there actually
is a heavy, very heavy theme of drugs, narcotics and poisonings in Ada. In fact
both Marina and her daughter are serial poisoners. The family name provides one
clue to this interpretation [see below].
Dear
Carolyn,
I explore these possibilities in my article Yagody
Ady i yady Yagody: Otravleniya u Nabokova i v Sovetskoy Rossii
("Ada's Berries and Yagoda's Poisons: the Poisonings in Nabokov and in
Soviet Russia") available in Russian in Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/sklyarenko3.doc.
At the time when I wrote it, I haven't read Gorky's story O
tarakanakh ("On Cockroaches", 1926). Its hero as a child has cockroaches
stuck in the treacle with which he smears the portraits of the tsars
and ends up being poisoned (with the sweet Turkish delight)
himself.
When he speaks of VN's anagramatic doubles, Stan K.-B.
forgets about Baron Klim Avidov, Marina's former lover who
gives her children the Flavita (=alfavit, Russian for "alphabet") set.
In my opinion, the Flavita chapter (1.36) is central in
ADA, because it hides the clue (klyuch ot kvartiry gde den'gi
lezhat, "the key from the flat where money is stored", as Ostap Bender
would say) to the whole novel. Also, I protest against the notion that
my reading of ADA is a simplistic one. The tricks that my (or rather Nabokov's)
letters of the alphabet perform are as difficult and artistic as
Mascodagama's.
Thanks to Dieter Zimmer for telling the correct number of
words in ADA.
Alexey Sklyarenko