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

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395
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agents from an alien country" (264).
The setting of their early love is Ardis Hall and
its park. Even the description of Van's short trip
there from the station suggests great natural beauty:
He was taken through pinewoods and over
rocky ravines, with birds and other animals
singing in the flowering undergrowth.
Sunflecks and lacy shadows skimmed over
his legs... (34)
This impression is deepened in the description of
Ardis Park itself with its "rond point -a small arena
encircled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy
bloom', (51), its trees and birds and flowers and
butterflies: "Blue butterflies... were flitting swiftly
around the shrubs and settling on the drooping clusters
of yellow flowers" (128); its bowers and arbours and
secluded spots, and its everlasting sunshine suffusing
the Park and the rooms of Ardis Hall, and surrounding
Ada (e. g. 51,75,99,100,189).
"... idealized gardens have traditionally been the
literary locations of human paradises... " 50 Ardis Park
is one of them. It even has its own "Tree of Knowl-
edge" imported "from the Eden National Park" (95).
Various clues suggest comparison with other literary
paradises, such as Baudelaire's and Marvell's. The
two paradises evoked in L'Invitation au Voyage and
The Garden respectively differ from each other in an
essential point: As R. Alter puts it:
whereas
The Baudelaire poem is ... a dream of a
perfect world, a world saturated with
both generally sensual and specifically
erotic delight...