Ada (novel)

In the center is the love of Van and Ada from the age of 12 until old age and is apparently incest, since they are brother and sister, although not officially. The fabric of the novel is full of complex cross and external links.

The action itself does not take place on Earth, but on Anti-Terra (the antipode-analogue of the Earth), where rumors are circulating about the existence of Terra. All countries are not where on Earth ("Terre"), and electricity is prohibited, even call it should be: "Alabir." The phone works on water, so instead of “hello” they say “to water” (pun: in French, “allô!” And “à l'eau” sound the same).

English-speaking nations rule the planet: the eastern hemisphere is the British Empire, the western is a certain Estotia, a synthesis of Russia and the USA. Editing the novel from the author himself says that Estotia was made according to the legends of Estotia-Estotilandia, where very smart people live, and she herself is on the Labrador Peninsula . Part of the territory that actually belonged to the USSR is occupied by the Golden Horde , which is separated from the rest of the world by the "Golden Curtain" (an allusion to the " Iron Curtain "). The population of the Golden Horde is the Tatars , its ally is China . The Russian-Anglo-Saxon world leads against it the so-called. "The Second Crimean War ."

Wang on the ravings of psychos is a novel about an unknown Earth, where there is fascism, but there is no Golden Horde. This essay is essentially a work of the same genre as the “Hell” itself - an alternative story .

The plot itself is a long family saga that tells about the life of Van and Ada. "Forbidden" love, which arose literally in childhood, has been a red thread through life. Thousands of reasons - external and internal - prevent the brother and sister from living together and loving one another. And only in late old age, Van and Ada find each other.

The song "unique genius" sounds:

Nadezhda, then I shall be back,
when the true batch outboys the riot.

The translation is almost meaningless, something like: Hope, I will return when people of the true sort will be more numerous than the rebels. But in fact, the famous text of Bulat Okudzhava is phonetically transmitted:

true batch outboys the riot = trumpeter hang up will play .

• “ Ardis, ” the name of the estate where Ada’s childhood passed, was used by Karl Proffer to name his publishing house, where many English-language novels by V. Nabokov were first published in Russian and Russian-language works not reprinted from pre-war times were reprinted.
• Also, the name of the estate, as well as the name of the heroine, was borrowed by Dan Simmons in the novel Ilion.

In 1995, the Russian translation of the novel was published under the title “Ada or Passion” by Oksana Kirichenko , Andrey Girivenko , Alexander Dranov (Kiev, Atika; Chisinau, Kony-Velis), a year later, under the title “Ada, or Joy of Passion” a translation by Sergey Ilyin was released (Moscow: Di-Dick). According to Alexei Zverev ,

if you wish, you can find fault with the text of S. Ilyin, sorting it page by page, than the growing tribe of Russian nabokovists and novokovedov will surely do. But nevertheless, it is possible to discuss only this text, because another Russian “Ada” turned out to be not even a faded resemblance, but simply a discrediting of the book in the eyes of the reader, who had heard about the inimitable stylistic virtuosity of its author ^[2] .

The first of these translations was subsequently revised and goes under the name “Ada, or Erotiada” as the translation work of Oksana Kirichenko alone.