Stalking Nabokov (14 page)

Or, rather, Beckett’s was polar, Nabokov’s tropical. Beckett saw life as a terminal illness and human thought, speech, and action as a babble amid meaninglessness. Nabokov saw life as “a great surprise” (
PF
225) amid possibly greater surprises. Four years after the best friend of his childhood was shot and he was forced to leave forever the country he loved, a year after the father he adored was murdered, he has a character, a man whose young son has recently died, speak for him: “Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar” (
SoVN
45). Nabokov looked at his world tirelessly and at close range, and for all the horrors he could evoke in his darker books, he found it swarming with inexhaustible diversity and delight. Not the least of his delights was Lepidoptera.

In a game that asks us to associate natural kinds and famous people, “butterflies” would yield the answer “Nabokov” as surely as “hemlock” would trigger “Socrates.” But while Socrates did not
choose
to be forever linked with hemlock, Vladimir Nabokov made butterflies his lifelong personal mark. He succeeded more than he could ever have imagined at the time when St. Petersburg’s best portrait photographer came to record him, a boy of eight, surrounded by butterfly books. Although those who know just one fact about Nabokov know him as the author of
Lolita
, the familiar icon of Sue Lyon as Lolita licking her lollipop never graces books about him. But designers who would not dream of picking hemlock for the cover of a new book on Socrates again and again pin butterflies to the lapel of Nabokovian jackets.

Nabokov’s singular attraction to butterflies attracts us as an image and an enigma. Consider this third contrast. In the margins of his manuscripts Pushkin sketched hundreds upon hundreds of human faces in profile, a high proportion of them a stylized and embellished version of his own striking silhouette. Nabokov drew thousands of butterflies for his scientific papers, for his unfinished catalogue of the butterflies of Europe, on the title pages of dedication copies of his novels, and in signing his most playful letters. Pushkin’s case needs no explanation: we can expect poets to be interested in people and a romantic poet to be interested in himself above all. But why should someone with Nabokov’s great gift as a writer be so obsessed with something so peripheral as butterflies are to most readers?

Does his passion for
papillons
indicate that he is insufficiently interested in people? Or should we argue the opposite, that the way he used the butterfly net of his boyhood has no bearing on the way he flourished his pen? After all, Humbert pursued nymphets, not Nymphalids; Luzhin captured chessmen, not Checkerspots; Pnin accumulated sorrows, not Sulphurs. Why did butterflies so fascinate Nabokov, and why should that so fascinate us? He became the world’s most famous lepidopterist, but was he a serious scientist or little more than an enthusiastic collector? Did he leave any legacy in lepidoptery as he did in literature? And are the butterflies and moths in his works no more than a sly authorial signature?

When Nabokov caught his first butterfly in 1906, aged seven, his mother showed him how to spread it. She herself had a passion for collecting mushrooms and came from a family long interested in science. Her mother’s father had been president of the Russian Academy of Medicine and her mother had arranged to have a chemical laboratory built for herself. But it was Nabokov’s father who had been a keen lepidopterist in his youth. A man of exacting scholarly standards, he was one of Russia’s leading criminologists, along with much else (in politics, publishing, public life) that left him little time to wield a net. Nabokov adored both of his parents and the summer estate of Vyra, forty miles south of St. Petersburg, where he caught and collected his first butterflies. His parent’s example and encouragement and the chance to see and savor Vyra in a new way sparked an explosive interest in butterflies.

Other elements in his makeup kept the fire burning. Sharp-eyed, sure of hand and foot, a zealous and accomplished sportsman (soccer, tennis, boxing), he always enjoyed the physical thrill of the butterfly chase. But the intellectual challenge appealed just as much to this precocious child. A mathematical prodigy at five, he lost the capacity for complex computation during a bout of pneumonia before he was eight. As he recovered, his mother surrounded his bed with butterflies and butterfly books. Decades later Nabokov would curiously rework that memory by having Humbert bring Lolita, convalescing from influenza, a bouquet of wild flowers collected from a mountain pass and a book called
Flowers of the Rockies
.
That
child, for good reason, is unresponsive to
that
“parent” and, in fact, escapes before Humbert can see her again. But Nabokov thrived on
his
mother’s love, “and the longing to describe a new species completely replaced that of discovering a new prime number” (
SM
123).

