As a mystical novel near the poet Koltsov

Orwell belongs thus to the writers (Tolstoy, author of the short story “The Berries,” 1906, should be added to their list) who are important in connection with Ada‘s baccate theme. This is confirmed by the fact that, in Animal Farm, one of its inhabitants, a gander, commits a suicide by swallowing deadly nightshade berries (chapter VIII). To the baccate theme, and to Orwell, is linked in Ada the “ursine” theme. And no wonder: the words “bear,” berry,” and “beer” (Aqua’s last doctor, Sig Heiler, had a reputation of a “near-genius in a usual sense of near-beer:” 1.3) sound similarly in English (the first to discover this similarity was Jansy Mello; see her post to Nabokv-L of 26.02.05). Besides, all of them are close to bor (Russian for “pine forest”), one of the words that Tatiana looks up in her dream interpretation book (note that Aqua, too, passes a pine forest on her way to the gulch where she eats her “berries”). Finally, a bear is a great lover of berries (particularly, raspberries).

Another connection between Ada’s baccate and ursine themes can be established via Floeberg’s Ursula. Van quotes a short fragment from that invented novel when he describes the scenery of his first tryst with Ada on the day following the night of the Burning Barn (1.20). The style of this “quotation” suggests that Ursula is the Antiterran version of “Madame Bovary.” Unlike the slightly distorted name of the author (incidentally, “floeberg” is a mass of floes resembling an iceberg), the name of the title character radically differs from the one that was given to her by Flaubert. Why? The name “Ursula” (that of a legendary British princess, who is said to have been martyred, with eleven thousand virgins, at Cologne) comes from ursus, Latin for “bear.” Flaubert, who famously said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” also called himself a bear (the animal that he physically resembled). On the other hand, Ursus is a character in Hugo’s “The Man who Laughs” (1869), whose tame wolf is named Homo (Latin for “man”). In Ada, ‘Ursus’ is the name of the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major (or simply “Man”), to which Van takes his sisters (2.8). Here, in a heart-rending scene, the slightly tipsy Lucette pours upon Van her wild passion: “I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, you (tebya, tebya), I ache for you unbearably (ya toskuyu po tebe nevynosimo)…”

We first learn that Lucette is madly in love with Van in the Part Two of Ada (2.5), when, after a four-year-long separation, she visits him in Kingston (a year before she wrote Van a long letter, in which, like Pushkin’s Tatiana, she made her declaration of love). “A black bear [Lucette has a fur coat on] with bright russet locks (the sun had reached its first parlor window) stood awaiting him.” Despite her beauty, this and all the rest of Lucette’s desperate attempts to win Van’s heart fail: he invariably spurns her. She makes her last try on board the transatlantic liner, where, a few hours before Lucette’s death, she and Van eat a roast bearlet à la Tobakoff (3.8).

