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

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of unhappiness and loneliness:
As she began losing track of herself,
she thought it proper to inform a series
of receding Lucettes - telling them to
pass it on and on in a trick-crystal
regression - that what death amounted
to was only a more complete assortment
of the infinite fractions of solitude
(494).
Van and Ada have found their own individual ways
of at least trying to survive and to preserve their
sanity in this depressing world which is hell. "...
independent and original minds", says Van, "must cling
to things or pull things apart to ward off madness or
death... " (220). This need explains what Sissela Bok
sees in'a purely negative light and what she calls
...
the disturbances in the attitudes of
both Van and Ada: their desire to take
and collect life, in the form of plants
or insects, to preserve them and their
beauty; to collect, to classify, to attempt
to grasp all of creation for themselves.
43
Earlier on Van's and Ada's various interests and
passions were discussed; they are indeed comprehensive
and in some points seem to confirm what Sissela Bok
says about them. There is Ada's profound curiosity
and knowledge about insects and birds and plants
which is almost an obsession with her. She has a posi-
tive mania for analysis and pedantic specification
when talking about them; she has a perfectionist
dream of "a special Institute of Fritillary larvae
and violets - all the special violets they breed on"
(57); she copies in minute detail or, on paper, com-
bines in "unrecorded but possible" ways
,
different
species of orchids with each other (99). Both Van and