The picnic celebrates Ada’s sexual awakening on her twelfth birthday. * It’s a picnic during which she initiates a life-long incestuous relationship with her older brother Van Veen.
As a sign of her age, Ada wears a long but airy and ample black skirt with red poppies or peonies, and a short-sleeved white, black-striped jersey. Provocatively she doesn’t wear underclothes, a convenience, so the narrator tells us so that she can hide in the bushes and pee.
Family and guests arrive in a charabanc, caléches, red motorcar, and bicycles to a picnic site in an old pine forest. Servants serve food Sèvres (and probably sterling flatware) from baskets filled with crustless sandwiches, roasted turkey, Russian black bread, Gray Bead Beluga caviar (the most expensive), candied violets, raspberry tarts, white and ruby port, watered claret for the children, and cold sweet tea. It’s unclear if the meal is served at tables or on rugs, though chairs are present.
Ada dances to a tune on a music box for entertainment, and Van walks on his hands.
Ada sits on Van’s hard lap on the ride home, and he can scarcely keep from having an orgasm. That is remedied not long after the picnic, and four years later, they are long-experienced lovers at Ada’s grand birth picnic. No longer walking on his hands, Van Veen takes from the birthday picnic to make love. The narrator explains, “While the rustic feast was being prepared and distributed among the sun gouts of the traditional pine glade, the wild girl and her lover slipped away for a few moments of ravenous ardor in a ferny ravine where a rill dipped from ledge to ledge between tall burnberry bushes.” The amorous couple cannot care less that a nearby chatty group of elderly townsmen eats calzones of cheese, buns, salami, sardines, and drinking Chianti on a lunch break.
*It’s also Ada’s governess Ida Larivière’s forty-second jour de fête.
Featured Image: A lolita, but not as Nabokov describes it.
See Vladimir Nabokov. Ada or Ardor, a Family Chronicle. New York: McGraw Hill, 1969; http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/index.htm