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

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(385). Van himself is called an "angry young demon"
(302), and he calls Ada "Adoschka, adova doschka,
(Hell's daughter)" (403). The fact that "Ada" is an
inflected form of the Russian word for "hell" reflects
of course on the title of the whole novel.
One might of course object to this and say that
the whole is Van's very subjective and overbearing
view of the world in which he lives, and he has in
fact been blamed for his arrogance in calling it
"this pellet of muck" (498) by John Updike, who calls
this phrase "a dandy's dismissal. "41 There is, however,
Aqua's statement "... that only a very cruel or
very stupid person, or innocent infants, could be
happy on Demonic... " (301), and Aqua being a shrewd
person during her periods of sanity, as she proves
by outwitting all the Freudians in her "radiant and
easygoing home" (27ff. ), this can be taken as a valid
statement which confirms Van's view and justifies his
reactions. Aqua puts an end to the uselessness of
life by committing suicide, and significantly signs
her farewell note: "My sister's sister who teper' iz
ada ('now is out of hell')" (29).
There is nothing much to contradict the identification
of (Anti) Terra with hell, for what people
experience during their lives seem to be almost exclusively
the""ghost things" or "fogs" that figure
in twelve-year-old Ada's "web of wisdom" (74). Their
individual fates fit into the depressing frame furnished
by historical events. They die young, as
Marina's brother, or suffer horrible deaths like Rack