As a mystical novel near the poet Koltsov

Upon the marble of my hand.

It is evident from this that Nabokov believed in his own immortality as a writer—especially in Russia, where they would erect a monument to him. But did he believe in his own immortality as a man, did he believe that his soul would live after death?

To a journalist’s direct question whether or not he believed in God, Nabokov answered: “I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express wouldn’t have been expressed, had I not known more” (Strong Opinions, p. 45). Nabokov knew a certain mystery which he could not communicate to the readers directly, but which shows through in one way or another in all his novels, stories and some verses. In his poem “Fame” (1942), he almost lets the secret out:

That main secret tra-tá-ta tra-tá-ta ta-tá –

And I must not be overexplicit.

But the work in which the existence of mystery is felt most distinctly is possibly Ada, in many respects, the writer’s “final” work. It is not in vain that Nabokov himself considered that of all his books, Ada most closely corresponds to the ideal fore-image from which this novel arose (Strong Opinions, p. 302). Are we, as readers, able to uncover Nabokov's innermost secret or, at least, to come close to its answer?

In Fame Nabokov says that he prefers “to stay godless with fetterless soul in a world that is swarming with godheads” (in Ada Van Veen expresses a similar disdain for “all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world:” 1.3). His poem ends thus:

But one day while disrupting the strata of sense

And descending deep down to my wellspring

I saw mirrored, besides my own self and the world,

Something else, something else, something else.

What is this mysterious “something else” echoing with the no less mysterious “ta-tá-ta, ta-tá-ta, ta-tá,” which helps the author of Fame overcome himself? It cannot be the reader (the empty dream “about readers, and body, and glory” is laughable to Nabokov), nor can it be God (since the author calls himself “godless”). But, perhaps, there is something, that is inaccessible to ordinary men (trusting “the enticements of the thoroughfare or such dreams as the ages have hallowed”), that they do not see—for example, the other world?

In order to attempt to answer this question, let us return from Fame, a work of the mature Nabokov, to his first poem. After the young author had finished reading it, his mother, deeply moved, gave him a mirror so that he could see the little spot of blood, left by the mosquito he had squashed. But Nabokov saw much more. “Looking into my own eyes, I had the shocking sensation of finding the mere dregs of my usual self, odds and ends of an evaporated identity which it took my reason quite an effort to gather again in the glass.” (Speak, Memory, p. 176) So ends the Chapter Eleven of the English-language version of Nabokov's autobiography. The heart of this chapter is an excerpt about “cosmic synchronization” (Vivian Bloodmark’s term). In the opinion of this philosopher (whose name is another anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov”), “while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur – all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N. Y.) is the nucleus.” (Speak, Memory, p. 169)

It is easy to notice the similarity between the theory of cosmic synchronization and the mystical experience described by Solovyov in “Three Rendez-vous.” Just like its hero who, during the third meeting/rendez-vous with the Eternal Beloved, embraces the whole universe, Nabokov’s poet is able to sense everything that happens on Earth—and even on neighboring Venus—at any given moment in time. Evidently, this is the very moment when his muse appears. It is the muse who is Nabokov’s Eternal Beloved, with whom he has had not three, but many more, meetings. Moreover, it’s not necessary for Nabokov to go to Egypt, as Solovyov did, in order to see her (it’s curious, though, that this is where Van Veen goes to complete his pilgrimage –“to the pyramids of Ladorah”– during his longest separation with Ada, his muse: 3.1). The point is that Nabokov’s muse was his wife, Vera Nabokov (and in his youth, “Tamara,” to whom he dedicates one of the chapters of Speak, Memory); while the Eternal Beloved of Solovyov, who preached asceticism and chastity, had no earthly embodiment. Solovyov’s tragedy lies in the fact that an insurmountable distance, a genuine chasm, separates Julie from his autobiographical story and the ideal heroine of “Three Rendez-vous.” For him, the revelation of earthly love did not coincide with the revelation of divine love (subsequently, a similar mismatch occurred in the life of another poet-prophet, Aleksandr Blok). It seems to me that the main difference between Solovyov (and also, Blok) and Nabokov, and especially, his character Van Veen, can be found here. The latter can even be considered the antipode of Solovyov, because he believes to reach a higher reality in the moments of physical closeness with Ada, when “reality lost the quotes it wore like claws – in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness). For one spasm or two, he was safe. The new naked reality needed no tentacle or anchor; it lasted a moment, but could be repeated as often as he and she were physically able to make love.” (1.35)

