Re: VAn & ADA - further speculation & Quaker humor

There are no "real" people in ADA, or in any other book by Nabokov, with the exception, perhaps, of "Speak, Memory"/Drugie Berega. Even the characters in Chapter Four ("The Life of Chernyshevsky") of "The Gift" (the novel that you, Carolyn, stubbornly refuse to read) were more or less invented by VN. Neither is Khrushchyov (to cite another, more familiar to you, example), who toward the end of Kinbote's commentary in "Pale Fire" is made to visit Zembla and deliver a speach ("you call yourselves Zemblans..." as imagined by Kinbote), a real man.

On the other hand, some of Nabokov's characters can be more "real" than the others. Contrary to your suggestion though, Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox turn out to be even less "real" than Van and Ada. While the latter are but characters in Nabokov's dream of Antiterra, both Violet and Mr. Oranger are characters of the last in a series of dreams that Lucette sends to Van and Ada from Terra (I know that you don't accept my theory, but you can't deny that it is logical, fits the facts and explains nearly everything in the novel). Like Eric Veen and his grandfather David van Veen in the floramor chapter, Violet and Oranger are merely a "dream within a dream." Their "reality" has thus a doubly oneiric origin and should be taken in double quotes, so to say (in a certain sense, even Prince Ivan Tyomnosiniy, a fabulous ancestor of Van and Ada mentioned at the beginning of the Family Chronicle, is more "real" than "Mr. and Ms. Ronald Oranger"). Interestingly, while Lucette uses Blok's poem Nochnaia Fialka (literally, "The Night Violet) to create for Van (and Ada) the charming vision of Violet Knox, she seems to resort to certain images from Ibsen's play "The Master Builder" (mentioned at the end of my essay on Blok's dreams in ADA) for creating Mr. Oranger. I hope to speak of this in more detail some other time.

In the meantime, let me say that I expect a little more intelligent feed-back to the expanded version of my essay on Dreams in ADA, which recently appeared on Zembla, than I had received a few moths ago from Carolyn in response to the initial version of the article published in the latest issue of The Nabokovian.