In 2002, when I was working at Harvard, I took a graduate seminar in the Comparative Literature department called "Memory and Modernity," taught by Svetlana Boym. I believe that class may be the last time I read Nabokov before picking up Glory (on the recommendation of someone I know only from Twitter!). We read Speak, Memory as well as some of his short stories. I also seem to remember re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in connection with this class, but I don't think it was assigned. I had read quite a bit of Nabokov at that point - 7 or 8 of his books I believe. I'm not sure quite why I stopped reading him - it wasn't a conscious decision at first. But as more time passed and I continued not reading him, I started to think of Nabokov as a writer of my youth.
Reading Glory brought me right back to that class with Professor Boym. In fact, I found myself wondering why we hadn't read Glory for that class. We did read Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog, which the book's hero picks up to read on p. 91. We also read Nabokov's short story, A Guide to Berlin, which covers some of the same geography as Glory does. Then there is the fact that Glory starts out in Crimea, The Lady with the Dog takes place there as well, and Professor Boym talked so affectionately of Yalta - a place I previously only knew of by name from whatever I had learned in history class about the Yalta Conference - that I've wanted to go there since. Professor Boym had a particular interest in nostalgia, and the whole of Glory is a study in nostalgia. Nearly every character is trying to recapture some half-imagined past or place. And then, the hero's constant invention and reinvention of himself also seems like it would be familiar to Professor Boym. Of course, she was certainly familiar with the book, it just didn't come to my attention until recently (though I had owned it for years).
I learned of Professor Boym's untimely 2015 death by chance from a passing tweet and it took me completely by surprise. When I'd had her as a professor, she had been young (43, the same age I am now). Though several years had passed, it seemed impossible that she could have died. I can't say I thought about her often between 2002 and 2015, nor really between learning of her death and the present, but reading Glory brought back some details I had forgotten, and also reminded me how much of what I know about Nabokov I learned from Professor Boym.
In actual fact, I read Glory in just 4 or 5 days, but it felt like an eternity because I took a 9-day vacation at about 80 pages in and didn't touch the book (except to move it from bag to bag) the whole time I was away. (Of course, I also packed and lugged all over the Azores a second book just in case I finished Glory on vacation. Will I never learn? Good thing I'm a light packer in all other respects.)
