Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Touch? A giant, with an effort-contorted face, clamping and twisting an engine of agony. Rather humiliating that physical pain makes one supremely indifferent to such moral issues as Lucette’s fate, and rather amusing, if that is the right word, to constate that one bothers about problems of style even at those atrocious moments. The Swiss doctor, who had been told everything (and had even turned out to have known at medical school a nephew of Dr. Lapiner) displayed an intense interest in the almost completed but only partly corrected book and drolly said it was not a person or persons but le bouquin which he wanted to see guéri de tous ces accrocs before it was too late. It was. What everybody thought would be Violet’s supreme achievement, ideally clean, produced on special Atticus paper in a special cursive type (the glorified version of Van’s hand), with the master copy bound in purple calf for Van’s ninety-seventh birthday, had been immediately blotted out by a regular inferno of alterations in red ink and blue pencil. One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.

  Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter. In the latest Who’s Who the list of his main papers included by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written, though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now—and it was high pain for Ada to be completed. “Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon Dieu,” Dr. [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes, in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery, could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two people in one bed.

  Ardis Hall—the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis—this is the leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chronicle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America—for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-borne caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent families, is Dr. Van Veen, son of Baron “Demon” Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Arcadian innocence with the “Ardis” part of the book. On the fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.

  In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.

  The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected all over the Western Hemisphere.

  Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral park; and much, much more.

  Notes to Ada

  BY VIVIAN DARKBLOOM

  1 All happy families etc.: mistranslations of Russian classics are ridiculed here. The opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel is turned inside out and Anna Arkadievna’s patronymic given an absurd masculine ending, while an incorrect feminine one is added to her surname. “Mount Tabor” and “Pontius” allude to the transfigurations (Mr. G. Steiner’s term, I believe) and betrayals to which great texts are subjected by pretentious and ignorant versionists.

  2 Severnïya Territorii: Northern Territories. Here and elsewhere transliteration is based on the old Russian orthography.

  3 granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble.

  4 Tofana: allusion to “aqua tofana” (see any good dictionary).

  5 sur-royally: fully antlered, with terminal prongs.

  6 Durak: “fool” in Russian.

  7 Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town of Kitezh which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.

  8 Mr. Eliot: we shall meet him again, on pages 459 and 505, in company of the author of “The Waistline” and “Agonic Lines.”

  9 Counter-Fogg: Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne’s globetrotter, traveled from West to East.

  10 Goodnight Kids: their names are borrowed, with distortions, from a comic strip for French-speaking children.

  11 Dr. Lapiner: for some obscure but not unattractive reason, most of the physicians in the book turn out to bear names connected with rabbits. The French “lapin” in Lapiner is matched by the Russian “Krolik,” the name of Ada’s beloved lepidopterist (p. 8, et passim) and the Russian “zayats” (hare) sounds like “Seitz” (the German gynecologist on page 230); there is a Latin “cuniculus” in “Nikulin” (“grandson of the great rodentiologist Kunikulinov,” p. 433), and a Greek “lagos”in “Lagosse” (the doctor who attends Van in his old age). Note also Coniglietto, the Italian cancer-of-the-blood specialist, p. 379.

  12 mizernoe: Franco-Russian form of “miserable” in the sense of “paltry.”

  13 c’est bien le cas de le dire: and no mistake.

  14 lieu de naissance: birthplace.

  15 pour ainsi dire: so to say.

  16 Jane Austen: allusion to rapid narrative information imparted through dialogue, in Mansfield Park.

  17 “Bear-Foot,” not “bare foot”: both children are naked.

  18 Stabian flower girl: allusion to the celebrated mural painting (the so-called “Spring”) from Stabiae in the National Museum of Naples: a maiden scattering blossoms.

  1 Raspberries; ribbon: allusions to ludicrous blunders in Lowell’s versions of Mandelshtam’s poems (in the N.Y. Review 23 December 1965).

  2 Belokonsk: the Russian twin of “Whitehorse” (city in N.W. Canada).

  3 en connaissance de cause: knowing what it was all about (Fr.).

  4 Aardvark: apparently, a university town in New England.

  5 Gamaliel: a much more fortunate statesman than our W. G. Harding,

  6 interesting condition: family way.

  7 Lolita, Texas: this town exists, or, rather, existed, for it has been renamed, I believe, after the appearance of the notorious novel.

  8 penyuar: Russ., peignoir.

  1 beau milieu: right in the middle.

  2 Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.

  3 Braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.

  4 entendons-nous: let’s have it clear (Fr.).

  5 Yukonets: inhabitant of Yukon (Russ.).

  6 lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.

  7 my lad, my pretty, etc.: paraphrase of a verse in Housman.

  8 ballatetta: fragmentation and distortion of a passage in a “little ballad” by the Italian poet Guido Cavalcanti (1255–1300). The relevant lines are: “you frightened and weak little voice that comes weeping from my woeful heart, go with my soul and that ditty, telling of a destroyed mind.”

