Rich, sumptuous, delicious? Or stodgy, unpalatable, indigestible? Perhaps even revolting, poisonous and evil? Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is Vladimir Nabokov’s longest and most ambitious novel. Vast and plentiful, romantic and extravagant, it presents incestuous lovers who enjoy a lavish lifelong affair on an alternate Planet Earth, dying together in their nineties. It is a strange and sickly world: poetic and inspired, dazzling but disturbing, shot through with paradox, controversy and the dissonance of audacious proficiency.
Ada is preoccupied with time: the way we sense it, suffer it, are perplexed and consumed by it. Time dominates our lives yet remains a mystery to us. We determine it via clocks and calendars, but asked what it is, we can only shrug and mutter incomprehensibly about ‘progress’ or ‘things happening’. Time is something we experience immediately and yet – at the same time – we cannot quite grasp, still less delineate. We know about causality, how events seem connected through time and how it also seems to be irreversible. But what is the true nature or meaning of time? Is it only an illusion? What is the reality behind its mystical appearance?
Human perceptions of subjective time change during our lives, as events and images become more familiar, less surprising, and Ada measures this. Indeed, subjectivity is built into the novel’s very structure, through the radical differences in size of each section of the book as it progresses: part five is only one-sixteenth the dimensions of part one, which itself is half the novel. Across Ada’s pages we witness the vastness of youthful time, where anything is possible (and everything can wait). Then the hastening, hurrying bankruptcy of time as we grow up (and realize we won’t live forever). The stockpiles of memory begin to overwhelm us, stacked high and deep, time speeding by as we age, lament and mourn.
Nabokov’s novel divulges the lifelong love story of Van Veen (1870–1967) and his sister Ada (1872–1967). They first meet when she is eleven and he fourteen, initially believing themselves to be cousins but later discovering they are actually siblings. They begin a sexual affair, and Ada charts the numerous and protracted disruptions and fleeting resumptions of their relationship over the decades. They are wealthy, well educated, cultivated, highly intelligent. Van goes on to become a world-famous psychologist- philosopher; Ada takes the form of his memoirs, written in his nineties. The text is interspersed with his own and Ada’s marginalia, and in parts with annotations by an unidentified editor, perhaps indicating the manuscript was incomplete or unfinished at their death.
Ada begins in the second half of the nineteenth century on an alternative Earth called Demonia or Antiterra. The planet’s geography is the same as that of our own, as is much of its history, but with blips and disparities. The English-speaking USA extends across the Americas (although there is a Russian-speaking province in what we know as western Canada and a French-speaking one in the east). Most of Asia is Russian; Europe and Africa are British (and ruled by a King Victor). Aristocracy remains extensive. Technology seems occasionally ahead of, though sometimes behind, our own timeline: there are cars and aeroplanes, but no television or telephones. Electricity has been banned since the ominously elusive ‘L disaster’, and hydro-kinetic systems now provide Antiterra’s energy needs.
Throughout Antiterra lurks the abnormal belief in the existence of a twin world, ‘Terra’. This planet seems to have a history much more like our own, something we discover due to the fact that adherents to this cult-like creed form an important part of Van’s early psychological research. Van’s subjects/patients dream, or hallucinate, about Terra, believing themselves in some way in communication with it.
This is the Antiterran world that Van and Ada are born into. In part one of the book we witness the two adolescents falling in love. The sweethearts tenderly pool resources to tell the story of their past, its patterns and contentment, its blissful sexual summers and harsh disappointments as they are compelled to spend considerable lengths of time apart (as cousins often do). Memory reconstructs past time, mislaid pleasures, evoking them in minute detail and linking them to the future happiness the couple will share in their later lives. Part one has been called the last nineteenth-century Russian novel: Ada’s sonorities, atmosphere, subject, visual landscape and narrative edifice all converse and negotiate with her mighty literary predecessors, while also conserving the artefacts of the previous century’s novels in a vigorous, ironic museum.
