considering any kind
of musical circular art of the fugue, but, by setting it in the
"singular", he seems to be indicating a classic
or renascentist ordering of perspective in painting. XXth Century art has "un-centered" this organization
through artists like Cézanne, the Surrealists, Dada... aso and,
inspite of "Podvig"'s romantic mood, it is formally closer to modern art than to
"classicism". Can anyone ellucidate me about the meaning of VN's
expression, then, his "fugal theme"?
A fugue ( as in "fugitive") carries us back into
"escape"!
(btw Steve, I found no copy of "Glory",
besides a Penguin frail and mouldy one, carrying the indicated "foreword".
Is there any American edition you'd recommend?)