  9 Nuss: German for “nut.”

  10 Khristosik: little Christ (Russ.).

  11 rukuliruyushchiy: Russ., from Fr. roucoulant, cooing.

  12 horsepittle: “hospital,” borrowed from a passage in Di
ckens’ Bleak House. Poor Jo’s pun, not a poor Joycean one.

  13 aujourd’hui, heute: to-day (Fr., Germ.).

  14 Princesse Lointaine: Distant Princess, title of a French play.

  1 pour attraper le client: to fool the customer.

  1 Je parie, etc.: I bet you do not recognize me, Sir.

  2 tour du jardin: a stroll in the garden.

  3 Lady Amherst: confused in the child’s mind with the learned lady after whom a popular pheasant is named.

  4 with a slight smile: a pet formula of Tolstoy’s denoting cool superiority, if not smugness, in a character’s manner of speech.

  5 pollice verso: Lat., thumbs down.

  1 Sumerechnikov: the name is derived from “sumerki” (“dusk” in Russian).

  2 lovely Spanish poem: really two poems—Jorge Guillen’s Descanso en jardin and his El otono: isla).

  1 Monsieur a quinze ans, etc.: You are fifteen, Sir, I believe, and I am nineteen, I know.… You, Sir, have known town girls no doubt; as to me, I’m a virgin, or almost one. Moreover …

  2 rien qu’une petite fois: just once.

  1 mais va donc jouer avec lui: come on, go and play with him.

  2 se morfondre: mope.

  3 au fond: actually.

  4 Je Pignore: I don’t know.

  5 cache-cache: hide-and-seek.

  6 infusion de tilleul: lime tea.

  7 Les amours du Dr. Mertvago: play on “Zhivago” (“zhiv” means in Russian “alive” and “mertv” dead).

  8 grand chêne: big oak.

  9 quelle idée: the idea!

  10 Les malheurs de Swann: cross between Les Malheurs de Sophie by Mme de Ségur (née Countess Rostopchin) and Proust’s Un Amour de Swann.

  1 monologue intérieur: the so-called “stream-of-consciousness” device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for instance, Anna’s last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets of Moscow).

  1 Mr. Fowlie: see Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud (1946).

  2 soi-disant: would-be.

  3 les robes vertes, etc.: the green and washed-out frocks of the little girls.

  4 angel moy: Russ., “my angel.”

  5 en vain, etc.: In vain, one gains in play

  The Oka river and Palm Bay …

  6 bambin angêlique: angelic little lad.

  1 groóte: Dutch, “great.”

  2 un machin etc.: a thing as long as this that almost wounded the child in the buttock.

  1 pensive reeds: Pascal’s metaphor of man, un roseau pensant.

  2 horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (“symbols in an orchal orchestra”), p. 73.

  3 buvard: blotting pad.

  4 Kamargsky: La Camargue, a marshy region in S. France combined with Komar, “mosquito,” in Russian and moustique in French.

  5 sa petite collation du matin: light breakfast.

  6 tartine au miel: bread-and-butter with honey.

  1 Osberg: another good-natured anagram, scrambling the name of a writer with whom the author of Lolita has been rather comically compared. Incidentally, that title’s pronunciation has nothing to do with English or Russian (pace an anonymous owl in a recent issue of the TLS).

  2 mais ne te etc.: now don’t fidget like that when you put on your skirt! A well-bred little girl…

  3 très en beauté: looking very pretty.

  4 calèche: victoria.

  5 pecheneg: a savage.

  6 grande fille: girl who has reached puberty.

  7 La Rivière de Diamants: Maupassant and his “La Parure” (p. 87) did not exist on Antiterra.

  8 copie etc.: copying in their garret.

  9 à grand eau: swilling the floors.

  10 désinvolture: uninhibitedness.

  11 vibgyor: violet-indigo-blue-green-yellow-orange-red.

  12 sans façons: unceremoniously.

  13 strapontin: folding seat in front.

  14 décharné: emaciated.

  15 cabane: hut.

  16 allons donc: oh, come.

  17 pointe assassine: the point (of a story or poem) that murders artistic merit.

  18 quitte à tout dire etc.: even telling it all to the widow if need be.

  19 il pue: he stinks.

  1 Atala: a short novel by Chateaubriand.

  2 un juif: a Jew.

  3 et pourtant: and yet.

  4 ce beau jardin etc.: This beautiful garden blooms in May, but in Winter never, never, never, never, never is green etc.

  1 chort!: Russ., “devil.”

  1 mileyshiy: Russ., “dearest.”

  2 partie etc.: exterior fleshy part that frames the mouth … the two edges of a simple wound … it is the member that licks.

  3 pascaltrezza: in this pun, which combines Pascal with scaltrezza (Ital., “sharp wit”) and treza (a Provençal word for “tressed stalks”), the French “pas” negates the “pensant” of the “roseau” in his famous phrase “man is a thinking reed.”

  4 Katya: the ingénue in Turgenev’s “Fathers and Children.”

  5 a trouvaille: a felicitous find.

