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Product Description
Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.
This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
About the Author
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses--the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions--which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nabokov's Masterpiece!,
By
This review is from: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Paperback)
This truly is Nabokov's masterpiece; Lolita was gripping and shocking, but 'Ada' takes the reader to a higher, more complicated plane. Intellectually satisfying, with characters he forces you to care about, the plot twists and you're led helplessly against your own sensibilites.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult, Wonderful, Love Story,
By
This review is from: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Paperback)
I loved this book; in fact, now I am going to read two of the critical books about it. At its very heart, it is a love story, yes, despite the incest, taken care of by Van's sterility. Nabokov's language has always just blown me away. There are breathtaking passages in "Lolita", and no less so here. ". . . leaving their tiger-marks on the drapery of dreams. . ", page 253. It is not, granted, for the faint of heart, but oh so rewarding. I do agree that the chapter on Time is unpleasant, but don't you think that that is just what Nabokov intended it to be, the passage of seventeen years without Ada? The book, of course, is about Van, not Ada, and his lifelong (83 years!) obsession with and love of her. Nabakov very neatly separates sex and love, the two not necessarily being tied together in the way we Americans like to think, at least in our professed vanities. This is a master of prose, at the top of his game. Worth rereading. At heart, far more romantic (stripped of all the side bars) than many a modern love story.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Most feel love; a select few feel ardor.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Paperback)
A burst of light, a entymological treatise, a love story,a dirty old man's sexual fantasy, a miracle. This is Nabokov's "Ada", his last great novel, but more a spilling of the soul than a book. Only Nabokov would have the audacity to try to write a literary masterpiece around a simple -- even simplistic -- plot of youthful incest, and the skill to pull it off in such a brilliant fashion. If wordy pretentiousness and precocious kids turn you off, you shouldn't be reading Nabokov in the first place. But if you are the kind of reader who loves the sound of complex consonance and takes pleasure in being forced to re-read the last two chapters to grasp the convoluted plot, this is your high-lit Bible.
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