But between the older couple and the ardent young lovers falls a severe and expansive chasm that Ada also navigates. Parts two and three have ragged, jagged edges, irregular vacillations and frayed textures. This is time in flux and anguish, jealous and aggrieved. Van and Ada hardly see each other across the long decades and when they do are aghast, repelled, awkward, irritated. Part four is Van’s lecture on time, dictated as he drives across Europe to see Ada. Near its end, we feel that Van and Ada’s love (and their lives) has been squandered. Only the slim, intolerably slight, final section awaits. But it will triumph over time (and space).
Part five begins on Van’s ninety-seventh birthday. We learn that the couple, after decades apart, have spent the last forty years together in beatific, luminous love. After the immeasurable years of separation and recrimination, it hardly seems possible that they can still have time for so long together, but they do (and the maths, when we do it, adds up and summons tears). It is this final victory, and the almost appallingly slight amount of space we have to experience and enjoy it – 16 meagre pages out of a hefty 461 – which is the meaning and achievement of Ada.
It is not just that Van and Ada finally reunite, as they might in any number of pensioner-led romcoms where combatant former lovers get back together. Ada is not just a love story with a happy ending, a winter with flowers. Ada is about time and the way it manipulates us, and we manipulate it. There is mistreatment on both sides, and Nabokov explores and exploits this mutual manoeuvring. Like a rusty accordion, Ada pulls and squeezes time: dozens of pages are devoted to a few hours; a handful of slender sheets encompass decades. Expanded and condensed this way, our experience of, and involvement with, time changes.
Life, as human beings experience it, is not a one- way street or an arrow relentlessly moving through time, its point tapering and finally striking an inevitable target in death. It is much looser, with periods of torpor; then the shakes, shocks and changes of direction that make up the distinctive shape and particular texture of an individual’s destiny from cradle to crematorium, womb to tomb. Viewed externally, life seems determined and obvious, undeviating. From within, however, it is restless, fluid, multidirectional, disorientating and disconcerting.
In Ada, Nabokov fuses shifting scientific approaches to time, quite properly portraying our perception of time as a synthesis of several models. Time was long regarded as unbending and universal, calculated by Newton’s clock in the sky, which all could see. Yet by the twentieth century, Einstein’s relativity, and quantum mechanics, shattered our notions of set, absolute time and defined spatial dependence. Einstein’s picture of reality as a network of relationships seemed to complement, if not corroborate, much of the peculiarity of time that we live through. Here fixity is repudiated for dynamic uncertainty, a more subjective, intrusive system closer to our own emotional- psychological experience.
At the same time (as it were), Ada recognizes that, for all the strangeness, time marches on: the sun still rises and sets with a Newtonian regularity, while the planets orbit our star like cars endlessly circling a roundabout. But there are also discrepancies, idiosyncrasies, that match the dilating, tightening, crawling or careering time we feel with flummoxing familiarity, as we humans are variously busy, bored, young, old, in love or in pain.
Ada’s language is as ornately ironic and diversely fertile as its temporal deliberations (it begins by mangling the famous opening words of a famous nineteenth-century Russian novel). Like Romeo and Juliet’s semantic compressions and inversions, or the dangerous harmonics and lurid tonalities of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Ada’s gaudy, heterogeneous language both conveys and conceals its meanings.
In Ada, time and sentences seem to proceed for just a little too long. They are nebulous, incestuous, ambiguous, often losing our attention, straying into hallucinations and deliriums, the text becoming excited, animated, overwrought. They can also be pithy and laconic, lethargically slouching, apathetic, blasé, blank. Ada muddles language and time just as it jumbles comedy and tragedy, dreams and realities, Terra and Antiterra. With laughter and tears, Ada tries (and perhaps succeeds) to cleanse guilt and history, flouting gravity, disregarding space and time.
