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Ada, or Ardor. New York, 1969 Nabokov once referred to Ada as his "most cosmopolitan and poetic novel." Simultaneously a family epic of the Russian aristocracy, a literary history of Russia, and a meditation on the nature of time, Ada is arguably Nabokov's most difficult book. It takes place on Anti-Terra, while the existence of Terra, our earth, is debatable. Nabokov's most complex novel linguistically and thematically, it is dense with games and deceptions, and with literary, historical, scientific, and cultural allusions. Derived from Russian, American, and Nabokovian contexts, it is written in Russian, French, and English. And the subject matter - a contented, incestuous love affair that spans the youth into the happy old age of the couple - alienated a part of his traditional audience. On the surface, Ada is framed as the work of a philosopher - Van Veen - and includes some of his own philosophical writing on the nature of time. Appropriately, Nabokov's structure for the novel dictates that after the first part, each of the four remaining parts is only half the length of the preceding one. Ada is also the memoir of Van's lifelong incestuous love affair with his sister, and prints some of his correspondence with Ada, along with his reminiscences of the relationship. In his own annotated copy of Ada, Nabokov added in Russian: "A book of genius - the pearl of American literature." Brian Boyd has traced this inscription to a copy of Madame Bovary that Nabokov's father had given him, with an identical inscription in French, calling it "a book of genius - the pearl of French literature." Boyd speculates that though Nabokov's "echoing" inscription in his copy of Ada "may well be a joke . . . there must have been a grain of seriousness to provoke that 'pearl' into being." Nabokov himself admitted in a 1969 interview for Time that "the opening sentences of Ada inaugurate a series of blasts directed throughout the book at translators of unprotected masterpieces who betray their authors by 'transfigurations' based on ignorance and self-assertiveness." The novel is divided into five parts. Eight chapters from the first part were, perhaps astonishingly, printed in Playboy. Columbia Pictures paid half a million dollars for the film rights (but a movie was never made). Time did a cover story on Nabokov coinciding with the book's publication. Two New York Times reviews were reverent and ecstatic. But a critical onslaught followed both the initial avalanche of praise and a twenty-week stay on The New York Times best-seller list. Mary McCarthy so loathed the novel that she considered retracting her unqualified praise of Pale Fire. Perhaps in response to these attacks, Nabokov appended to the first paperback edition, brought out by Penguin, the explanatory afterword "Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom [an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov]," a list of approximately five hundred translations, identifications, and explanations by page number.
Vladimir Nabokov Newspaper clipping (San Francisco Chronicle) about Susan Hayward,
the "star of 'Ada,' " sent by Alfred Appel, Jr. to Vladimir
Nabokov in a letter of April 25, 1967 Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov |
© 1999
The New York Public Library