Andrey Vakhrulin: I was puzzled by the
choice of years - 2145 AD and 200 AA in Lance - and suddenly yesterday
it dawned on me that the logic could be as follows:
1. It's the two
alternative names for one and the same year in the future/ 2. Given that, 2145
AD is quite clear, but 200 AA presents a difficulty. If it's one year we then
can guess what is year 1 AA is like: 2145 - 200 = 1945! The new epoch seems to
start at that year, according to VN./3. What is so important of this year for
VN? Obviously, end of WW 2 (Ameica coming to the forefront). But also VN getting
Ameican citizenship./4. So AA may mean Anno America - particularly as the
narrator in the story is so close to Nabokov himself./5. Another interpretation
may be Anno Atomus - when the nuclear bomb was first tried. The text,
incidentally, features later the phrase 'comics and atomics'. What do you
think?
JM: What an interesting
hypothesis! You may find a corroboration in Brian Boyd's delightful Ch.4
(Permanent Impermanence...1944-1946, AY p.78-79), where the
biographer mentions Nabokov's Time and Ebb as "a little
masterpiece that blends the imediate and the remote, the mundane and the eerily
beautiful. A nintety-year old Jewish scientist reflects from his hospital bed in
the year of 2024 not on the world around him...but on the strangteness of the
world of his childhood, America in the early 1940s. For the first time but not
the last, Nabokov brilliantly inverts science fiction..."