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

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outward signs of the closeness of their minds which,
where they do not correspond, complement each other.
Taken together, their minds seem to form one single
superior mind, superior by what Ada herself points
out: "prodigious individual awareness and young genius"
(71). Their minds are close to each other in their
youth and "their brains and senses stayed attuned and
were to stay thus always, through all separations"
(218). Even in their respective old ages, when composing
their memoir, they feel that they are essentially
one: "... we are not 'different'" they say (120),
and to confirm this, Van's name "[rhymes] with and
indeed [signifies] 'one' in Marina's double-you-less
deep voweled Russian pronunciation" (360).
In their youth they experience this love as something
that is equal to an experience of paradise. Van
abolishes the paradise of others, rather conventionally
viewed by some as peopled by "angelic spirits"
and less conventionally by Aqua as "a future America"
(21), but doing so he does not deny the possibility
of gaining one's own private paradise. This is not a
place that one might fix in space or that one might
hope to find oneself in after death: as he explains
to Ada, who is puzzled by the fact that he seems to
believe in Terra (which means paradise in Antiterrestrial
terms): "I accept it as a state ofmind" (264).
He says this to her in a moment of particularly intense
and tender love, and he implies that in a place
that is hell, they have both attained this state of
mind: "Anyway", he said, "it's fun to be two secret