The reference in the List to a "larvorium" is
correct for Pale Fire judging from Shade's lines " IPH/ was a larvorium and a
violet".)
In Ada comes the
expected "a" indicated by B.Boyd*: "I’m going to relent and show you the real marvel of Ardis
Manor; my larvarium, it’s in the room next to mine’ (which he never saw, never —
how odd, come to think of it!)." Later: "At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before
leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada’s larvarium."
It is worth revisiting the Proustian
sex-life of entomology: "A
freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen was fanning its lemon and amber-brown
wings...the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him, into an elephantoid
mummy with a comically encased trunk of the guermantoid
type"
A link to "Pale Fire" and its Institute named IPH thru
this "larvorium" with an "o" ..."my dream
is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and violets ... I
would have eggs or larvae rushed to me here by plane from allover North America,
with their foodplants... a Pale Violet from Montana..., and a rare white
violet from a secret marsh near an unnamed lake on an arctic mountain where
Krolik’s Lesser Fritillary flies."
with its interesting connection bt. larvae,
nymphs to "Lolita", thru "Carmen" and pedophile(?) Crawly:
"Dr Krolik received from
Andalusia and kindly gave me five young larvae
of the newly described very local Carmen Tortoiseshell. They are delightful
creatures, of a beautiful jade nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only
on a semi-extinct species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also
obtained for me)."
There's also a passage through Proust
("Swann" and la Bibliotheque Rose) iterated in "cattleya" (Proust used
the euphemism (?) "catleia" to refer to the act of making love...)
with an agressively erected hyacinth head of a stiff oedipal Sphinx:
(At ten
or earlier the child had read — as Van had — Les Malheurs de Swann, as
the next sample reveals)...‘I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby
("There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such revolting
pets...," "Normal young ladies should loathe snakes and worms," et cetera)
-- if I could persuade her to overcome her old-fashioned squeamishness and
place simultaneously on palm and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy
enough!) the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur
Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques,
rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff "Sphinxian"
attitude.’
...............................................................
* B.Boyd: Sorry to be a party-pooper,
but we know what Nabokov's preferred English dictionary was..."Larvarium" it
defines as "A box or cage for the rearing of insect larvae." Query to
Boyd: Is "larvorium", in Shade's poem, a
misprint???????