While, for Solovyov, a token of the victory over death is the possibility of contemplating the Eternal Beloved with his own eyes, the hedonist Van celebrates the same kind of victory at the moment of possessing Ada. Nabokov, of course, knew the impossibility of possessing beauty completely—be it the beauty of a beloved woman or the beauty of a sunset, astonishing us with its colors. However, he believed that in the minutes of inspiration, given us from above, a person is able to overcome his mortality. For Nabokov, “mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower… when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness.” (Speak, Memory, Chapter Two, 4) It is just at one of these minutes at the end of 1965 that a small fragment was born, from which all Ada subsequently arose and which entered the final draft of the novel without changes (“Inspiration:” Strong Opinions, p. 310). As I attempted to show in my “Addendum to Ada as a triple dream” (The Nabokovian, #53), Nabokov secretly believed that his dream of Antiterra was sent to him by the spirit of his father, V. D Nabokov (1870-1922), the memory of whom the writer held sacred. The fact that Nabokov “bestowed” his father’s birthday, July 21, upon Ada is partial evidence of this. Although Ada’s year of birth (1872) does not coincide with that of V. D. Nabokov (1870, the year of birth of the main character Van Veen, and also of Vladimir Ulyanov, who almost shares with the author of Ada his birthday), it’s worth noting that the final reunion of Van and Ada at Mont Roux occurs in 1922, the year of his tragic death.

Dates and their concurrences play a huge role in Ada. It’s hardly accidental that Nabokov made the first (1884-1888) and the second (1888-1892) periods of Van and Ada’s separation equivalent to four years. On the one hand, this is the same length of time that passes between the first and second meeting of the hero with Julie in Solovyov’s autobiographical story. On the other hand, four years also separate the first meeting of the author of Speak, Memory with Tamara (summer 1915) from the date on which Nabokov left Russia for good (April 1919). Four years later, in 1923, he met his greatest love, Vera Slonim, who became his muse until the end of his life. Nabokov bestowed his wife’s birthday, January 5, to four characters in Ada: the twin sisters Aqua and Marina and their husbands Demon and Daniel Veen (I discuss this marvelous coincidence in “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia Set on Antiterra”).

In Ada Nabokov used many dates that played an important and sometimes, fateful, role in his own life and the life of people close to him. However, not all dates met in this “family chronicle” refer back to this or that event in the life of its author and his family. For example, Van Veen’s birthday, January 1, coincides with the birthday of the main character of another Nabokov novel, Lolita, and Lucette’s birthday, January 3, coincides with the day (December 22, 1849, Old Style) on which Dostoevsky climbed the scaffold and his death sentence was announced to him. In a separate article dedicated to the L disaster that occurred on Antiterra in the middle of the past century (January 3, 1850—truly the “beau milieu” of the 19^th century), I will try to show that the cruel farce of the announcement of the death sentences to the Petrashevskians and their subsequent pardons is the main event in a series of several real ones (possibly, one can even relate the publication of Lolita in 1955) standing behind the enigmatic Antiterran catastrophe.

As Yuli Aikhenvald (the leading émigré critic and a senior friend of Nabokov, who died tragically in December, 1928, returning home from the Nabokovs) noted in his Silhouettes of Russian Writers (Berlin, 1923): “Our time moves under the black omen of Dostoevsky, in his style. It has Dostoevsky as its patron or living epigraph, because the mad shuddering and trembling which the human being now experiences here and there make up the element of the creator of The Possessed. Like some heartfelt sorcerer, did he prophesy the revolution to Russia.” By “here” and “there” Aikhenvald means the emigration and Soviet Russia—that hell on Earth, in comparison with which the world where the Russian exiles have found themselves is at worst a Purgatory. However, in the universe of the two opposing worlds in Ada, we may rightfully substitute Antiterra and its twin planet, Terra, on which, Van conjectures, “human minds and human flesh underwent… worse torments than on our much maligned Demonia” (2.2) for “here” and “there.”