  6 Ada, who liked crossing orchids: she crosses here two French authors, Baudelaire and Chateaubriand.

  7 mon enfant, etc.: my child, my sister, think of the thickness of the big oak at Tagne, think of the mountain, think of the tenderness-

  8 recueilli: concentrated, rapt.

  9 canteen: a reference to the “scrumpets” (crumpets) provided by school canteens.

  1 puisqu’on etc.: since we broach this subject.

  2 hument: inhale.

  3 tout le reste: all the rest.

  4 zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.

  1 Mlle Stopchin: a representative of Mme de Ségur, née Rostopchin, author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann).

  2 au feu!: fire!

  3 flambait: was in flames.

  4 Ashette: “Cendrillon” in the French original.

  5 en croupe: riding pillion.

  6 à reculons: backwards.

  7 The Nile is settled: a famous telegram sent by an African explorer

  8 parlez pour vous: speak for yourself.

  9 trempée: soaked.

  1 je l’ai vu etc.: “I saw it in one of the wastepaper-baskets of the library.”

  2 aussitôt après: immediately after.

  3 ménagez etc.: go easy on your Americanisms.

  4 leur chute etc.: their fall is slow … one can follow them with one’s eyes, recognizing-

  5 Lowden: a portmanteau name combining two contemporary bards.

  6 baguenaudier: French name of bladder senna.

  7 Floeberg: Flaubert’s style is mimicked in this pseudo quotation.

  1 pour ne pas etc.: so as not to put any ideas in her head.

  2 en lecture: “out.”

  3 cher, trop cher René: dear, too dear (his sister’s words in Chateaubriand’s René).

  4 Chiron: doctor among centaurs: an allusion to Updike’s best novel.

  5 London weekly: a reference to Alan Brien’s New Statesman column.

  6 Höhensonne: ultra-violet lamp.

  7 bobo: little hurt.

  8 démission etc.: tearful notice.

  9 les deux enfants etc.: “therefore the two children could make love without any fear.”

  10 fait divers: news item.

  11 blin: Russ., pancake.

  12 qui le sait: who knows,

  13 Heinrich Müller: author of Poxus, etc.

  1 Ma soeur te souvient-il encore: first line of the third sextet of Chateaubriand’s Romance à Hélène (“Combien j’ai douce souvenance”) composed to an Auvergne tune that he heard during a trip to Mont Dore in 1805 and later inserted in his novella Le Dernier Abencerage. The final (fifth) sextet begins with “Oh! qui me rendra mon Hélène. Et ma montagne et le grand chêne”—ont of the leitmotivs of the present novel.

  2 sestra moya etc.: my sister, do you remember the mountain, and the ta
ll oak, and the Ladore?

  3 oh! qui me rendra etc.: oh who will give me back my Aline, and the big oak, and my hill?

  4 Lucile: the name of Chateaubriand’s actual sister.

  5 la Dore etc.: the Dore and the agile swallow.

  6 vendange: vine-harvest.

  1 Rockette: corresponds to Maupassant’s La Petite Roc que.

  2 chaleur du lit: bed warmth.

  3 horosho: Russ., all right.

  4 mironton etc.: burden of a popular song.

  1 Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet.

  2 Bagrov’s grandson: allusion to Childhood Years of Bagrov’s Grandson by the minor writer Sergey Aksakov (A.D. 1791–1859).

  3 hobereaux: country squires.

  4 biryul’ki proshlago: Russ., the Past’s baubles.

  5 traktir: Russ., pub.

  6 (avoir le) vin triste: to be melancholy in one’s cups.

  7 au cou rouge etc.: with the ruddy and stout neck of a widower still full of sap.

  8 gloutonnerie: gourmandise.

  9 tant pis: too bad.

  10 je rêve etc.: I must be dreaming. It cannot be that anyone should spread butter on top of all that indigestible and vile British dough.

  11 et ce n’est que etc.: and it is only the first slice.

  12 lait caillé: curds and whey.

  1 shlafrok: Russ., from Germ. Schlafrock, dressing gown.

  2 tous les etc.: all the tires are new.

  3 tel un: thus a wild lily entrusting the wilderness.

  4 non etc.: no, Sir, I simply am very fond of you, Sir, and of your young lady.

  5 qu’y puis-je? what can I do about it?

  6 Stumbling on melons … arrogant fennels: allusions to passages in Marvell’s “Garden” and Rimbaud’s “Mémoire.”

  1 d’accord: Okay.

  2 la bonne surprise: what a good surprise.

  3 amour propre, sale amour: pun borrowed from Tolstoy’s “Resurrection.”

  4 quelque petite etc.: some little laundress.

  5 Toulouse: Toulouse-Lautrec.

  6 dura: Russ., fool (fern.).

  1 The Headless Horseman: Mayn Reid’s title is ascribed here to Pushkin, author of The Bronze Horseman.

  2 Lermontov: author of The Demon.

  3 Tolstoy etc.: Tolstoy’s hero, Haji Murad (a Caucasian chieftain), is blended here with General Murat, Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and with the French revolutionary leader Marat assassinated in his bath by Charlotte Corday.