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

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"... thousands of more or less unbalanced people be-
lieved... in the secret Government-concealed identity
of Terra and Antiterra" (582), and the next few sen-
tences state clearly that they are right. Van, per-
forming his Mascodagama stunt, perceives such wonders
as "an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reserve"
(184-185); he perceives in fact the whole universe
upside down in a "magical reversal" (146), and it is
thus that he recreates it. But the true state of
affairs shimmers-through the artistic version, and is
then frankly revealed. In another reversal the osten-
sibly "real" Antiterra is shown to be a figment of
Van's imagination, a distorted version of Terra, and
the "fictional" world (Terra) assumes its full reality.
The passage in which this reversal takes place even
leaves the level of fiction and for a moment estab-
lishes a connection with the actual reality of the
author and the reader:
Demonian history dwindled to a casual
illusion. Actually, we had passed through
all that... Tropical countries meant, not
only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and
death, and ignorance, and shamans, and
agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was,
in fact, mid-twentieth century... Russian
peasants and poets had not been transported
to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages
ago - they were dying, at this very moment,
in the slave camps of Tartary (582).
As Van's novel was to suggest, all is not paradise
on Terra, in fact, paradise has been abolished. Terra,
the paradise of sick minds, is identical with Anti-
terra, or "Demonic", and the implication is that this
is Hell. The name of Van's father is very suitably
Demon, and Ada refers to him as "our father in hell"