Ada and Van Vin, the main characters of the novel Ada or Ardor, are representation of a two-syllable ideal version of Vladimir Nabokov. Konchayev, the writer’s ideal double, his alter-ego from the future, appears in Gift. Nabokov’s novels are imbued with various prisms of duality.
I-doubles appear in various forms, such as shadows, reflections, ghosts, demons, etc. I-doubles are created by decomposition, and dividing of one and the same individual psyche. You-doubles are similar identities who change roles and represent separate beings. There are two basic groups of doubles, “I-type” and “You-type” ones. Indeed, Nabokov's critics, biographers, and disciples may find it almost impossible to represent his life and art without merely repeating his own representations of himself.
Inevitably, each of these books became, like Speak, Memory before it, another performance of Nabokov's self-reflexive game. The ensuing quarrel between subject and biographer eventually inspired three other parodic texts: Nabokov's novel, Look at the Harlequins! Field's biography, Nabokov: His Life in Part, and Roberta Smoodin's novel, Inventing Ivanov.
Fifty years after Nabokov invented this game, he met his first real-life biographer, Andrew Field, who resisted playing it by Nabokov's rules. Indeed, he went on to play the game of narrating his own biography throughout his memoir, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, and in his fiction. Staging his own biography in this fashion allowed Nabokov to resolve the inherent conflict between his life and his art. In this self-conscious "game," he orchestrated changes in grammatical person, gender, and tense in order to transform his present experiences into a third-person past, as remembered by a female friend in an imaginary future. In 1918, in the Crimea, the adolescent Vladimir Nabokov devised a new pastime: "parodizing a biographic approach" by narrating his own actions aloud.
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