Solovyov was a young friend of Dostoevsky, who turned out to have a large influence on the philosopher. On the other hand, Solovyov’s personality, imbued with mystical ideas, gave creative material to Dostoevsky. It is an accepted notion that Solovyov served as the prototype for at least one of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s last novel (1880) – that of Ivan, author of the “poem” “The Grand Inquisitor” (Book Five, “Pro et contra,” Chapter Five). There is much in common between the “The Grand Inquisitor” and Solovyov’s “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” (for example, Christ appears in both works, even if he does not play a main role). However, while the action of the Ivan Karamazov’s “poem” occurs several centuries ago (in Spain during the 16^th century), the action of monk Pansophius’ tale is attributed to the future, several centuries in advance. According to Solovyov, the Antichrist should come into the world and at some time take power over a greater part of humanity in the 21^st century, on the eve of the second coming of Christ.

“Godless” as he was, Nabokov hardly believed in the second coming. At the same time, he should have recognized that, for the most part, Solovyov’s prophecy had already been fulfilled in the 20^th century. At least three people—Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler—who caused more harm to humanity, possibly, than all the other people who have ever lived on Earth, can lay claim to the title of “Antichrist.” But how did they succeed in attracting millions of people to their side, by what means did they seduce the simple souls? At the end of “Three Rendez-vous” Mr. Zed (being, with the monk Pansophius, a mouthpiece of the author’s own views) says: “And I take back my previous words, that ‘you will not explain the Antichrist only in sayings.’ He is wholly explained by one, and besides, it's an extraordinarily simple one: Not all that glistens is gold. The brilliance of this false goodness is more than enough, but as for the real power, it has none.”

In the article “Ada as a Russian Fairy Tale…” I showed that this same saying, by which the Antichrist is explained, is applied to Van Veen. In many respects his brilliance is false; the true hero of the novel, the dobryi mólodets (“good young man”) of Russian fairy tales, turns out to be Ada's humble and seemingly unremarkable husband, Andrey Vinelander. It isn't easy for the reader to reconcile the image of this sickly man, as Van portrays him, with the traditional description of fairy tale heroes. But as Solovyov, who defined man as “the laughing animal,” used to say to his students, “it is better to be a sick man than a healthy beast” (cf. Mochulsky, Chapter Three, “The Crisis of Western Philosophy”). In spite of all his refinement, Van behaves at times like a real beast, cruel and merciless in relation to those close to him. He puts out the eyes of Kim Beauharnais without hesitating, when he finds out that the latter had spied on him and Ada in Ardis and now, after several years have passed, decides to blackmail Ada. He leaves the dying Marina, his mother, who had asked him to wait for her death, and doesn't even return for her funeral. Finally—even if it is unpremeditated—he drives his half-sister Lucette, who is hopelessly in love with him, to suicide.

In Ada Van is associated with the raven—this prophetic, even ominous, bird. But he has the features of another animal as well—the wolf. In contrast to Dr. Freud's patient, Van, this talented dreamer, did not see white wolves sitting in a walnut tree in his dream, but, like Freud's Wolfsmann, he has an affair with his sister. His “lupine” nature distinguishes Van, a habitué of all possible lupanars, not only from the more human Andrey Vinelander, but also from Mandelshtam, who in a poem which is sometimes called “Vek-volkodav” (“The Wolfhound Century,” “For the sake of the resonant valor of ages to come…”) speaks of himself as follows:
Lead me into the night where the Enisey flows,

And the pine reaches up to the star,

Because no wolf by blood am I,

And only my equal will kill me.

(the poem’s translation is by Nabokov: “On Adaptation,” Strong Opinions, p. 281)
Whoever Mandelshtam’s murderer was and whoever sent him off to certain death in a concentration camp was in no respect the poet’s “equal.” Executioners are always lower than their victims; and if the victims are poets, the executioners are, at best, pygmies in comparison to them:
Drink our blood, live, in destroying;

You are still a pygmy, an insignificant pygmy.

