"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"!

 

I know what you mean about how a fugue doesn't seem like how Glory works. I think Nabokov might simply have meant the first part of how my dictionary defines the word: "a polyphonic composition based upon one, two or more themes..." Nabokov's famous motifs sprinkled through the story, though there is only one voice, hence no fugue. I don't remember does Martin experience any periods of amnesia? One problem I've always had with this book is that the result of it, Glory, seems at odds with what Nabokov claims his intention was, to create a story about a romantic young man who sets off on a great glorious exploit, since as many critics have noticed, Martin's exploit is pointless and absurd. Nabokov has somehow tried to meld his idea of the nonutilitarian glories of artistic discovery with that of an actual real life adventure, though what comes out seems to be ironic: no one in the book thinks Martin is as romantic as he feels; he pointlessly climbs a cliff and nearly kills himself like some immature idiot out of Hemmingway, and endeavors to cross the line from his "real" world into his fantasy "Zoorland" when he cannot get the girl wants--all signs that Martin seems to be just a more attractive version of the demented chess genius in The Defense. The book seems more like a vortex sucking everything into oblivion than it does a fugue. And Martin's dreams come true only in the sense that the third person narrator cheats by simply refraining to dramatize whatever happened to Martin and instead giving us a late scene which numerous critics have noted echos with various themes in the novel, leading back to the beloved picture from childhood of a forest with a winding road disappearing into it, where little Martin has, we are being pushed to believe, finally disappeared himself. In a literal sense Martin was always only a conjured figure in a fictional work of art and so dissolves at the end into same, but surely N. doesn't mean to suggest that Martin has somehow tripped into a tranparent phantomic realm? If so why is Martin so wrong about everything in his life? He's a man who at the end clings to nothing but fantasy. Not in the way Fyodor and Zina do, as a means of creating life, heightening its colors, giving it more depth, so as to live it more fully, but as a means of slaking off frustration. Yet Nabokov seems to be saying that we're not reading what we're reading. I like this book except for the emotional outburst of the ingenue at the end, which seemed melodramatic and out of character; it's not her fault she didn't want to get with Martin and I don't think she should feel the least bit guilty.