Dear Victor,

I hope I’ll not inconvenience you by preferring to continue my questions at the VN-List, one of my most valued forums because it allows us to voice not only candid, humoristic and informal opinions but also to engage in more strict academic exchanges related to Nabokov which are often inaccessible to some of the Nablers. Your contributions are always a joy to read – and to know that they are shared by many of your admirers is, for me, an added bonus.

Here is a quote from your review of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”:

“Anton Chekhov died of tuberculosis, aged 44, in 1904—the time of a rare, precarious peaceful spell in European history. Ten years since, officers and soldiers leaving town in the final scene of The Three Sisters will march onto the fields of the senseless, bloodiest Great War. Those who survive will see their dreams ruined again by the Russian revolution, civil war, and communist terror and slavery for three generations. After we have lived through the 20^th century well into the 21^st, there is less and less hope that the humankind will heed the dreams of Colonel Vershinin (first played by the great Stanislavsky himself). // Still, I value dreams as much as Chekhov did, so I repeat after Vershinin: “In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing. Man has need of that life and if it doesn't yet exist, he must sense it, wait for it and dream of it, prepare to receive it, and to achieve that he must see and know more than our grandfathers and fathers saw or knew.”

At a time when we witness different kinds of wars expanding their destructiveness all over our vulnerable planet and spirit, it is bracing to hear of your dreams, some of them shared with Chekhov and with V.Nabokov. When I decided to bring together your generous and heartening sentence and one of Nabokov’s, I refreshed my memory using a search machine that led me to various articles and books ( several of which I wasn’t familiar with). I’d like to bring up the name of two:  Ethics, Evil and Fiction (where the author offers an elaboration about the phrase I’d been looking for and connects it to the content of your message about Darwin indirectly), by Colin McGinnsear,  and the more familiar article by Richard Rorty on Cruelty (available on line  eb.princeton.edu/sites/english/NEH/RORTY.HTM )

The quote:  “Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only in so far as if affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”

Just as a mathematical formula can be considered “beautiful”, there are many works of art that now question the standard parameters of “beauty” (without the revolutionary excesses defended by, say, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, when the road to beauty - the correct word now fails me - demands a passage that progresses through various degrees of horror). Your article about Chekhov’s art and play emphasized the importance of individual emotions over strategic action in a succinct manner. And, as I see it, the beauty and ethics of V.Nabokov’s art lies in the promise (the dream) hidden in the lines quoted above because, for me they represent, among other things, an exercise in the dangers and advantages in the emotions related to “empathy” (can we connect them to Darwin at this point, without the need of invoking religion?)

Going back to the original subject. You were advocating the inclusion of Darwin and evolution in “ADA”* before you noted that: Nabokov is both writer and a natural scientist; he may not agree with mechanisms suggested by Darwin entirely, but he never denies evolution and human nature,” but it’s not clear to me if, by evolution, you mean a directionless rotation and change, or if the concept of “progress” and an advance in complexity is implied therein. You seem to value Van’s and Ada’s evolutionary acquisitions relying on Darwin’s evolutionary theory and based on “human nature” ( judging from: “not inherited, I’m afraid”) – but your reference to an article about “sterility” mainly offers examples of decadence and illness resulting in the death of a lineage, as was the case of the Veens. 

I fear I’m confusing different issues (art, beauty, cruelty, empathy, evolution, progress) for I lack the necessary background to coherently express the radiating associations you stimulated in me: perhaps you could enlighten me, without silencing your vision at the VN-List?  

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* “Van and Ada thus are not just "children of Demon" but also descendants of Darwin. "Descent with modification" is Darwin's original formula of evolutionary change. Anybody would agree that, in the case of Van and Ada, such modification, compared to direct ancestors, is profound. It will not be inherited, I am afraid.”

B.Boyd: I might take about forty years to finish my Annotations to ADA / AdaOnline, although I could have completed it in two or three years had I chosen to do it continuously. But I protest at Robert's comparison with Finnegans Wake. I wrote my first published article on Joyce, was considering a PhD on him—even one on the Wake—but have never managed to read more than a fraction of the book. I read Ada avidly at 17, and happened to leave the book down at the home of my sister--who never finished high school, had a shotgun marriage, already had two children, now runs a pub in a depressed area—while I goofed around with her kids. She read the first chapter—surely the densest part of Ada and of Nabokov’s oeuvre--and thought it “a scream.” The book is funny and accessible. Sure, it also includes riddles no one person will be able to master, but so does life, and we can enjoy both.

Hello, Brian.

I hadn’t realized that the first chapter was “the densest part of Ada”, but I agree with your sister also on that it’s “a scream”.  I keep returning to it over and over. But that’s not the reason I decided to write this comment…

I was an avid Nabokov reader long before I began to correspond with Nablers at the List, or was able to discuss anything VN-related with anyone close to me.*  It was a lonely and silent experience with a gigantic oeuvre and, for two times, like you, when you “happened to leave the book down at the home of…” , I abandoned the novel in a niche at my hosts’s homes as a mischievous gesture: I wanted “ADA” to be found one day and provoke a surprise (I didn’t think “ADA” would be a spontaneous acquisition by my American friends). The editions were cheap (one of them I bought at a used-books fair in New Hampshire) and my own copy was safe at home…

Whenever I remember the impulse I feel puzzled by what could have prompted me to do it – it must have been related to the attic trouvailles and the herbarium.  

Jansy

* ADA was translated and published in Brazil only in 2005.