I think this is probably a pretty healthy way of looking at Nabokov's attitudes. On his view of relativity I just this second rereading Ada came across this quote in part 4, The Texture of Time: "The texture of Space is not that of Time, and the pie-bald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg." P. 430 of American Library version, which goes with what you said, though it seems like in the several readings of this section and a lot of thinking on my part, I come to the conclusion N. isn't talking about the texture of Time at all (the silences between metronymic ticks escapes my understanding), but merely the "style" of memory, which one might liken to looking at pictures from any given period, say the sepia of photos from the twenties, the stark primaries and washed out grays of fifties photos, the orangey quality of seventies polaroids, in its turn an analogy of
time perecieved in retrospect, which is concrete but understood only in subjectively structured terms; I don't think he's dealing with physics excepting in the most glancing way, almost as a feint or a diversionary tactic, I think because he thought physics was really just a conceit, in my opinion.
Stephen Blackwell <sblackwe@UTK.EDU> wrote: Just a side note to the discussion of Nabokov's attitudes towards relativity (and quantum theory, and subatomic theory): These topics were subject of wide and passionate international discussion throughout the '20s and '30s (as were Darwinism and Freudianism), and Nabokov's fairly extensive fictional engagement with them demonstrates their importance to him as emerging, even revolutionary ideas in the history of science. This engagement may begin as early as Mary, which begins in the
darkness of a disabled elevator (elevators were key examples from Einstein's popular exposition of his General Relativity, as Marina Grishakova notes in her book). While working on Ada, Nabokov read many treatments of relativity, and judging from his note-card responses, he was philosophically disturbed by the idea of a four-dimensional space-time continuum, believing that time had distinct ontological status. Already in "Ultima Thule" (1939) and in lectures on theater shortly after, he had begun to explore the idea that the mathematics of relativity might be more self-referential than descriptive of reality. In this surmise, he was echoing, perhaps by chance, the thoughts of the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, who helped confirm Einstein's theory (by photographing the effect of the sun's gravity on light) and who wrote several books of popular physics and philosophy in the '20s and '30s (and whose posthumous, theoretical magnum opus
Fundamental Theory made it onto Nabokov's reading list in the 1960s). The key, as I see it, is that Nabokov felt that all great theories are destined to be supplanted by greater ones (see "Ultima Thule"*), and I think he was bending his mind toward imagining where, and how, the next revolutions in science might occur.
I have a chapter on this topic in my book project on Nabokov's scientific interests, which I hope will be published within the next year.
Stephen Blackwell
* “ ‘ When a hypothesis enters a scientist’s mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. Its plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults. I believe the whole of science consists of such exiled or retired ideas: and yet at one time each of them boasted high rank; now only a name or a pension is left.’”
(Collected Stories, 514)
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