 Brilliant's audio presents the unabridged recording of Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle, by Vladimir Nabokov, performed by Arthur Morey. Arkadeyevich Karenina, transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Limited, 1880. That pronouncement has little, if any, relation to the story to be unfolded now. A family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps, closer to another Tolstoy work, Detsdvo i Otrochesdvo, childhood and fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858. Von's maternal grandmother, Daria Dali Dormanov, was the daughter of Prince Peter Zemsky, governor of Brassdor, an American province in the northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married in 1824 Mary O'Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dali, an only child, was born in Brass, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of 15, General Ivan Dormanov, commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentlemen, with lands in the Severn Tories, Severnia Territorii. That tessellated protectorate still lovingly called Russian Estoti, which commingles granoblastically and organically with Russian Kennedy, otherwise French Estoti, where not only French but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a Halcyon climate under our stars and stripes. Dormanov's favorite domain, however, was Reduga, near the burg of that name, beyond Estoteland proper, in the Atlantic panel of the continent between elegant Kaluga, New Cheshire, USA, and no less elegant Ladoga, Maine, where they had their townhouse and where their three children were born, a son who died young and famous, and a pair of difficult female twins. Dali had inherited her mother's beauty and temper, but also an older ancestral strain of whimsical and not seldom deplorable taste, well reflected for instance in the names she gave her daughters, Aqua and Marina. Why not Tofana? Sample complete. Ready to continue?