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

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only meet again after twelve years have elapsed, but
somehow, it seems, these years are like no time at
all: Ada has changed, and yet she is "more Ada than
ever" (511), and their ten secret meetings bring to
them "the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old
love" (521). Van and Ada have to bear yet another
long separation. Ada's husband being taken ill, she
refuses to leave him and nurses him until his death
in 1922. It is only then that the lovers are reunited,
this time to stay together.
Ada herself warns Van before she arrives that she
has "changed considerably', in contour as well as in
color" (556), and Van finds this confirmed: "Nothing
remained of her gangling grace, and the new mellowness,
...,
had an irritating dignified air of obstacle and
defense" (556). Van meditates that
Had they lived together these seventeen
wretched years, they would have been
spared the shock and the humiliation;
their aging would have been a gradual
adjustment, as imperceptible as Time
itself (558).
However, not the differences matter but the feature
which the periods have in common: Van's and Ada's
undiminished love for each other, which, even after
the initial shock accompanying their last reunion,
turns their life together into "a steady hum of happi-
ness" (574). Each time, too, it is indicated how Past
and Present blend and merge in Van's mind. He experi-
ences a "sensation of fate's rerun" in the summer of
1888; Ada Is advance to him through a crowd of stran-
gers in 1905 "consumed in reverse all the years of
their separation... " (510); and in 1922, it is her