From: Vladimir Nabokov Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of Donald B. Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 8:14 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: Fwd: Two notes on ADA


Dear List,

1) Bertrand Russell quotes Thomas Aquinas (and his SUMMA CONTRA GENTILES) as a remarkable example of attempting to rationalize moral precepts. Thus, incest should be forbidden because it would complicate family life. There is a very curious argument against brother-sister incest, which I thought would be of some interest to ADA connoiseurs: that if the love of husband and wife were combined with that of brother and sister, mutual attraction would be so strong as to cause unduly frequent intercourse.

2) Brian Boyd notes that Ada is a character in Dickens's BLEAK HOUSE (which was part of the course of European literature VN taught at Cornell and Harvard). The part-time narrator of the novel, Esther Summerson, addresses Ada as her "pet", "my precious pet" (I have in mind the sentence quoted in VN's lectures, p. 121, in the HBJ edition). Now, in ADA Van and Ada have dubbed Lucette pet, which for them is a French word (fart, an emission of wind from the anus), "it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882" (Part 2, Ch. 8). Perhaps it may serve as another link between the novels. On the whole, I would suggest that ADA owes a great deal to VN's lectures on Russian and European literature. I offer this as a tentative remark, since I haven't read BLEAK HOUSE yet.

Sergey Karpukhin

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