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

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super-imperial couple", different from, and, she im-
plies, infinitely superior to, "billions of brilliant
couples" (71). It is their very genius that makes
them so implausible as children. Ada, aged twelve,
knows everything about orchids and butterflies and
literature, and talks about them in an impossibly
stilted style, and yet casually, relegating bits of
astounding knowledge to subordinate clauses, her
"spectacular handling" of which even Van acknowledges
(61). One example may suffice:
'I
... can add, ' said the girl, 'that the
petal belongs to the common Butterfly Orchis;
that my mother was even crazier than her
sister; and that the paper flower so cavalierly
dismissed is a perfectly recognizable
reproduction of an early-spring sanicle that
I saw in profusion on hills in coastal California
last February. Dr. Krolik, our local
naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred,
as Jane Austen might have phrased it, for
the sake of rapid narrative information
(you recall Brown, don't you, Smith? ) has
determined the example I brought back from
Sacramento to Ardis, as the Bear-Foot,
B, E, A, R, my love, not my foot or yours, or
the Stabian flower-girl's - an allusion,
which your father, who, according to Blanche,
is also mine, would understand like this'
(American finger-snap) (8).
"A pretty prig", Van calls her in retrospect (51) and
"impossibly pretentious" (43), and there is no deny-
ing the truth of his statements.
As to genius, Van is quite her equal, even though,
except for literature, his interests and talents are
different from hers, and singly or toget4er they con-
fuse and dumbfound not only Lucette but all their
elders by their precocious ways. Van, as Sissela Bok
puts it, is "blessed with every visible talent. " 31
At quite a tender age (nine) he "adored... Gilberte