Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Ada, or Ardor

First Edition Cover
Author	Vladimir Nabokov
Language	English
Published	1969 (McGraw Hill)

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969.

Ada began to materialize in 1959, when Nabokov was flirting with two projects, "The Texture of Time" and "Letters from Terra". In 1965, he began to see a link between the two ideas, finally composing a unified novel from February 1966 to October 1968. The published cumulation would become his longest work. Ada was initially given a mixed reception. But, writing in The New York Times Book Review, noted scholar Alfred Appel called it "a great work of art, a necessary book, radiant and rapturous" and said that it "provides further evidence that he is a peer of Kafka, Proust and Joyce".

According to David Eagleman, Nabokov named the title character in part after his favorite butterfly. An avid collector of butterflies, Nabokov was especially fond of one species with yellow wings and a black body. As a synesthete, he associated colors with each letter; A was connected to yellow, and D to black. Thus he saw a reflection of his favorite butterfly (yellow-black-yellow) in the name Ada. This also makes sense because Ada wants to be a lepidopterist in the book.

"Ada" is also a pun, a homophone, for "Ardor". Marina, Ada's mother, pronounces her name with "long, deep" Russian "A"s, which is how a speaker of non-rhotic English would say the word "Ardor". Her name is also a play on Ad (Ад), Russian for Hell, which serves as a theme throughout the story according to Rita Safariants.

Ada tells the life story of a man named Van Veen, and his lifelong love affair with his sister Ada. They meet when she is eleven (soon to be twelve) and he is fourteen, believing that they are cousins (more precisely: that their fathers are cousins and that their mothers are sisters), and begin a sexual affair. They later discover that Van's father is also Ada's and her mother is also his. The story follows the various interruptions and resumptions of their affair. Both are wealthy, educated, and intelligent. Van goes on to become a world-renowned psychologist, and the book itself takes the form of his memoirs, written when he is in his nineties, punctuated with his own and Ada's marginal notes, and in parts with notes by an unnamed editor, suggesting the manuscript is not complete.