Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1969. Nabokov's longest and perhaps most ambitious novel, Ada is, in part, his homage to the nineteenth-century Russian novel, notably Tolstoy's Anna Karenina which it most obviously, and parodically, echoes. Though it has an ostensibly historical setting, the novel marks the beginning of Nabokov's ‘flirtation’ with the resources of science fiction: the Antiterra of Ada is an ‘alternative world’ that re-imagines pre-revolutionary Russia without invoking precise historical analogies. Ada has been seen as Nabokov's Finnegans Wake for its multicultural, multilingual allusiveness. Brian Boyd has written a full-length study, Nabokov's ‘Ada’: The Place of Consciousness (1985).