Immortality need a celebrity to face on if it wishes so you can branch and flower and you can help many bluish-plumed angel wild birds every singing as the sweetly as little eunuchs. To leave their gravity ways to transcend the newest grave. . . . (“Lance,” Tales 636)
Why does the relationship between this type of “cousin planets” by itself relate to the fresh uncommon relationship between the sis sets Marina and you can Aqua, Van and Ada, Ada and you can Lucette, exactly who take a look now contrasted, now inextricably confused or bonded?
From the interplanetary theme, Nabokov including explores the newest conceptual motif off relationship, out of identity, similarity, differences (“There have been people who handled your inaccuracies and you may ‘false overlappings’ between them globes have been too multiple, and too 
seriously woven towards the skein out-of straight situations, to not taint having trite admiration the idea out of important sameness; there had been people that retorted that dissimilarities simply affirmed new alive natural facts in regards to additional industry,” -). Is Terra the fresh Fair the reverse of the entire world Antiterrans along with termed as Demonia? Can it be identical which have Antiterra, otherwise as more since mortal existence regarding immortal?
New gap ranging from Terra and Antiterra and lets Nabokov repeatedly–but as opposed to solemnity, without belaboring the purpose–in order to probe the connection anywhere between ways and you can life, involving the world of new book and the arena of the reader. Even more thus since arena of which unique looks the world of The fresh new Novel, the outdated nation-home reality of one’s antique nineteenth-century novel regarding Austen in order to Tolstoy, but compromised from the science-fiction otherwise utopian lifestyle of one’s later 19th and you may early 20th many years, off Verne and you can Wells so you can Zamyatin and you can Huxley.
Van’s informal records to an emergency his meant members are typical meant to know already, and we also genuine website subscribers need certainly to be unable to master, echoes the techniques regarding a book as in the occasions from the fresh Comet (1906), of the one of several favourite writers from Nabokov’s childhood, H.G. Wells (1866-1946), since the comic indecency off strength toward Antiterra remembers the fresh new Erewhon (1872) out of Samuel Butler (1835-1902), in which criminality was a condition or a bacterial infection you to evokes sensitive empathy, when you’re problems is an activity sordid, awkward, criminal.
Plus ubiquitous than just these higher issues would be the comic otherwise cryptic reminders of dating Nabokov brings from the innumerable local consequences away from a scene where geography becomes a non-stop amaze in sameness and differences of ours
However if Ada is why Antiterra motif pulls towards research and you will utopian fiction, in addition it parodies it, because arena of that it unique one another is actually and that is perhaps not ours, as it draws together cosmic remoteness having in depth but altered local coordinates, since it is time and you may technology hunt both advanced, a 19th-100 years with swimming pools and Movie industry movies and you will petroloplanes, however profoundly nostalgic. Nabokov believe stamina eery: “Stamina. Go out. Space. We realize little regarding these materials” (cited inside Andrew Career, Nabokov: His Life to some extent , Nyc: Viking, 1977: 87); “Science confides in us . . . that Earth wouldn’t merely break down, however, vanish such as good ghost, in the event the Strength was out of the blue removed from the country” ( PF 193). He could be proper: physicists acknowledge they don’t really know as to why count is to integrate and you can combine courtesy negative and positive costs. However in Ada Nabokov decreases the mystery from matter so you can farce and you can replays science-fiction given that parody throughout the hydraulic systems you to exchange fuel and especially on the phones you to gurgle and you can gulp the comical path from unique.
Brand new Terra-Antiterra motif in the very beginning of the chapter appears like an excellent flamboyant digression, an opinion Nabokov accentuates from flippancy off Van’s build. As much during the Ada , he discovers brand new illusion regarding caprice a helpful technique for applying a very complex manage.