While the baccate theme is mostly associated with Aqua, the ursine one is inseparably connected to Lucette. Like the theme of berries (or that of feasts, which also plays a prominent part in Ada), the ursine theme goes back to “Eugene Onegin.” There is in Tatiana’s dream one more character whom we didn’t mention – the bear, “the shaggy footman,” who comes to her rescue at the perilous footbridge over the brook and brings her to the hut of his “gossip” (Onegin reveling in the company of demons) in the woods. Not only all the bears (of which there is actually none in Ada), but all animals (of which there are more than it might seem) in the novel, descend, in a sense, from this bear. The point is that URSA (Union des Républiques Socialistes Animales) was the title that Orwell suggested, in a letter to Yvonne Duvet, for the French translation of Animal Farm that, in the same letter, he described as “a novel contre Stalin.” Ada is also a novel contre Lenin, Stalin & co. (see my essay “Russian poets and potentates as Scots and Scandinavians in Ada; three ‘Tartar’ poets” in The Nabokovian, no. 56), but, unlike Orwell’s satire (or, say, Pushkin’s heart-rending “Fairy Tale about a She-Bear,” 1830, in which animals are given features, and even professions, of men), many animals in it are disguised as humans (and not vice versa). For instance, one can discern in d’Onsky (“an easy-going, lanky, likeable fellow,” nicknamed ‘Skonky,’ which is an anagram of konksy, Russian for “of a horse”) Onegin’s Don stallion, on which he leaves his house from the back porch of every time his neighbors come with a visit (EO, Chapter Two, V). D’Onsky must be a strong and tough lover (as befits a stallion), for even after he has received a wound in the duel with Demon, he is capable of procreation (much later, at Marina’s funeral, we meet his son, a person with only one arm: 3.8). Demon (note that he and d’Onsky have the same London hatter; and, toward the end of Ada, 5.5, we learn that “horses wore hats – yes hats – when heat waves swept Manhattan”) is also a horse (a cross of an Arabian racer with Gogol’s myshinyi zherebchik, “old lecher”), just as his London pal, a certain Paul Whinnier, apparently is one (2.8). Another lover of Marina, the film director G. A. Vronsky, is a boar (as suggested by his name and initials that taken together form the word havron’ia, colloquial Russian for “sow”). He is notable for his indiscriminateness in sexual matters, and his entire appearance (“elderly, baldheaded, with a spread of grizzled fur on his fat chest,” 1.32) that neither hay fever nor dark glasses can improve (1.41) makes him look like that animal. There is something of a pig in the burly, lecherous Percy de Prey, who appears kak ziuzia pianyi (drunk as a sow) at the picknick on Ada’s birthday and “grunts” in a fight with Van (1.39). The Latin actor Pedro, yet another lover of the ageing Marina, is, of course, a monkey (but with beautiful nostrils of a lynx). Making cruel fun of him, Van suggests that Pedro gets himself a cocoanut (1.32). As to Marina herself, she is a cuckoo – the bird that plants her eggs into other birds’ nests (in the present case, into the nest of Aqua, who is associated with a more colorful bird, a pheasant).

Ada’s zoo is heavily populated with animals, whose list can be easily continued. There are animal features in the two main characters, Van and Ada. Ada, who adores everything that crawls and poisons her love portions, is a snake. During her first walk with Van in Ardis Park she informs him that “we can squirm from here in the front hall by a secret passage” (1.8). As to Van, the son of Demon, who is known in society as “Raven Veen,” he resembles sometimes that sinister bird. Its croak is believed to prophesy ill, and it is symptomatic that Ada once calls Van “sinister insister” (1.31). Indeed, Van’s gravest misgivings that he and Ada will never be able to marry prove correct. Even after the death of Marina and Demon, when not a single soul knows that Van and Ada are brother and sister and nothing seems to prevent them from marrying each other, fate separates them once again. Ada refuses to leave for Van’s sake her husband, Andrey Vinelander, when she learns that he is sick with tuberculosis and spends with him his last seventeen years (3.8). Here is a fragment of the dramatic dialogue between Van and Ada just before their longest separation:

‘Castle True, Castle Bright!’ he now cried, ‘Helen of Troy, Ada of Ardis! You have betrayed the Tree and the Moth!’

‘Perestagne (stop, cesse)!’

‘Ardis the First, Ardis the Second, Tanned Man in a Hat, and now Mount Russet – ’

‘Perestagne!’ repeated Ada (like a fool dealing with an epileptic).

‘Oh! Qui me rendra mon Hélène – ’

‘Ach, perestagne!’

‘et le phalène.’

