''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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374
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fiction is
...
earthbound, and while in
decency the names of small towns and
middling cities must be faked, metropolises
and nations are unique and should
be given their own names or none.
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Antiterra is not wholly unfamiliar. There are elements
in it that are recognizably elements of the world we
inhabit, but our world is not described realistically
as in traditional novels; rather, Ada presents a mir-
ror image of our world that is strangely distorted
and out of focus. The map of Antiterra (or Demonia)
is very different from that of Terra, which exists
only in rumours and deranged minds and is strongly
debated. The boundaries of countries as we know them
have got hopelessly jumbled, the most spectacular dif-
ference being that America and Russia are "poetical"
rather than "political" notions. Together they con-
stitute Antiterrestrial "Amerussia" which is governed
by Abraham Milton (18). The European part of the
British Commonwealth extends "from Scoto-Scandinavia
to the Riviera" (19), and there is on Antiterra "an
independent inferno" called "Tartary", which "... spread
from the Baltic and Black seas to the Pacific ocean,
[and] was touristically unavailable... " (20).
Antiterrestrial dates have no more to do with our
calendar than Demonian geography with our maps; Appel
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advises the reader to put them in quotation marks.
The action takes place in some "nineteenth" century
and extends into the early "twentieth", but neither
is fully recognizable. Amazing gadgets are in use,
such as "hydrodynamic telephones" (23) which, when
transmitting a long-distance call, send all the water-