Word: nabokov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...critic foolish enough to exclaim "Aha!" over gross parallels between Nabokov's experience and his literary creations is viewed by the author with scorn. Yet the soft, pervasive breath of Paradise Lost that whispers through Ada is more than an echo of Everyman's lost ardor. It is a transmogrified version of Nabokov's own lost private Eden in the Russia of his childhood. With his wealthy and gifted family, he lived in a town house in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg, and at Vyra, an idyllic, rambling country estate. For Nabokov, his two brothers and two sisters and their parents, life...
...easy entry on the boy-meets-girl plot level, Nabokov indulges in a tale about Van Veen and his half sister Ada Veen. They fall in love at the respective ages of 14 and twelve and begin an energetic sex life in the nooks and dells of the family's rural estate. Over the years, their floating orgy suffers prolonged periods of inactivity. In their old age, however, Van and Ada reunite and mate?now in a highly figurative way?melding into an unbeing that Nabokov calls Vaniada. Licensed allusion hunters will find that Vanadis is an epithet for Freya...
...Nabokov sums up these amorous doings in a mock dust-jacket blurb that closes Ada by describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...
...route, some of the characters perish by fire, water and air?fleeting reminders of a return to elemental states. Age comes finally. Time reasserts itself. As the artifice is revealed, one almost expects to hear the snap of Prospero's wand. For this is Nabokov's autumnal fairy tale. Though not his finest book, it is certainly his most brilliant attempt yet to ransack the images and thoughts of his own past and shape them into a glittering now of the imagination...
...Nabokov's tall, gentle father was an ex-Guards officer who could trace his family tree back to ancient Muscovite princes; he was also a professor of criminal law, and that rarity in Czarist Russia, a liberal politician as well. He held a seat in the first Russian Parliament. In 1906?when Vladimir was seven ?Czar Nicholas II illegally dissolved the Parliament less than a year after its establishment. Nabokov's father signed a manifesto exhorting popular resistance to the move?and went to jail...