‘Je t’emplie (“prie” and “supplie”), stop, Van. Tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’

What is it (Van’s curt utterances) but a raven’s croak? It is also more than a mere occurrence that Van is compared in that scene to an epileptic. One might say that Van, “the sinister insister,” nakarkal (“has brought down by his own prophesies;” literally: “has croaked into life”) an epileptic fit to himself. For it is the epilepsy that he prophesizes himself in one of his conversations with Ada in “Ardis the Second:” ‘at worst we shall live quietly, you as my housekeeper, I as your epileptic, and then, as in your Chekhov, “we shall see the whole sky swarm with diamonds”’ (1.31). Most interestingly, Van’s prophesy comes true: after Andrey Vinelander’s death, Van and Ada reunite and spend the rest of their lives (nearly fifty years) together. It is not for nothing that raven is believed to be a prophetic bird that lives, moreover, three hundred years.

Features and habits of this or that animal can thus be discovered in almost all characters of Ada. Most of them only seem humans, but actually are beasts; and it is not by chance that Antiterra’s other name is Demonia. The creatures that feel well on this planet are demons (like Van and Ada). But those, who don’t have demon blood in their veins or in whom human being predominates over beast (as in Lucette, Aqua, or Van’s black nurse Ruby Black), perish as soon as they come in close contact with fair demons. Lucette, the novel’s central tragic character (she is linked not only to Tatiana of EO, but also to the beautiful Tsarevna Lebed’ from Pushkin’s “Fairy Tale of the Tsar Saltan”) commits a suicide because of the unrequited love to Van. When she looses all hope ever to become his mistress, she jumps from Tobakoff (after having swallowed five pills of a tranquillizer, which connects her suicide to that of Aqua) into black waters of the Atlantic (3.5). Van is responsible, even if he didn’t want it, of her death (for “non-love nearly equals murder,” as Zhivago’s wife Tonia puts it in her fare-well letter to her husband: Part Thirteen, “Opposite the house with figures,” section 18).

It might seem that Van Veen and the invisible and omnipresent Big Brother, the cruel ruler of Oceania in Orwell’s novel, have nothing in common. But the kinship that connects Van to Lucette (he is her older half-brother) and the place where the tragedy happens (ocean) suggest the opposite. There is a direct connection between Orwell’s Big Brother (whose prototype was Stalin) and Nabokov’s hero (note that when Ada meets Van for the first time after Lucette’s death, 3.8, he wears mustache that Ada promptly commands him to shave). But, unlike Orwell’s character, who doesn’t leave his poster, Van Veen is three-dimensional, demoniac and not without special charm. While Big Brother distantly resembles the mighty but somewhat lubochnyi (in the style of lubok, cheap popular print in old Russia) Stalin of Mandelstam’s epigram, Van is closer to the demonically irresistible Onegin of Tatiana’s dream. Like Shakespeare, Nabokov is not afraid of picturing evil in attractive vestments. It seems to me that here lies Nabokov’s main disagreement with the author of Nineteen eighty-four and Animal Farm. In his essay “Writers and Leviathan” (1948) Orwell says: “we have developed a sort of compunction which our grandparents did not have, an awareness of the enormous injustice and misery of the world, and a guilt-stricken feeling that one ought to be doing something about it, which makes a purely aesthetic attitude towards life impossible. No one, now, could devote himself to literature as single-mindedly as Joyce or Henry James.”

We know that there was at least one such man. Although Nabokov felt the world’s injustice and misery at least as deeply as Orwell did (to see this, one has just to read such of his stories as “Cloud, Castle, Lake” or “Tyrants Destroyed”), he didn’t think a purely aesthetic attitude to life impossible. But it doesn’t mean that he has fled the world to live in an ivory tower. On the one hand, Ada is set on the invented planet, Earth’s double, whose description, with all its inhabitants, must have given Nabokov an incomparable aesthetic pleasure (we can only guess how tremendous it was – much surpassing, anyway, the pleasure that I derived from solving some of the riddles implanted by him in the novel). On the other hand, Antiterra is by no means an ideal world, and even in its Western, better, hemisphere, and the free countries of the Eastern, things are not quite perfect. Therefore Ada is not a utopia, but rather an antiutopia, and as that, it is one of the most powerful blows that Nabokov delivered the totalitarian systems, which the twentieth century, one of the most terrible in the history of mankind, was so generous to produce.