From this point on, literature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Nabokov’s life.

As a boy of nine, still enjoying Wild West games, Nabokov wrote to the great lepidopterist Nikolay Kuznetsov proposing a new subspecies name for a poplar admiral he had found (Kuznetsov scribbled back a two-word reply, the existing subspecies name and the name of its author). A year or two later Nabokov would translate Mayne Reid’s Western novel
The Headless Horseman
into French verse. In his twin passions exhilaration merged with ambition and determination. Even before he read and reread all of Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Shakespeare in the original languages as he entered his teens, he had mastered the known butterflies of Europe and “dreamed his way through” the volumes so far published of Adalbert Seitz’s
Die Groß-Schmetterlinge der Erde
.
²

“Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration,” Nabokov writes in his autobiography (
SM
126). His lepidopterological ambitions seemed more haunting than his literary aspirations because they took so much longer to realize. At twelve or so, he sent off the description of a “new” moth to the British journal
The Entomologist
, whose editor did not recognize the species but found out it had already been described by Kretschmar. Twenty years later Nabokov had still discovered no new species but had become the leading writer of the Russian emigration and could recoup his adolescent disappointment by assigning Kretschmar’s name to the unfortunate hero of
Camera Obscura
, unwittingly preempted in his love for Magda by another, slyer lover.

At fourteen Nabokov had prepared and distributed to friends and family his first “publication,” a romantic poem of which he could later recall only one line, evoking a hawkmoth hovering over a rhododendron. Real publication soon followed. Just turned seventeen, he had a poem accepted by Russia’s most august literary journal,
Vestnik Europy
. That same summer, 1916, he had his first book of poems privately printed, and after inheriting his uncle’s considerable estate, he began to contemplate seriously an expedition to Central Asia, perhaps with the great explorer and naturalist Grigory Grum-Grzhimaylo.

But when the Bolshevik coup came, he had to flee Petrograd. He could take with him his manuscript albums of verse and the slim volumes of his favorite poets, but he had to leave his butterfly collection behind. In the Crimea with his family, his rhymes nostalgically mourned Vyra and northern Russia even as he exulted in the opportunity to explore the almost Asiatic fauna in the cliffs above Yalta and on the Crimean plateau.

In the spring of 1919 the advance of the Bolshevik army forced the Nabokovs to abandon Yalta, and another butterfly collection, and head for England. In his first term at Cambridge, Nabokov compiled a record of his butterfly collecting in the Crimea that “at last”—he was all of twenty—earned him his first publication in
The Entomologist
. Like the literary work of his Cambridge years—a Russian essay on Rupert Brooke, a translation of a difficult Romain Rolland novel from French into Russian, and, day after day, his own Russian poems—the butterfly article bore no relation to his nominal course of study.

Installed from 1922 in Berlin, by then the center of the Russian emigration, Nabokov soon evolved from imitative poetry to increasingly original prose. Except during a stint as a farm worker at Solliès-Pont near Toulon in the summer of 1923, he had few chances to collect butterflies: writing and tutoring earned him enough only to keep him in Berlin, not to pay for travel further afield. But imagination offered a passe-partout. At the end of 1924 his first story about Lepidoptera, “Christmas,” drew on his early and very late memories of northern Russia: the collection he had been forced to forsake at Vyra and the one exception, a hawkmoth pupa that he had kept in a box for seven years and that had hatched in the overheated railway carriage taking him from Petrograd down to Simferopol. Nabokov knew he could not overload and imbalance his fiction with entomological detail, but in “Christmas” a moth that unexpectedly emerges crowns a very human story: A father, presumably a widower, cannot cope with the death of his only child, a son, the little lepidopterist who yearned to see that moth emerge. Just as the father decides life is no longer worth living, the glorious atlas moth cracks open its cocoon, and its huge wings dilate in a sign of new hope, perhaps even of resurrection.

