VAMBA’S NOVEL “THE PRINCE AND HIS ANTS” IN A LITERARY CONTEXT

Abstract

This article deals with the novel “The Prince and his Ants” (1893) by Luigi Bertelli (1860–1920), who wrote under the pseudonym of Vamba, who was one of the founders of classical Italian children’s literature, and whose work is little known in Russia. The plot about the adventures of a lazy boy turned into an ant is compared with other books about insects. The pretexts of the novel are the works of Alfred Brehm, Jean Henri Fabre, Frances Hubert, Carlo Emery, popular science articles in Italian children’s magazines, the novel “The Adventures of a Cricket” (1877) by Ernest Candez. Traditionally ants were portrayed either sympathetically or antipathically in the role of social and moral allegories (Bible, Virgil, Ovid, Aesop and other fabulists, Fransis Bacon, and others). Vamba’s innovation is that the educational, instructive and entertaining principles are inseparable from each other and are of equal importance. Although there is no direct evidence of the acquaintance of Russian writers with Vamba’s novel, a comparison of the texts suggests that this is one of the possible pretexts of famous children’s books about insects: “The Adventure of an little Ant” (1935) by Vitaly Bianki, “The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Valya” (1937) Jan Larri and “Barankin, be a (hu)man” (1962) Valery Medvedev. While differing in their views on the place of man among other animals, these texts are typologically
close to Vamba’s creative principles.

Keywords: Vamba, literature for children, Vitaly Bianki, Jan Larri, Valery
Medvedev, animal fiction