Immortality need to have a star to stand with the when it wishes in order to branch and you can flower and support tens of thousands of bluish-plumed angel birds all singing due to the fact sweetly very little eunuchs. To leave the the law of gravity means to transcend new grave. . . . (“Lance,” Reports 636)

How does the relationship between these types of “cousin worlds” itself relate solely to new strange dating between the cousin pairs Marina and you may Aqua, Van and you will Ada, Ada and you will Lucette, which see today contrasted, now inextricably perplexed otherwise fused?

From interplanetary theme, Nabokov in addition to explores the latest conceptual theme off matchmaking, away from identity, resemblance, distinction (“There are people who was able that the discrepancies and you will ‘false overlappings’ between them planets was indeed also numerous, and you may also deeply woven into the skein out-of successive events, to not taint having trite really love the theory out-of important sameness; so there were people that retorted your dissimilarities merely affirmed new real time normal facts around one other world,” -). Are Terra the fresh Fair the opposite of the entire world Antiterrans also termed as Demonia? Will it be identical which have Antiterra, otherwise just like the more since mortal existence out of immortal?

This new gap anywhere between Terra and you will Antiterra together with allows Nabokov many times–however, without solemnity, rather than belaboring the purpose–so you’re able to probe the relationship between ways and lives, between the arena of brand new book and world of the new viewer. All the more so since world of which unique looks the field of The newest Novel, the existing country-house realism of your own vintage 19th-millennium unique away from Austen in order to Tolstoy, however, undermined from the science-fiction or utopian community of later nineteenth and you can early 20th years, of Verne and you will Wells so you’re able to Zamyatin and you can Huxley.

Van’s casual references to a tragedy his designed customers are typical meant to already fully know, and we also genuine website subscribers need certainly to be unable to learn, echoes the methods off a manuscript like in the times off the brand new Comet (1906), because of the among favorite publishers from Nabokov’s youth, H.G. Wells (1866-1946), just like the comic indecency from electricity into the Antiterra recalls brand new Erewhon (1872) away from Samuel Butler (1835-1902), where criminality is an affliction or an infection that evokes tender empathy, whenever you are illness is an activity sordid, uncomfortable, criminal.

And common than this type of large inquiries will be the comic otherwise cryptic reminders away from dating Nabokov produces from innumerable local outcomes of a scene in which geography will get a non-prevent treat within its sameness and change from ours

In case Ada ‘s Antiterra motif pulls with the science and you can utopian fictional, what’s more, it parodies they, just like the arena of this unique one another are which is maybe not ours, because it draws together cosmic remoteness with detail by detail however, altered regional coordinates, given that its time and you will technology look each other innovative, a nineteenth-100 years that have swimming pools and you may Movie industry clips and you will petroloplanes, however significantly emotional. Nabokov envision strength eery: “Electricity. Time. Place. We understand nothing throughout the these materials” (cited within the Andrew Industry, Nabokov: His Lifetime in part , New york: Viking, 1977: 87); “Research confides in us . . . that Environment wouldn’t simply fall apart, but disappear such as for instance an effective ghost, if the Power had been instantly removed from the country” ( PF 193). He could be proper: physicists acknowledge they don’t really know why matter should add and you can blend through good and bad charges. In Ada Nabokov decreases the secret out of matter so you can farce and you can replays science fiction while the parody regarding hydraulic possibilities one replace energy and particularly regarding phones one gurgle and you can gulp the comical course from book.

New Terra-Antiterra theme in the beginning of the chapter looks like an excellent flamboyant digression, an impression Nabokov accentuates from flippancy out of Van’s tone. As frequently in Ada , he discovers the fantasy away from caprice a good way of exerting a far more state-of-the-art control.