Another fruit of that century abhorred by Nabokov was the Freudianism. Nabokov considered the theories of Freud (who almost shares his birthday, May 6, 1856, with Marx and who also has a representative on Antiterra: a certain Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu), with the sexual myth lying at their basis, totalitarian by nature and was surprised that police states didn’t use them to their own purposes. On the contrary, sexual love that had to be replaced by love to the Party and its leaders was suppressed in puritan countries like the USSR. This has found its reflection in Nineteen eighty-four: in the totalitarian Oceania even the love between husband and wife is not encouraged. Sex can be excused only when it serves to procreation. Party members are allowed to marry only if they are physically not too attractive to each other. In order to kill in people the sexual instinct, the Junior Anti-Sex League, to which Julia also at one time belonged, had been founded. Therefore, Winston regards even a simple sexual act, particularly if its goal is pleasure, as a rebellion against the Party and Big Brother.

A different picture we see on Antiterra whose entire Western hemisphere, and part of the Eastern, is covered by the chain of palatial brothels – floramors (their “botanical” name apparently can be explained by the fact that, after the appearance of Dumas-fils’ novel “La dame aux camélias,” 1848, later dramatized by the author and turned into the opera, La Traviata, by Verdi, courtesans were called in Russia “camellias”). Their idea belonged to Eric Veen (not a relative of the protagonist), author of the essay “Villa Venus: an Organized Dream” (2.3). Eric didn’t live to see the realization of his boyhood dream, because at fifteen he perished during a storm in Switzerland (at Ex-en-Valais, the place in which Van was soon to be born), where he recovered from tuberculosis. It was the disease of which another Eric, Blair, who is known to the world under the alias George Orwell, died. Unlike his Antiterran namesake, he didn’t suffer from erotomania in his boyhood, but at least one detail of his biography deserves attention: he studied at Eton. ‘Note,’ the preparatory school, to which Eric Veen went, is not just an anagram of Eton, but its inversion. Similarly, the freedom of love enjoyed by the inhabitants of Antiterra (at least, of its Western hemisphere) “mirrors” the puritan chastity in Orwell’s Oceania.

Remarkably, despite this chastity, pornographic literature is not totally banned in Oceania. Moreover, it is secretly produced and distributed among the proles by the state, and it is young girls that manage the production (because men are believed to be in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handle). Julia at one time also worked in Pornosec, the subsection of the Fiction Department, before returning to the production of normal books. All novels – normal, as well as pornographic – are composed in Oceania by the machine (people only service its electric motor) and poetry, by another machine called “versifier.”

In “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Nabokov says that in pornographic novels action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. But, in that case, Orwell’s non-erotic antiutopia must also belong to this category. For, as Nabokov remarked in his foreword to the second edition of Bend Sinister (1963), Orwell’s novel almost entirely consists of clichés. Provided it has a sufficiently powerful electric motor, the novel-composing machine could have composed Nineteen eighty-four, but it would never compose Ada! Therefore Ada, with all her erotic scenes, is a much more chaste book than Nineteen eighty-four. And if certain details of Eric Veen’s “Organized Dream” appear dirty to some, it is not Nabokov who is to blame, and not even Eric (for Eric is but a character in Van Veen’s dream, just as Van is a character in the creative dream of Nabokov’s), but Orwell, whose novel fits in Nabokov’s definition of pornography. After they had been metamorphosed in Nabokov’s imagination, Orwell’s clichés acquired a new unexpected form on Antiterra where they began to play with bright colors of the eroticism. But, whatever eroticism there might be in them, the dreams of true art, like Lolita and Ada, are never “dirty.”

Thanks to Sergey Karpukhin for his help in the translation
Alexey Sklyarenko, St.-Petersburg