CK: Although as Jansy well knows, Ada is my least favorite VN
novel, now that my name has come up, I may as well follow it by sticking my own
nose in and ask the as yet unasked question: why does Ada put those larvae
(which larvae, by the way - - do we know?) in with Krolik's body? Any theories
(I have one of my own, of course).
Dear Carolyn,
First of all, not "larvae," but pupae (a
different stage in the metamorphosis of insects):
"after Dr Krolik died (in 1886) of a heart attack
in his garden, she [Ada] had placed all her live pupae in his open coffin where
he lay, she said, as plump and pink as in vivo."
(1.35).
I wouldn't build a theory on this, because
elsewhere Ada gives a different version of the end of her childhood
passion for "everything that crawls:"
"What had she actually done with the poor worms,
after Krolik's untimely end?
'Oh, set them free' (big vague gesture), 'turned
them out, put them back onto suitable plants, buried them in the pupal state,
told them to run along, while the birds are not looking - or, alas, feigning not
to be looking..." (1.31).
While
we are here, IN
VIVO
+ STARINE = IN VINO VERITAS
(starine is prepositional case of
starina, Russian for "old days, ancientry." Cf. Tatiana's words to her
nurse in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, chapter three, XVII, 3-4: Мне скучно,
/ Поговорим о старине, "I'm dull. / Let's talk about old days", or the author's declaration a little later in the same
chapter, XXVIII, 14: я верен буду старине, "I shall be true to ancientry." In vino
veritas is a Latin proverb, "in vine is truth")
In Blok's Incognita (the poem directly alluded to in
Ada: 3.3) there are lines:
И пьяницы с глазами кроликов
In vino veritas кричат.
And drunks with the eyes of rabbits
cry out: "In vino veritas!"
Alexey Sklyarenko