Pushkin's André Chenier turns to his executioner with these words in his last verses (“André Chenier,” 1825). Nabokov, who in one of the Russian poems of his “American” period quotes lines from Chenier's “Iambs,” scorned executioners to such a degree that he belittled them in Ada even further—he decreased them to the size of a mosquito, drinking human blood.

In contrast to the bloody wars and revolutions shaking our world in the 20th century, this was a peaceful and prospering century on Antiterra (3.7). If human blood was spilled during that time on Demonia, then it is the fault of mosquitoes (except for the unlucky extra, who, having played the executioner's assistant in Vitry’s film, was accidentally beheaded when the scene of Louis XVI's execution was filmed: 5.5). Every summer, during the last week of July the female of the “interestingly primitive mosquito” culex chateaubriandi (named after its discoverer, Charles Chateaubriand: 1.17) appeared at Ardis. The scientific name of this imaginary insect obviously hints at François René de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the author of the story “René” (1802), about the tragic love of a brother and sister, and of the memoirs “Notes from Beyond the Grave” (1848-1850), which also play an important role in Ada. In the latter book the author describes a Florida aborigine, the “scorched man” (le Bois-brûlé), who had abducted two Indian cousins (who served as the prototypes for Atala and Céluta, the heroines of the story “Atala,” 1801, and the prose epic “The Natchez,” 1826), because he was jealous of one of the girls, as follows: “my adversary was a gaunt, ugly black mosquito, having all the indications of the insects defined by Dalai Lama's entomologists as creatures which have their flesh inside and bones outside” (“Notes from Beyond the Grave,” Book Eight, 5). In the same chapter, a little later, Chateaubriand, having seen the heading “Flight of the King” in an English newspaper strewn under his feet, tells how he found out about the arrest of Louis XIV in Varennes (executed a year and a half later) and at that moment made the decision to interrupt a trip around America and return to France.

Chateaubriand's comparison of man to the insect—even if such an unattractive one as the mosquito—must have delighted Nabokov both as an entomologist and an artist. He surely experienced such a joy (or, perhaps, an even greater one, given that there is a moral satisfaction in addition to the aesthetic pleasure here) from Mandelshtam's comparison of Stalin's mustache to a cockroach's antennae. One exactly noted feature allowed the poet to transform Stalin into a huge disgusting insect. In this way, at least, Nabokov interpreted this image from a desparingly bold epigram on the leader (“We live, feeling no land beneath us…”), which plays a hidden, but very important role in Ada (see my “Ada as Nabokov’s Anti-Utopia…”). But if Stalin is a cockroach, the “riff-raff of thin-necked leaders” around him are flies (cf. the fable “The Cockroach” by Ignat Lebyadkin, a character in Dostoevsky's “The Possessed,” and my aforementioned article), then their rank-and-file underlings, the executioners, are the even more lowly insects, the mosquitoes.

Russia has always been renowned for its horde of mosquitoes, from which (I mean insects, not executioners) foreigners have especially suffered. Thus, in Chekhov's short story “An Unpleasant Incident” (1887), “kumari, kramori, les cousins” do not allow a Frenchman (who fails to pronounce correctly the Russian word komary) to sleep. The hero of this story, a young Russian, comes from town to see his mistress in her country house and finds out that her husband has unexpectedly returned from Paris. Thoroughly vexed, he exclaims, “Vot te klyukva!” (“Here's a pretty kettle of fish!” klyukva means “bogberry” in Russian) Bad weather, the late hour and absence of a cab all prevent him from returning home. He asks the master of the house for permission to stay the night and receives it. Here the hero sees that the husband does not take advantage of his wife's favors, but sleeps (or, rather tries to sleep) in a dining-room on chairs. The hero sits in the same room with the Frenchman, who suffers from insomnia, until the wife enters and, to both the husband's and lover's surprise, leads the latter to her bedroom.

