Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle was published by McGraw-Hill, New York, on 5 May 1969, in a first printing of approximately 50,000 copies priced at $7.95. Nabokov considered it his masterpiece — a judgment shared by some scholars and fiercely contested by others. The novel is long (nearly 600 pages), dense, multilingual (passages in English, French, and Russian), and defiantly difficult. It was a bestseller on publication, driven partly by the still-potent fame of Lolita and partly by the novel’s sexual content, which is more explicit than anything else in Nabokov’s work.
The Novel
Van Veen and Ada Veen are ostensibly cousins but actually siblings — both the children of Demon Veen and Marina Durmanov, who concealed their affair by pretending Ada was the daughter of Marina’s husband, Dan Veen. The children meet at Ardis Hall, a country estate in Ladore (an alternate-history version of America), during the summers of 1884 and 1888. They are twelve and fourteen at their first meeting; they fall in love; they become lovers.
The novel follows their affair across nearly a century — separations, reunions, betrayals, reconciliations — narrated by Van in extreme old age, with Ada’s marginal corrections and footnotes. The setting is “Antiterra,” an Earth where history has diverged: Russia has colonised North America, electricity is banned (replaced by “hydro-dynamics”), and the nineteenth century persists into the twentieth. This alternate world allows Nabokov to create a dreamlike, timeless setting for the love story while embedding puzzles, anagrams, and literary allusions on every page.
The Controversy
Ada divides Nabokov’s readers more sharply than any other work. Its champions — including the Nabokov scholars Brian Boyd and Michael Wood — argue that it is the summa of his art: a novel that contains everything he knew about love, time, memory, and language, organised with a structural intricacy that rewards unlimited rereading. Its detractors — including several prominent critics — argue that it is self-indulgent, overlong, and morally complacent: the incest is never adequately confronted, the prose is often precious, and the puzzles obscure rather than illuminate.
The novel’s treatment of Ada and Van’s love as transcendent — unclouded by guilt, presented as the supreme human achievement — has troubled readers who feel that Nabokov, usually the most morally subtle of writers, here fails to interrogate his protagonists’ selfishness. Van and Ada destroy several lives (including that of their half-sister Lucette, who drowns herself); the novel treats these casualties as unfortunate but ultimately irrelevant to the central love story.
Collecting Ada
First edition (1969, McGraw-Hill): Approximately 50,000 copies, $7.95.
Identification points:
- McGraw-Hill imprint
- First printing stated
- Green cloth binding
- Dust jacket with butterfly design
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $400–$1,200
- Signed first edition: $3,000–$10,000+
- Without jacket: $50–$150
Value trajectory: Moderate demand. The large first printing keeps values accessible, but signed copies command strong premiums. Nabokov died in 1977, and his signature is always valuable. The novel’s divisive reputation means it appeals to Nabokov specialists rather than to the broader literary market. Scholars who consider it the masterpiece drive demand at the high end.
Nabokov’s Longest Dream
Whether Ada is a triumph or a failure, it is undeniably a unique literary object — there is nothing else like it. The novel’s depiction of erotic love as a function of memory and language, its playful destruction of the boundary between fiction and criticism (Van is writing a philosophical treatise on time even as he narrates his love story), and its sheer linguistic virtuosity place it in a category of one. It is the kind of book that exists to be argued about, and the argument shows no sign of ending.