7 - Ardor in Ardis: Ada

Summary

Molchala dver’. I pered vsemi The door stayed silent, and for all to see

muchitel'no ia prolil semia writhing with agony I spilled my seed

i ponial vdrug, chto ia v adu. and knew abruptly that I was in Hell.

(V. Nabokov, Lilit/‘Lilith’, Berlin, 1928: PP 54–5)

Intelligent readers will abstain from examining this impersonal fantasy for any links with my later fiction. (Ibid. 55)

Ada or Ardor, subtitled ‘A Family Chronicle’, is indeed a lengthy and extravagant pastiche of that novelistic genre, taking its lead in the opening sentence from an emblematically and inexactly translated quotation from Anna Karenina (and its famous opening sentence), held up as the archetypal Russian family chronicle and extended society tale. Ada is one of Nabokov's novels of adultery, but it is much more his novel of (sibling) incest, and is the most erotic of his works. It is also the longest and the most ostentatious of his novels, in terms of multilingual wordplay (English, Russian, and French with regularity, and occasional snatches of German and Italian) and multicultural allusion. It therefore demands serious attention. As a mature work, published in 1969, it has presented itself as a major target to Nabokov's detractors, who accuse him of self-indulgence, class and cultural élitism, sexism, and super-arrogance.

And indeed there is much in Ada to provide ammunition for such a critique. The main characters, and many of the subordinate characters for that matter, effect intellectual and social imperiousness, exhibiting an impossible and insufferable articulateness and erudition: in the form of trilingual precocity as children, through adult superciliousness, to geriatric hauteur (so much so that even their creator disliked them: see SO 120, 146). However, once again, nothing in a Nabokov novel is straightforward, and those readers able to control their irritation through the opening pages and sections (some commentators advise skimming, or even skipping, the first three chapters of ‘prologue’), and those with sufficient patience and a disposition for re-reading, are ultimately rewarded with a richly patterned feast.

Supreme achievement, or flawed masterpiece? His best writing, or a semi-pornographic longevity fantasy? More than any Nabokov novel, Ada may provoke abandonment in its early stages, while its full effects are only to be felt, as Ada‘s leading interpreter Brian Boyd has stressed, ‘through the corrective effects of successive readings’.