But neither literature nor life offered Nabokov other significant outlets for his love of Lepidoptera until, at the end of 1928, German translation and serial rights for his second novel,
King, Queen, Knave
, paid well enough for him to take his wife, Véra, on their first butterfly expedition together, in the eastern Pyrenees, from February to April 1929 at Le Boulou then until June at Saurat.

As would often happen in later years, in seeking butterflies Nabokov also found inspiration. While collecting above Le Boulou, the idea for his first masterpiece,
The Defense
, suddenly sprang to mind.
³
Able to write in the late afternoons and evenings or on wet or dull mornings, he finished the novel by August. Back in Berlin, he checked his new catches against the records of the Entomological Institute at Dahlem in preparation for a report of his finds that he published in
The Entomologist
. In the course of this research he came across a detail that evolved into a key image in his next novella,
The Eye
, and may even, it has been suggested, have provided the first spark for the whole story.
⁴

Certainly the four-month expedition in the south of France seems to have awakened Nabokov’s sense that his science could play a larger part in his art. As soon as he had completed
The Eye
, in the spring of 1930, he started “The Aurelian,” a story about the owner of a Berlin butterfly store, who, after selling his prize collection, hopes to escape his frustrating domestic life and fulfill his one dream of a collecting expedition to Spain and beyond.

By the end of 1932 Nabokov prepared to climb new heights in his art as he moved toward
The Gift
. In this new novel, far longer, denser, and wider in scope than anything else he had yet written, he would fuse his passions for literature and Lepidoptera, art and nature, country and family, life and art; ten years after the assassination of his father, he now felt ready to commemorate him in print. The novel is the story of the development of a young Russian émigré writer in Berlin, Fyodor Godunov, an ardent lepidopterist who as a youth dearly longed to join his father on the last of his entomological expeditions into Central Asia, from which Count Godunov never returned. In real life, Nabokov’s father had been an amateur lepidopterist and a celebrated statesman; Fyodor’s father has no time for politics but is renowned as a scientist. Yet to Elena Nabokov he seemed an exact portrait of her husband. Fyodor tries to write a biography of his father, and in recounting the expeditions gradually includes himself in the party, at last even taking over his father’s voice.

For Fyodor, as for Nabokov, these imagined expeditions are both a wishfulfillment compensation for a dream that history had forever quashed and a product of painstaking research in the writings of actual Russian naturalists like Grum-Grzhimaylo and Nikolay Przhevalsky. Although he had been producing novels at a rate of one a year, Nabokov began research for
The Gift
early in 1933 and did not complete the book until five years later.

At the beginning of 1937, with much of its final draft still to write, he fled Germany for France. Living in Moulinet, high in the Maritime Alps, in the summer of 1938, he caught a butterfly that seemed the long-delayed realization of his thirty-year-old dream: a new species. Three years later he would be able to describe and assign a species name to his catch—which would eventually prove, as he himself suspected could be the case, to be a hybrid rather than a new species.

In the meantime, like his collecting in the Pyrenees in 1929, the new find intensified further his desire to explore entomology within his art. Sometime in 1939, it seems, Nabokov wrote a long appendix to
The Gift
. Here Fyodor recounts his own early love for Lepidoptera and expounds his father’s incisive but cryptic ideas on speciation and evolution, supposedly noted down in outline on the eve of his departure for his final expedition. This appendix, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov and published for the first time in any language in
Nabokov’s Butterflies
, is, with the exception of
The Enchanter—
also a fifty-page typescript, also written in 1939, and also left unpublished in the author’s lifetime—the longest piece of Nabokov fiction to appear between his death and the publication of
The Original of Laura
in 2009. Here Nabokov’s art, science, and metaphysics meet more unguardedly than anywhere else. Perhaps he did not publish it at the time because his other plans for continuing or expanding
The Gift
were never realized after the outbreak of the Second World War and his shift from Europe to America and from Russian to English. But perhaps, too, he had misgivings about mixing hard science with the kind of free speculation he had allowed himself from behind the mask of the Godunovs, father and son.