''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

- 42
-
design in the life of Martin Edelweiss out of one of
his own childhood recollections:
One night, during a trip abroad, in the
fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my
(flattish) pillow at the window of a
sleeping car... and seeing with an inexplicable
pang, a handful of fabulous
lights that beckoned to me from a distant
hillside, and then slipped into a pocket
of black velvet: diamonds that I later
gave away to my characters to alleviate
the burden of my wealth;
137
These lights reappear in Glory where they "accom-
pany the hero... throughout his life, from Yalta, to
Southern. France, Switzerland, and finally back to
Russia. "138He is intensely aware of them on a moonlit
night in Yalta:
Right under his feet he saw a broad black
abyss and beyond it the sea, which seemed
to be raised and brought closer, with a
full moon's wake, the 'Turkish Trail'
spreading in the middle and narrowing as
it approached the horizon. To the left,
in the murky, mysterious distance, shimmered
the diamond lights of Yalta (20).
This, and the rest of the surroundings: "... above the
black alpestrine steppe, above the silken sea, the
enormous, all-engulfing sky, dove-gray with stars" (20)
evokes in Martin an extraordinary sensation: "an un-
bearable intensification of all his senses, a magical
and demanding impulse, the presence of something for
which alone it was worth living" (20). These lights,
of which he keeps catching glimpses from trains never
lose their attraction and magic for himý. and firmly
remain associated in his mind with the intense emo-
tional experience in his childhood:
Thus the nostalgic memory of the past
flashes out of the darkness of anonymous
landscapes which are rushing past the