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Ada cannot rightfully be separated from its language, from the chaos of literary allusions, the geographical and genealogical data. But its glory rises from the fragrance of things that have been lost but cannot be forgotten. Central to its timelessness is the anachronistic world of Ada and Van's youth. Known as Antiterra, it is physically like a mixture of pastoral 19th century Russia and Canada and the modern U.S.
Antiterra's "current events" rove timelessly between an imagined future, in which Mississippi is run entirely by Negroes, and a fabled past, in which the Crimean War, occurring in 1886, is fought with modern war planes. For a while, space and time are suspended. Ultramodern "dorophones" ring, planes fly, and magic carpets skim cool glades without so much as a patent pending.
En 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.
Any 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, especially at Vyra, seems to have been the living lesson in love, order and responsibility that all ancien regime childhoods should have been but so seldom were.
Flight from Home
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.
The sentence lasted only three months.
Family life at Vyra began again, to last, apparently unshadowed, for nearly a decade more. In 1919 (young Vladimir was 20, and had recently inherited the equivalent of $2,000,000 from an uncle), the Bolshevik revolution forced the Nabokovs to begin their flight from Russia with only a few jewels and clothing. The real awareness of tragedy did not fully come home to them until 1922 in Berlin, when a night telephone call informed the family that their father was dead. He had been shot at a political rally, trying to protect another