Yet it can only rinse so much. Dark, complex or controversial figures from our world haunt and menace Ada via delectably bad puns or worse jokes: early on we encounter a stalking Sigmund Freud, ‘Dr Sig Heiler’; near the end, the Führer slithers by as ‘Athaulf Hindler’. Fantasy worlds, like childhood, can seem all sunlit summers and elations, but youth is often sickly and revolting as well, full of ghosts and shadows, and Ada’s frequently infantile language contrasts sharply to its typically sophisticated prose and fervid philosophizing. Like a succubus it enchants and terrifies, alternately demonic and angelic, vigorous and exhausted, original and clichéd, logical and absurd.
In part, this helps explain why Ada is so indecipherable, almost unreadable for many diligent bibliophiles and attentive Nabokovians. By blending beauty and horror, infancy and maturity, art and science, brother/sister and husband/wife, and our world and another, Nabokov mixes meanings to such an extent that partition and comprehension become elusive, remote. Ada asks us to transcend time-bound limitations and terrestrial parameters – beyond taste, convention, laws, memories, and into true freedom, the frank abandon and abundant inventiveness of the primordial experience.
During the short final section of Ada, revelations of Van and Ada’s ultimate decades-long happiness are interspersed with observations on the havoc and consequences of time, especially on the fleshly self. Cancer advances excruciatingly within Van, the disease being one of the book’s many ‘engine[s] of agony’, as he and Ada rearrange eighty years of splintered and reforged time into a dialogue on death.
Van ceases tweaking his largely finished (but not yet entirely perfected) work, and the text of Ada starts to become distorted, indistinct. The novel no longer refers to Van and Ada as separate beings, but begins to variously amalgamate them into ‘Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda’ as they ‘overlap, intergrade, interache’ and inaugurate their own termination, dissolving into the finished book. They move into a state of maximum entropy, thermodynamic equilibrium, where everything ceases, including time, since there is now no way to measure it: nothing changes; everything stays the same. A timeless state, an eternal existence, unfathomable to our hominid imaginations.
This ultimate romantic union of Van and Ada, and their eventual metaphysical merger, is not brought about solely by the gambling fortunes of fate or by latent feelings finally surfacing. All Nabokov’s works hint at otherworldly connections or intercessions, exhorting us to think beyond the prisons of human time. The distinctive, exceptional textures of his art encourage us to backtrack across the story, retracing our narrative steps to discover interdimensional clues that invite and provide meanings. These otherworldly mediations tend to work in conjunction with pain and loss, for at the heart of Nabokov’s works lie secrets and sorrows: absent, usually dead, girls who nevertheless continue to structure and inform the texts in which they do not actually figure.
Mira, murdered by the Nazis, endures to protect her youthful lover Pnin, shepherding him via a succession of interventionist squirrels (Pnin, 1957); Hazel, lost to suicide, guides her father (poet John Shade) in his art and eschatological musings (Pale Fire, 1962); the eponymous siblings in ‘The Vane Sisters’ (1951) speak with startling power across the cosmic and dimensional divide. In Ada, this function is occupied by flame-haired-girl-in-green Lucette, Van and Ada’s kindly kid sister. In this case, she is a present and vital character for much of the novel, until her structural and thematic exit, which paradoxically opens up her much larger organizing role and significance.
In the midst of their passion, Van and Ada tease their little sister and exclude her from their sexual and intellectual games, cruelly using or manipulating her for their own ends and amusements. She is by turns a convenient tool or a troublesome obstruction (as little sisters tend to be) to their love and desire:
Lucette, the shadow, followed them from lawn to loft, from gatehouse to stable, from a modern shower booth near the pool to the ancient bathroom upstairs. Lucette-in-the-box came out of the trunk. Lucette desired they take her for walks. Lucette insisted on their playing ‘leaptoad’ with her – and Ada and Van exchanged dark looks.
