Vladimir Nabokov

RE: Continuation of L-Serve discussion of VN's Aunt Preskovia

By MARYROSS, 5 March, 2025

 

This post is a continuation of responses to David Potter’s post on the List-Serve 03/03/25, re: Nabokov’s Aunt Preskovia (Pauline Tarkovsky), who was a psychiatrist and wrote a book on “Women Who Kill” (now available in English. Nabokov writes in SM her curious final words:  “That’s interesting. Now I understand. Everything is water, vsyo—voda.”

 

This makes me wonder if these remarkable words were the impetus ADA’s theme of a world technology based on water, instead of electricity.

 

I am not well-read in regards to ADA, having only slogged through it once. I have not come across many articles on it, and do not know what the excepted, or controversial wisdom is on the water theme, but  probably no one has suggested Jung, so here are my thoughts on the subject:

 

The water-based technology supplanting electricity seems metaphysical/psychological.  There is a kind of feminine/masculine association, heart/head, depth/height duality. The L[ectron] -disaster seems to have been the hubristic result of the over-intellectual scientific technology such as the atom bomb on Terra. Nabokov associates electricity with life-force and consciousness (light), like in the PF Shade poem “Electricity.”.

 

Psychologically, water has to do with emotions and the unconscious,i.e. the “depths.”  Except for Ada, who has a very masculine intellect, the women in ADA, Aqua and Marina, and Lucette are associated with water. Aqua's insanity is an example of too much anima – feminine emotion and intuition,; Marina is an example of a kind of “typical feminine” triteness.  Lucette, whose name suggests "light" (and therefore electricity) is taken down to the depths by her emotion (water). 

 

Just speculation here, but perhaps Aunt Pasha, who was clearly an intellectual, not sexual, woman had her death epiphany by a recognition of her feminine aspect.

 

As it happens, I just got a daily Jungian quote from a site I subscribe to, and it has to do with water and the feminine! Very interesting, and, I think, pertinent:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQZTVrVQwZTJhLkNdrNVpvKTGbh

 

 

In addition, as I was writing “L[ectron] -disaster,” I almost wrote “L-ectra” and that lit up an idea that ADA is the ORESTEIA!  turned on its head, of course.  Nabokov suggests that it is unhappy families who are alike. Except that ADA ends as a happy story of love and long life.

 

The unhappy family (as noted in Ada’s opening line!), the secret parentage, the adultery, incestuous love, suicide, the brother/sister motif. It fits.

Let me know if I am going over previously worn paths. 

Mary

MARYROSS

1 week ago

This has spurred me (at last) to look more into ADA. So far, I have found very little written about ADA, except for an excellent thesis by David Potter! (https://www.academia.edu/59984087/Ardor_or_Ada_Authority_Artifice_and_Ambivalence_in_Nabokov_s_Ada_or_Ardor). He connects Aunt Pasha's dying words to the water theme:

 

Of Ada, Nabokov said: “my purpose is to have […] metaphors breed. To form a story of their own, gradually, and then again to fall apart”. 169 In one way or another, everything flows [vse-voda] to and from Lucette and Aqua’s deaths. In a sense, Ada takes Aunt Pasha’s dying words, vsyo-voda [“everything [is] water”], 170 and develops their premise into Antiterra’s otherworldly aquatic currents. Nabokov’s symbolic linkage of water and mortality clashes, by design, with Van’s “rather dry, though serious and well-meant, essay on time”, forming “a story of their own” 171 that undermines his haughty rejection of death. Eventually sharing Aqua’s “morbid sensitivity” to water and the messages it carries, Van is able to pick up signs from Lucette from her beyond, often recording them in his memoir without even realising it (like the narrator of “The Vane Sisters”).

This is very much in line with my thoughts. Electricity is associated with masculine intellect, whereas water is associated with feminine intuition. As time goes on, Van finds himself becoming more intuitive (sensitive) like his "real," – not "birth" – mother, Aqua.

 

MARYROSS

2 days ago

Circling back to ADA and Jung…

 

In the first post of this thread I mentioned Jung’s archetypal ideas about the feminine symbolism of water. At the time it was not my intention to assert that Nabokov was directly referencing Jung (as I have asserted in regards to PF) since I was not familiar enough with ADA, and perhaps VN  intended this differently.

