Alexey Sklyarenko: When Van first meets Ada in Ardis, her fingernails are badly bitten. She stops biting them on her twelfth birthday…I don't think that Ada is so superstitious that she asks Kim or Blanche to throw her pared fingernails in the flames of the Burning Barn; yet, Gorky's story seems to me another indirect evidence that the "Baronial" Barn was set on fire on purpose and that Ada was involved in the arson….

 

JM:  So Ada stopped to bite her fingernails after she met Van? He seemed to feel great tenderness for her harmed cushiony fingertips at that first period in Ardis. The mosquitoes were associated to Chateaubriand, Goethe and the fictional Robert Brown. Now you see a link to Gorky, an author Nabokov didn’t seem to appreciate much. Were his references, then, satirical or neutral?

 

I cannot remember the interconnections between the fiery bites, Van and Ada’s passion and a second arson, one that is mentioned much later in connection to Kim and silhouettes seen from a distance. A few lost lines of poetry about a guide which indicated the British princess Margaret and her forbidden love seem to be close to this scene. Wasn’t Lord Snowdown also a photographer, although better equipped than Kim?

It’s such a pity that I cannot return to Ada right now, your new clues are tantalizing by bringing up various blind spots in my reading…