This unfinished story by Chekhov, far from being one of his best, would not be worthy of our attention were it not for this series of striking coincidences. First of all, there is the homonym cousin (Fr., meaning “cousin” and “mosquito”), which is used to good effect in Ada. On the eve of his meeting with Ada in 1886, Van “spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had” (1.29). The Ardis mosquito, culex chateaubriandi, the bites of which Ada scratched with such voluptuousness, did not show a great interest in Van. It is interesting that the Russian inhabitants of the Ladore region ascribed the insect’s virulence “to the diet of the French wine-growers and bogberry-eaters of Ladore” (1.12, my italics; for the connection between the berry and blood themes in Ada, cf. “Ada as Anti-Utopia…”). Finally, I would note the diametrical opposition of situations in “Notes from Beyond the Grave” and “An Unpleasant Incident.” Chateaubriand decides to return to his homeland, France, having barely learned about the king’s arrest in a newspaper. The Frenchman in Chekhov’s story, on the other hand, had just arrived in a foreign land: having attempted to talk with him, his wife’s lover finds out that he is in no way interested in politics or literature. He knows no contemporary French politician or writer. The name Zola means nothing to him.

Besides the differences between characters, there are differences between the authors. While Chateaubriand, who was a descent of a poor noble family, was an aristocrat, Chekhov, whose grandfather was a serf, was the greatest Russian writer to spring from the people. Moreover, Chekhov, born January 17/29, 1860, was the best Russian prose writer who was born under the sign of Aquarius. And the best Russian poet born under this sign (it appears that Nabokov has thoroughly studied the horoscopes of Russian writers) was V. A. Zhukovsky (born 29 January/9 February 1783; Pushkin died on the same day in 1837). Zhukovsky (note that his surname comes from zhuk, Russian for “beetle,” yet another insect) was the illegitimate son of a Tula landowner and a captive Turkish girl. In contrast to Chamfort, who suffered from the same disease, which, according to Chateaubriand (cf. “Notes from Beyond the Grave,” Part One, Book Four, 12), had birthed the Jacobins, Zhukovsky was able to forgive humanity for his illegitimate origins. However, as a result of his own personal drama (the poet was in love with his own niece and she loved him; Zhukovsky’s half-sister and the girl’s mother, though, would not permit a marriage), Zhukovsky’s works—especially of his mature period—are tinged with strong mystic tones.

Aikhenvald writes in his essay on Zhukovsky: “there is, in his work, the recognizable element of the Undine, there is, in the good and the bad, something in common with the element of water: as a writer, he somewhat resembles his character Dyadya Struy—but only the good Dyadya Struy…” Dyadya Struy (“Uncle Stream”) is a character in Zhukovsky’s “ancient tale” “Undina” (1831-35), a versification in hexameters of the German writer F. de la Motte-Fouqué’s (1777-1843) tale of the same title. This stream, a water spirit, is able to assume human form; he abandons his little niece to a fisherman and his wife (in exchange for their abducted daughter, whom Struy has placed with a Duke and Duchess). The girl grows up among people and marries the knight Gulbrand. However, when the knight ceases to love Undina (and falls in love with Bertalda, the fisher’s daughter, raised at court), Struy takes her back beneath the water. Then, the knight decides to marry Bertalda, despite the warning of Undina. On their wedding night, Undina, sent by Struy, comes to her husband and weeps him to death.

In Ada the fairytale situation of “Undina” is turned upside down and treated in a more “realistic” manner. Marina abandons her newborn son (and future hero and narrator of Ada, Van Veen) to her kind, but feeble-minded sister Aqua (Van’s aunt’s name clearly echoes the name Dyadya Struy), who had miscarried several weeks after Van’s birth. Aqua’s doubts about whether Van is her son or not only makes her mental suffering worse. Her namesake, water, the language of which Aqua believes to have learned to understand, becomes one of her tormentors. Aqua, not having the strength to fight against disease, commits suicide, and after a year or so Van travels to Ardis for the first time. Here he begins his romance with Ada (who turns out to be not just a cousin, but his sister). This romance continues, with interruptions, right up to their deaths. Lucette, their half-sister, becomes the victim of the impetuously developing relations between Van and Ada. Her love with Van is unrequited and she commits suicide, jumping into the Atlantic from the deck of the ship she and Van were sailing to America. Only many years later, at the end of their lives, Van and Ada realize that they have teased Lucette (to whom they now refer as “our mermaid”) to death.