However, I have just found out that it was not Freud, but Jung, who coined and developed the “Electra Complex”  as the female version of Freud’s “Oedipus Complex.” Freud did not accept Jung’s theory.

If I am correct in seeing Aeschylus’ Oresteia as the ur-family chronicle behind ADA, this is intriguing, at least. The Greek word “elektra” means “amber.” Lucette is described as having “reddish-blond hair” [36], and Van feels “the fire of Lucette’s amber runs through…” [419].  Lucette, then, through her looks, her spirit, and the first letter of her name, is associated with Elektra, electricity, and presumably, the “L”-disaster.

Further, Jung developed his theories through studying his patients in schizophrenic wards; Freud only worked with “neurotics.” Van Veen becomes a psychiatrist and studies his schizophrenic patients for his theories on time. Jung is well-known for his theories on time, and “synchronicity” - a word he coined for a-causal relationships. Aqua would have been a great patient for Jung; he was also interested in the highly sensitive subjective states of his patients, which seemed to be behind clairvoyant individuals. Like Van with Aqua, he began to see in them his own sensitivities and was remarkably psychic.

Jung developed his theory of “Individuation” (psychic wholeness) through studying alchemy as spiritual transcendence. The main process of spiritual alchemy was the combining of opposites to effect this transmutation. The alchemists referred to this as the “King & Queen,” the “Brother and Sister,” or the “Hermaphrodite.”

Pale Fire also has a motif of opposites, and spiritual search. Kinbote, however, despite going through a classic “Hero’s Journey” of “individuation,” in the end fails to come to terms with his anima, Sybil. Sybil is the archetype of the Great Mother. They constitute the “King & Queen” of PF’s alchemy.

On the other hand, ADA is the tragic “family chronicle” turned on its head (Voltemand). Incest can be love; Hell can be ardor. In the end, Van and Ada, through their long ordeal with love morph into each other –  the hermaphrodite, “Vaniada.” They have achieved the goal of individuation.

MARYROSS

1 day 2 hours ago

Alexey-

I have asked you before to keep your comments pertinent to the post. If you disagree with what I have posted, then please be specific. If you want to mock me personally, please do not.

i.e. Answer any of the statements below:

 

>Are electricity v water NOT a central theme of ADA?

>Is "elektra" NOT the etymology of "electric"?

>Does "elektra" NOT mean "amber"?

>Is amber NOT "reddish-yellow"

>Does Van Veen NOTrefer to Lucette as "amber running through" and her hair "reddish-yellow"?

>Does an electric current NOT "run through" a conductive material - e.g. nerves?

>Was Van NOT "excited" by Lucette's proximity?

>Does the "L" in "L-disaster" not mean "el-ectricity"?

>Is there NOT a trilogy by Aeschylus about Elektra and her brother, Orestes?

>Is the Oresteia NOT a tragedy and a family chronicle, and the opposite to ADA's happy ending?

>Did the psychiatrist Jung NOT coin and develop the psychological term "The Electra Complex"?

>Was Van Veen NOT a psychiatrist?

>Are Jung's theories on synchronicity NOT the same or similar to Jung's?

>Is psychology NOT a persistent motif in Nabokov's oeuvre?

 

If there is some other issue which is NOT personal, I would be interested in your reply.

Mary

 

Смеяться, право, не грешно

Над всем, что кажется смешно.

It's not a sin, really, to laugh

at everything that seems funny. 

(Karamzin)

Sorry, Mary, I simply cannot take your arguments seriously. Your un-Nabokovian (and therefore fundamentally wrong and counter-productive) approach to Pale Fire and Ada reminds me of the poet Max Mispel (the author of a review of Van's novel Letters from Terra). Also, “the conceit of explicating Nabokov without knowing Russian is tantamount to studying Van Gogh without knowing yellow, orange, and blue” (from Charles Kinbote's novel Silvery Light).

MARYROSS

54 min 30 sec ago

Agumentum ad hominem. Reductio ad absurdum. 

If you can't say something substantive, or nice, then say nothing at all.