Бабочки Набокова: Неопубликованное
и несобранное. Новые переводы с русского языка Дмитрия Набокова, редакция
и аннотация Брайена Бойда и Роберта Майкла Пайла. Reviews / Обзоры
The Guardian ©
The wings of desire
Saturday March 25, 2000
Jay Parini discovers how much Nabokov's lepidoptery informed
his literature in Nabokov's Butterflies
Nabokov's Butterflies: unpublished and uncollected writings by Vladimir
Nabokov; edited by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle (Allen Lane, £25)
"From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle
of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion," wrote Vladimir
Nabokov. "If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first
thought was for the butterflies it would engender." It was an unusual
way to view the world, and one that not many readers - even those who
adore Nabokov - may have fully appreciated.
In fact, the ferocity of Nabokov's obsession with butterflies has only
just been made clear to general readers with the publication of Nabokov's
Butterflies, a fascinating volume of unpublished and uncorrected writings
on the subject, edited by the Russian author's tireless biographer and
critic Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert in butterflies.
All translations are, as usual, by Nabokov's son Dmitri, who has lavished
time and unusual talent on his father's work over several decades.
More than 700 densely printed pages on this subject may strike even the
most sympathetic reader as overkill. Does anybody really want to read
page after page of Nabokov's highly technical descriptions of various
butterflies? Are these writings "important" to anyone, even
lepidopterists? Is there any connection between Nabokov's passion for
"lepping" and his fiction? I suspect "no" is the correct
answer to all but the final question, which one must answer resoundingly
in the affirmative.
In his shrewd introduction Boyd teases out the connections between the
writer and the lepidopterist. One comes to understand Vladimir Nabokov
as novelist more completely and precisely by understanding that science
gave this canny author "a sense of reality that should not be confused
with modern (or 'postmodern') epistemological nihilism.
"Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids,
or counting scale rows on their wings, he realised that the further we
inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not
know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere convention
but because the world is infinitely detailed, complex, and deceptive,
'an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms'."
Born into a wealthy and aristocratic Russian family just before the turn
of the century, Nabokov caught his first butterfly at the age of seven,
in 1906. His mother showed him how to pin the insect to a board. His father,
too, had been a keen lepidopterist, so the child had obvious models before
him.
But his monomaniacal interest in the subject is nothing short of breathtaking:
Nabokov moved back and forth between literature and lepidoptery for the
rest of his life, at one point spending six years - the happiest of his
life, he claimed - at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where
in 1942 he wrote and published the first of his four major papers, a study
of the genus Neonympha. It was also during this period that he began working
on "Blues", a variety of north American butterfly that became
his speciality and inspired the trip to the American west that provided
background material for his most famous novel, Lolita.
Nabokov's important writings on butterflies are reproduced in this volume,
but in blessedly reduced form, since nobody except a professional lepidopterist
would care to troll such material. Wisely, the editors have blended other
kinds of writing by Nabokov with the scientific prose, beginning with
the luminous meditation on butterflies from the sixth chapter of Speak,
Memory.
These writings - poems, excerpts from his memoirs, letters, diary entries,
criticism and fiction - cover the period from 1941 to 1947, when Nabokov
was most ferociously involved in lepidoptery. His obsessiveness is wonderful
to behold, as when he writes to Edmund Wilson about a lecture trip to
Sweet Briar College in Virginia. "The weather in Virginia was perfectly
dreadful and except for a few Everes comyntas there was nothing on the
wing." Everything, in the end, was butterflies.
Until now, I had not realised the extent to which Nabokov's fiction depended
on his attention to the natural world. There is, for example, an excerpt
here from a story published in 1945 called "Time and Ebb". Somewhat
self-critically, Nabokov wrote that "we" - meaning the people
of the early 40s - "lived in the era of Identification and Tabulation;
saw the personalities of men and things in terms of names and nicknames
and did not believe in the existence of anything that was nameless".
Coming from a trained lepidopterist, this is quietly shocking; one assumes
that the work of "Identification and Tabulation" is the principal
activity of the taxonomist.
But Nabokov's interest in lepidoptery went beyond sorting out and naming
butterflies. He was not a mere tabulator. Indeed, there is something exquisitely
metaphysical, even mystical, about his approach to nature's plenitude
and complexity. He sought to uncover the sense of design that underlies
the details of the physical world, and he delighted in the great cosmic
mystery, the game of hide and seek that God seems to play with human beings.
There was, of course, a pedantic streak in Nabokov. From childhood on,
as Boyd notes, "he preferred the small type to the main text, the
obscure to the obvious, the thrill of finding for himself what was not
common knowledge". His scientific writings of the 40s brim with minutiae,
with countless obscure details lovingly searched out, sorted, underlined
and displayed. A similar temperamental preference seems to underlie his
massive commentary on Pushkin's Onegin, compiled in the 50s. It also informs
novels such as Pale Fire - written in the form of a digressive literary
commentary - and Ada, a late masterpiece in which the author's erudition
and urge for complexity reach spellbinding heights.
Nabokov's Butterflies also contains a detailed, intimate profile of Nabokov
as lepidopterist written by Robert Michael Pyle, who followed close on
the Russian author's heels on one of his famous "lepping" trips.
He concludes that Nabokov knew what "all butterfly folk knew: the
rhapsodic thrall in which one may be held by butterflies and moths".
He notes that two of Nabokov's most vivid fictional creations - Konstantin
Godunov-Cherdynstev in The Gift and Ada Veen in Ada - were "butterfly
folk".
The obsession with butterflies gathers a great deal of Nabokov into one
powerful stream, encompassing work of otherwise incomprehensible variety.
While few readers will want to study the scientific articles reprinted
here, their presence in this striking miscellany operates in subtle ways
to remind us that Nabokov (who referred to himself as VN), was also a
student "of that other VN, Visible Nature". Nabokov offered,
in his magnificent fiction, a complete taxonomy of the human spirit. He
might not have been so meticulous and thorough were it not for the parallel
interest in lepidoptery, so amply on view here.
Jay Parini is the author of five novels, including Benjamin's Crossing,
and of biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. |