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

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ernized barracks for misfits and their young" (341).
Van, apparently, has not written his novel without a
very distinct aim in mind:
the
... purpose of the novel was to suggest
that Terra cheated, that all was not paradise
there, that perhaps in some ways human minds
and human flesh underwent on that sibling
planet worse torments than on our much maligned
Demonia (341).
A number of clues suggest what is later explicitly
confirmed, namely that Terra is not only "a distortive
glass of our distorted glebe" (18) ("glebe" referring
to Antiterra) but that the two worlds are indeed
identical. The first clear indication of this is sup-
plied by some details in Van's notes on Terra: "...
proper names often came out garbled, a chaotic cal-
endar messed up the order of events but, on the whole,
the colored dots did form a geomantic picture of
sorts" (340). This can equally be applied to Antiterra
whose peculiar calendar was mentioned above, whose
geography is somewhat haphazard, and where there 'are
place names like Le Bras d'Or, Acapulcovo, Goluba
University, and Scoto Scandinavia.
The movie based on Letters from Terra is produced
in 1940 (Antiterra time), its action takes place in
1940 by the Terranian calendar, which corresponds to
1890 on Antiterra. But although this difference in
dates is meant to support the fiction that "... our
annals lagged by about half a century behind Terra's
along the bridges of time... " (340-341), the reaction
of the public to the film shows that they identify
the fictional world of the film with their own: