Subject: Fwd: Re: VAn & ADA: true siblings?
From: "Sandy Klein" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:01:15 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2005 12:31 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Fwd: Re: VAn & ADA: true siblings?

Dear Penny McCarthy,

Like real people, literary characters can have only one mother and one
(biological) father. Van and Ada make no exception. If you read ADA
carefully, you will see that Van is the son of Demon (and not, say,
d'Onsky) and Marina and that Ada is the daughter of the same parents.
However, it is true that Nabokov makes us question the parentage of the
two main characters and wonder if, for instance, G. A. Vronsky is Ada's
father. At a certain point we learn that Price, a footman at Ardis, was
dubbed by Marina and Vronsky, during their brief romance in 1871, "Grib"
(1.38). This should make us think of Griboedov (who was mentioned in the
previous chapter: 1.37), in whose play Gore ot uma ("Woe from the Wit"
or, as Marina puts it, "How stupid to be so clever") Famusov calculates
the pregnancy of a lady friend (whom he apparently has himself
impregnated). Famusov's words are jokingly quoted during the family
dinner in 1.38 by Demon who tries to establish the exact date of Ada's
birthday: "It's next Saturday, po razschyotu po moemu (by my reckoning),
isn't it?" That Demon believes he, and not anybody else, is Ada's father
and that he is making a deliberate playful allusion to Griboedov is
confirmed by Demon's words that he drops still a litttle later in the
conversation:

"You know quite well," said Marina, "that your father disapproves of
your smoking at table."
"Oh, it's all right," murmured Demon.
"I had Dan in view," explained Marina heavily. "He's very prissy on that
score."
"Well, and I'm not," answered Demon.
Ada and Van couldn't help laughing [they had discovered four years ago
whose children they actually are]. All that was banter - not of a high
order, but still banter.

It seems that not only Demon, but also Marina believes that Demon (and
not Vronsky) is Ada's father. But, perhaps, she is "vrong" (there is no
'double u' sound in Marina's English)? It is tantalizingly unclear why
Marina & Vronsky have dubbed Price "Grib" (could possibly the origin of
that mysterious nickname have anything to do with Griboedov and his play
- may be even with Marina's old attempt to calculate her pregnancy by
Vronsky?), and that makes the situation a little ambiguous. Vronsky's
phrase "Prichyom tut polozhenie ('situation-shituation')?" (1.32) that
hints at the Russian way of speaking about pregnancy and creates a
double-entendre here (note, by the way, that the phrase "interesnoe
polozhenie" is used in ADA, 1.2, to describe Marina's pregnancy - with
Ada) is also most intriguing. (You probably mention some of these facts,
or even all of them, in your paper, which I haven't read because of its
inaccessibility to me.) Still, I think that Ada is Demon's daughter -
because she has inherited some of his little mannerisms (for example,
wagging her left fore-finger three times at the height of the temple).
But then, again, genes can jump like chess knights (as Marina suggests:
1.37). So, theoretically, Ada could have inherited this habit to wag her
left fore-finger not from Demon, but - through Marina (who is Demon's
first cousin, or perhaps even his sister) - from Demon's aunt Kitty.
Perhaps, the strongest evidence that Ada is Demon's daughter is, after
all, the following passage:

"It almost awed one to see the pleasure with which she and Demon
distorted their shiny-lipped mouths in exactly the same way to introduce
orally from some heavenly hight the voluptious ally of the prim lily of
the valley, holding the shaft with an identical bunching of the fingers,
not unlike the reformed 'sign of the cross' for protesting against which
(a ridicoulous little schism measuring an inch or so from thumb to
index) so many Russians had been burnt by other Russians only two
centuries earlier on the banks of the Great Lake of Slaves."

Alexey Sklyarenko

----- Original Message -----
From: "Donald B. Johnson" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Sunday, September 18, 2005 8:05 PM
Subject: VAn & ADA: true siblings?

> ----- Forwarded message from [email-masked] -----
>     Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 08:15:32 -0700
>     From: Penny McCarthy <[email-masked]>
> Reply-To: Penny McCarthy <[email-masked]>
>  Subject: true siblings?
>       To:
>
> Dear List,
> Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello raises an interesting question about Ada
> and Van's relatedness. In my MLR 2004 (vol. 99.1) article 'Nabokov's
> Ada and Sidney's Arcadia'- noted with approval by Barbara Wyllie and
> Donald Johnson on 11 Feb. 2005, for which many thanks - I suggested
> that early in the novel Ada (p. 28 of the Penguin) Nabokov obfuscates
Van's parentage.
> G.A. Vronsky had an affair with Marina just before Demon became her
lover.
> Demon threw her out for some unexplained misdemeanour - had he
> discovered she was pregnant by Vronsky? As the two G.A.'s (G.A.
> Vronsky and Grigoriy
> Akimovich) merge into each other, so the Erminin family and the Aqua
> Veen branch of the Veens merge. So the harping on triplets from this
> very point in the story becomes suspect: perhaps Van, Greg and Grace
> are triplet children of Aqua. It is not that we are not meant to read
> the whole novel as a story of sibling incest; rather that we are
> reading a 'quantum physics' sort of novel, in which atoms (people) can
> pass through two incompatible histories simultaneously. Van and Ada
> are and are not true siblings.
> Feed-back on the notion of Philip Sidney as Nabokov's inspiration for
> his life and work would be welcome. Surely there is more to add to my
> findings. Penny McC.
>
> ----- End forwarded message -----
>

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