Day 1 Father's Butterflies
Father's Butterflies
by VLADIMIR NABOKOV
DURING my adolescence, the butterfly enthusiast ("le curieux," as the honnêtes gens used to put it in judicious France, "the aurelian," as the poets said in grove-rich England, the "fly doctor," as they wisecracked in advanced Russian circles) who wished to acquire from books a general notion of the fauna of Europe, including Russia, was compelled to scrabble for his crumbs of information in entomological journals in six languages and in multivolume, hard-to-find editions such as the Oberthür books or those of Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich. The absence or utter inadequacy of "references" in the atlases ad usum Delphini, the tedious perusal of the index of names enclosed with an annual volume of a monthly journal, the sheer number of these journals and volumes (in my father's library there were more than a thousand of the latter alone, representing a good hundred journals) -- all this had to be overcome in order to hunt down the necessary reference, if it existed at all. Nonetheless, even in my exceptionally propitious situation things were not easy: Russia, particularly in the north, dwelt in a mist, while the local lists, scattered through the journals, totally haphazard, scanty, and cruelly inaccurate in nomenclature, only maddened me when at last I ferreted them out. My father was the preeminent entomologist of his time, and very well off to boot, but the ordinary amateur, unable to dispatch his scouts throughout Russia, and denied the opportunity -- or not knowing how -- to gain access to specialized collections and libraries (and an accidental boon, the hasty inspection of collections at a lepidopterological society or in the cellar of some museum, does not satisfy the true enthusiast, who needs to have the boon always at hand), had no choice but to hope for a miracle. And that miracle dawned in 1912 with the appearance of my father's four-volume work The Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire.
Although in a hall adjoining the library dark-red cabinets contained my father's supremely rich collections, consisting of specimens complete with thoroughly accurate names, dates, and places of capture, I personally belonged to the category of curieux who, in order to acquaint themselves properly with a butterfly and to visualize it, require three things; its artistic depiction, a compendium of all that has been written about it, and its insertion within the general system of classification. With no words and no art, without a penetrating and synthesizing process of thought, for me a butterfly would remain incomplete. Only one thing could wholly replace these three demands: if I had caught it myself, if the expression of the given specimen's wings corresponded to the individual particulars of a familiar habitat (with its smells, hues, and sounds) where I would have lived through all that impassioned, insane joy of the hunt, when as I climb the rock, my face contorted, gasping, shouting voluptuously senseless words, I do not notice thorn or precipice, and see neither the viper under my feet nor the shepherd, yonder, observing with the irritation of ignorance the spasms of the madman with his green net as he approaches his heretofore undescribed prey. In other words, it was impossible to reconcile the creative contact between me and the countless rarities collected by others and not defined in the journals, or hopelessly buried in them. And, even though, through the glass top and bottom of the ultra-sleek sliding cases of my father's collection (lowering my gaze for hours down endless rows of thickset, small Hesperidae, in various hues of black with specks from hydrochloric acid and checkered fringes, and turning the case upside down to examine pearlescent cabalistic markings -- little kegs, hourglasses, trapezes, on the rowan-tinged or sulphury-grayish undersides of the hind wings), aided by the inscriptions on the labels, I could make a meticulous study of the local mutability of forms, it was only when I found those species and races assembled, researched, and especially, illustrated in the just-published Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire that a fascinating, lifelike portrait would reveal to me the mystery of the prepared lepidopteron: henceforth it was mine.
Interview with Nikolay All, June 1940
In Russian.
I was surprised even by the customs officers on the passenger wharf. [ ... ] When they opened my suitcase and saw two pairs of boxing gloves, two officers put them on and began boxing. The third became interested in my collection of butterflies and even suggested one kind be called "captain." When the boxing and the conversation about butterflies finished, the customs men suggested I close the case and go. Doesn't this show how straightforward and kind Americans are?
[Novoe Russkoe Slovo, June 23, 1940]
From a letter to Mikhail Karpovich, c. mid-June 1940
From New York.
In Russian.
Unpublished.
WARMEST thanks for your very kind offer, I accept with pleasure. If it's absolutely all right by you, we would come at the very beginning of July. [ ... ] I can't think without a quiver -- a sweet, torturing quiver -- that my passion for entomology will also be satisfied in Vermont. I am writing Avinov about some of my scientific findings in this domain.
[Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University]
From a letter to Elizaveta and Marussya Marinel, August 25, 1940
From West Wardsboro, Vermont.
In Russian.
Translated DN.
WE are staying amid marvelous green wilds with the wonderfully kind Karpoviches, where one can go around half-naked, write an English novel, and catch American butterflies (soon I'll have to start using your sweater: fall is near). My position is fatally undecided, so far nothing has worked out, and the thought of winter is rather frightening, but, by comparison, it is a genuine paradise here.
[Selected Letters 1940-1977, 33]
From "Prof. Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World"
Review of Frederick J. E. Woodbridge,
An Essay on Nature (1940).
THAT philosophers are essentially diurnal creatures (no matter how late into the night their inkpots and spectacles glitter) and that space would not be space if color and outline were not primarily perceived are suppositions that transcend the author's "naïve realism" just at the point where he seems to be most securely hugging the coast. But is visibility really as dominant as that in all imaginable knowledge of Nature? Though I personally would be satisfied to spend the whole of eternity gazing at a blue hill or a butterfly, I would feel the poorer if I accepted the idea of there not existing still more vivid means of knowing butterflies and hills.
[New York Sun, December 10, 1940]
From a letter to Edward Weeks, September 19, 1941
From Wellesley, Massachusetts.
IT is pathetically dull to watch the good old eastern combination of butterflies on the college lawns here -- after my Western orgies: rather like a garden in Cambridgeshire after a summer in the mountains of Spain.
[Weeks Collection, University of Texas, Austin]
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