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

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existence of Terra is the subject of debate and accepted
only by deranged minds "... in support and token
of their own irrationality" (18). By and by, however,
it turns out that the two worlds are closely related,
and this is one of the facts that combine to make Ada,
which has by one critic been called "... surely one of
the sunniest works of fiction written in this century"39,
and by another "the most happily loony work
since Alice"40, a very sad work indeed: it appears
from them that the abstruse and comic surface of the
novel and the story of Ada and Van, "unreal" and abstract
though it may seem, reflect indeed on factual
reality, and that they are the artful and artistic
disguise of what seems to be a very disenchanted view
of life and of human existence.
Terra the Fair, the "Other World" which in sick
minds gets confused with the "Next World" and "the
Real World in us and beyond us", and in which they
imagine "a rainbow mist of angelic spirits" (21), is
not really such a heavenly place at all. Ostensibly a
piece of science fiction, Van's Letters from Terra,
and the movie that is based on it, reflect twentieth
century history: "a succession of wars and revolutions"
(580), including the 1914-1918 World War and preparations
for "a conflict on an even more spectacular
scale" (581), and they feature among others "Athaulf
the Future" ("Athaulf Hindler" in the film version)
(581), "... [who] was said to be in the act of transforming
a gingerbread Germany into a great country of
speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and mod-