By the time she is eight, Lucette has fallen for Van, who she believes her cousin, spellbound by his charm, captured and enraptured in a dangerous and fatidic adult game that will ultimately kill her. A few years later, determined to seduce Van on a transatlantic liner, she is thwarted partly by fate’s malice (actress Ada’s unexpected appearance on the ship’s cinema screen) and her own kindness in politely helping others (boorish family friends). Frustrated in her amorous mission and rejected by a now sexually sober Van, she consumes a vast quantity of sleeping pills and jumps overboard.
Lucette is one of Nabokov’s most attractive creations: physically stunning, she is also witty, caring, courteous. While her death is horrendous, the episode is told in some of Nabokov’s greatest prose. Van’s final rebuff of Lucette is a virtuous thing in itself (betraying one sister with another will hardly improve a complicated situation), but it exposes his (and Ada’s) overall treatment of their sister and the way in which their ardour disregards all feeling for others. It is an infatuation which devours us as well, morally blinding us with its glare, since we, too, frequently wish Lucette out of the way of the erotic shenanigans Ada will have us behold.
Although the incestuous lovers – dazzling, passionate, articulate – think they are uniquely extraordinary, inhabiting their own world of difference, we can see past their dreadful glamour. Amid all the charisma, colour and romance of Ada and Van – and we are certainly seduced – we can distinguish the conceit, the cruelty, the way they have manipulated Lucette into becoming a manic, fragile, sex-fixated young woman (who dies a virgin). They have essentially teased her to death, as they half-admit.
Yet it would be too easy for Nabokov to simply denounce Van and Ada for their callousness. They are punished for their behaviour, suffering lonely decades of remorse and regret as they live their own lives apart. But Lucette’s kindness and humanity endure beyond her Atlantic suicide and watery grave, and she tears through the textures of time to help reunite the lovers. Lucette is a silent but persuasive narrative presence, a subtly forceful hue amid the infinite intensity of Van and Ada’s electric chromatism and brash designs.
Two themes – letters and water – form a peculiar pattern throughout Ada, determining the destiny of not just Lucette but Van and Ada too. They underscore both the novel’s scrutiny of ethical obligation and its probe of metaphysical possibilities outside human perception. Nabokov links up written messages across the novel’s formidable span: texts within the text that we are asked first to observe, later remember and finally connect. A poem Lucette is made to go away and memorize (so that Van and Ada can have their fun) returns in a letter Lucette writes at the end of her life, still desperate to display her love and devotion. During the disturbing scenes aboard the ship, which flourish in farce and desolation, this letter – written before the tragic sea voyage but read only after it – forms an omnidirectional compass around which Ada’s codes orientate and evolve.
Letters and water are further invoked by the many intertextual games the novel plays with dozens of other works of English, French and Russian literature, as well as with itself. Ada quips and riffs, playing frequently and at length on the role of correspondence and water in Hamlet, most especially via Ophelia’s exchanges with the prince and her aqueous demise. Letters alphabetical as well as epistolary figure in Ada – in the novel’s many (often purposefully bad) puns or in the Russian Scrabble that Van, Ada and Lucette play.
The initial character of Lucette’s name also connects to the wider metaphysics at play: the mysterious ‘L disaster’, which occurred at some point in the mid nineteenth century, not only discredited electricity but made talk of it taboo. Since then water has been the source of Antiterra’s power; but one other strange corollary of the L disaster was the rise of the bizarre, quasi-religious belief in the existence of ‘Terra’, a world physically akin to Antiterra but apparently sharing our planet’s narrative. Van is a world expert on this outlook and its believers’ vague, uncanny convictions (his work being a sorrowful sanctuary during his absences from Ada). He even writes a novel on the subject, Letters from Terra, under the jesting pseudonym ‘Voltemand’ (the name of a letter-conveying courtier in Hamlet), and it is to this alias’s address that Lucette deliberately sends her final missive to Van.
