Speaking of ‘gory Mary,’ I forgot to mention beautiful Maria Gamilton (descendant of a Hamilton who left Scotland and came to Russia in the 16^th century), a lady in waiting of Katharine I and one of the tsar Peter’s mistresses, who was arrested in 1717, tortured, accused of infanticide (she confessed of having got rid of several fruits of her love affairs that she started after the tsar had jilted her) and executed two years later, at the age of about twenty five. She was decapitated, in the presence of the tsar, who gallantly helped her to mount the scaffold, kissed her dead head on the mouth and ordered to take it to the kunstkamera (cabinet of curiosities) where it was displayed for the next two centuries. VN must have seen it there, when in the winter of 1915-16 he haunted St. Petersburg museums with Valentina Shulgina (“Tamara” of Drugie Berega and Speak, Memory). But even if he didn’t, he would remember Max Voloshin’s lines from his poem “

Russia

” (1924):

Happier than poor Maria Gamilton was another beauty, Emma Lyon (1761-1815), who entered history as Lady Hamilton, the mistress of Admiral Nelson. AH + HAMILTON = HA-HA + MILTON. Both the word ‘ha-ha’ (in the sense “ditch,” a feature of landscape parks) and the name Milton (cf. John Milton, 1608-74, English poet, the blind author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained) occur in the passage of Ada that deals with the Antiterran geography and its strange difference from the geopolitical situation on Terra, Antiterra’s twin planet:

“Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled all over today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kurils! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia’…” (1.3)

On Antiterra, Milton is thus a politician (which, of course, doesn’t preclude him from being also a poet; note that John Milton, Cromwell's secretary, wrote not only poetry, but also political pamphlets, one of his works is a treatise on Muscovy). His first name links him to both Abraham, the first of the great Biblical patriarchs, traditional founder of the ancient Hebrew nation, and Abraham Lincoln, 1809-65, the American politician, sixteenth President of the USA who helped to abolish slavery in his country.

Instead of the Antiterran “ha-ha of a doubled ocean” separating Amerussia and Tartary, we have on Earth the somewhat broader Bering Strait separating

America

and

Russia

. It was named after Vitus Bering (1680-1741), Danish navigator, explorer of the North Pacific. BERING + NELSON + MORE = BEREG + SLONIM + NERON (more is Russian for “sea,” as well as English comparative form of “much” and “many;” note that “more” is the word in which Ada ends: “…and much, much more:” 5.6; bereg is Russian for “shore;” cf. Drugie berega, “Other Shores,” the Russian version of VN’s autobiography; Slonim is Vera Nabokov’s maiden name; Neron is the name Nero, of the Roman emperor, known for his cruelty and depravity, in Russian spelling; note that Nero = Reno, a city in Nevada mentioned in the epilogue of Ada).

As to the Russian particle ved’, it is quite simple: VED’ + MAMAN = VED’MA + MAN (maman is French for “mother;” cf. “he [Van] invariably wrote in French calling her [Aqua] petite maman:” 1.3; ved’ma is Russian for “witch;” cf. “Two or three centuries earlier she [Aqua] might have been just another consumable witch:” 1.3; cf. “Witch (or Viedma, founded by a Russian admiral):” 2.2; “man” is homo sapience, but, capitalized, it is also a character in Milton’s epics; the name of the island in the Irish sea; the name of the Antiterran city that corresponds to our world’s New York, short of “Manhattan,” that city’s full name).

The word kunstkamera, like several other words in Voloshin’s poem, also turns out to be a part of an anagram. Because this anagram comprises 78 letters (39 = 39) and almost all words in it are Russian, I won’t bring it up here (so as not to shock you). I mention it only to illustrate my argument that Nabokov’s dream of Antiterra, a kind of Earth’s parallel world, is a word dream (cf. “Van often had word dreams:” 1.42) that involves a lot of hidden anagrams (note, by the way, that world = word + L). I would even call it a word nightmare. All the same, Ada is, in my opinion, Nabokov’s most complex and most perfect dream (all VN’s novels, like all true works of art, are dreams), in every respect superior to his greatest Russian masterpiece, Dar (however much I may admire it). It shows no sign of “decline” (contrary to S. Soloviov’s words in his recent posting) whatsoever.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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