Ada abounds with images that anticipate or recall Lucette’s death by drowning, and her aquatic departure is emblematically linked to Antiterra’s narrative and the novel’s metaphysics. It is no coincidence that the L disaster, which has caused Antiterra’s history to diverge from our own, has led to both the rise of hydro-dynamic energy and the perturbing belief in another world beyond Antiterra. Water is literally powering the planet, but subliminally it is also driving the energies, via kind-hearted Lucette’s transcendental intercessions into the fabric of space-time, that will reunite Van and Ada. Nabokov suggests that the dead Lucette exists on Terra, which is largely inaccessible to those on Antiterra, apart from an unsettled special few.
Van, flamboyant, impressive authority on Terra though he is, cannot initially grasp the connections that will allow his and Ada’s lives to have true meaning in happiness together. He eventually does, however, at the hotel in Mont Roux where the lovers’ reunion finally takes place. The novel’s hidden messages converge in scenes where luck, writing, dejection, the direction of time and the renewal of hope each play their own role, as do punning allusions and sly subliminal references to a ‘mermaid’s message’ (from Lucette, by now twenty-one years dead). Details from across the novel suddenly snap together, the rhythms of Ada and Van’s fickle, disordered lives revealed and rejoiced in. Now fifty and fifty-two respectively, they can spend their remaining decades by each other’s side, writing many books together – including the one we are holding.
The extent of Van and Ada’s redemption is limited. Their book, Ada, is not a narcissistic attempt at self-justification like Humbert’s memoir Lolita (1955), nor is it a dictionary of moral monstrosity like Hermann’s Despair (1934). Van and Ada are not exclusively outstanding freaks or fiends, and their book ironically indicts them as, in fact, the quite ordinarily flawed human beings we all are and participants in a really quite ordinary love affair (which, like all love affairs, from the inside feels astonishing and unique).
Lucette haunts their remaining years but benignly, even benevolently. By skilfully transferring the centre of the novel away from Van and Ada to Lucette’s quiet kindliness, Nabokov mutes the lovers’ vibrant voices and permits them to properly listen to each other and themselves, working together and discovering true happiness. We can see what Van and Ada cannot: the delicate filaments that Nabokov has entwined into the texture-web of Ada, which suggest the drowned Lucette has influenced Van’s and Ada’s lives, sending signals from a province outside perishable space-time – particularly at the decisive point when their reunification at the hotel seems to have been unsuccessful.
Ada is opulent comedy and a complex essay in Nabokov’s lifelong art of parody. Family sagas, fairy tales, epistolary literature, erotic fiction, the art of narrative exposition, even the role of attics in the nineteenth-century novel – all these and many more are lampooned and given new meanings in the rich riot of Ada’s fabulously designed universe, which engages with, as well as taunts and mimics, our own. In many ways, as a summation of Nabokov’s art, Ada is also a parody of his own parodies, playing with the ironies of his own making, disintegrating into itself and reconstituting further meanings concerning the comic and the cosmic.
Despite all its clowning and wit, Ada will always be an immensely difficult book. Like its author-subjects, Van and Ada, it is infuriating, exasperating, incessantly smug in its opacities and esoteric insinuations. It revolves around its own force, self-circumnavigating in a frenzied, violent desire to be different and to assert that difference. Yet it needs to do this to allow its discreet moral strength to glimmer and to intuit (not preach) transcendent, timeless realms of being and connectivity. In his work in general, and Ada in particular, Nabokov unites ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics into a continuum of belief rather than distinct categories. They are inseparable aspects to his art, forming a triune literary divinity: three-in-one, intimately related and indivisible.
Many seasoned Nabokovians are quite reasonably never able to fully enjoy Ada’s piquant pleasures or prevail over its tantalizing challenges. Nevertheless, with a certain amount of patience and persistence, it yields its intentionally subtle delectations, its rich and riveting delights. Though not Nabokov’s last novel, it is his final feast, served up by an ambidextrous, omni-talented chef.
This essay is an excerpt from Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, published by Endellion Press (2022).
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels will mark the writer’s centenary in 2025.