Subject
BIRTHDAY: Ghosts Linger (a special present from D. Barton
Johnson)
Johnson)
From
Date
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[EDNOTE. D. Barton Johnson, Nabokov scholar extraordinaire and founder
of NABOKV-L, sends this essay in honor of VN's birthday. Don also
reports that his book on Nabokov, Worlds in Regression, is coming out in
a new Russian edition from Symposium.
Neither Don nor I were able in insert the accompanying illustration into
his text, so please click on the attachment to get the full effect! --
SES.]
Ghosts Linger: Nabokov’s Vanessa io
Some years ago I had the privilege of teaching a summer course in the
Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg. The Museum is located at 47 Bolshaya
Morskaya in the old Nabokov family home so lovingly described in the
author’s memoir Speak, Memory. The following tale draws on that
experience.
For a person who has spent a good part of his life with Nabokov's work
at hand, working there, lecturing everyday in the old library room, was
an eerie experience. It was over eighty years since Nabokov had lingered
there but his presence was strong. Oddly so. On one of the first days of
the course I was wandering around the adjacent drawing room before class
when something flickered by at the edge of my vision. I started
searching and found a large butterfly, wings folded, perched on the
ceiling molding. It sat motionless in poor light. Later in the day, I
went into a small room off to the side where I found the creature
open-winged and much more visible. I called the students and one took a
flash picture. I had been in the city for a week or so and had not seen
any butterflies. I then inquired of the Museum staff and none of them
had even seen a butterfly in the house. It was still there the next day.
The Museum library contains a number of volumes from its original
holdings. One of these is The Natural History of British Butterflies and
Moths by Edward Newman, FLS. It is a rather large volume with figures by
George Willis and engravings by John Kirchner, published by William
Glaisher in London, circa 1870, the year after the birth of Nabokov's
father, Vladimir Dmitrievich. The volume contains the Nabokov Ex libris
plate in it, and has an exotic history. Nabokov's father had collected
butterflies as a boy and it is likely that he had acquired the volume
and then passed it on to his son. After the Revolution, the family
library was broken up and, in part, distributed to other libraries.
Following the dissolution of the USSR and the subsequent establishment
of the Nabokov Museum, Vadim Stark, founder of the Saint Petersburg
Nabokov Foundation, discovered it in the holdings of the Library of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. He borrowed the book from the Academy for a
couple of Museum exhibits, but couldn't convince the library to donate
it to the Museum. In 1999, an American benefactor of the Museum, Terry
Myers, brought a copy of Newman's book as a gift to the Nabokov Museum.
With Terry's permission, Vadim Stark and Elena Kuznetsova, the museum's
librarian, exchanged the donated copy for the original with the young
Nabokov's colorings. I browsed the volume and found the mostly black and
white illustrations that had been hand-colored by the young Vladimir
Nabokov. Among the chosen few was the Vanessa io (now the Inachis io) or
Peacock butterfly. This proved to be the species now visiting the old
family townhouse.
Dieter Zimmer's A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths
(Hamburg,2001) tells us that Nabokov refers to this particular butterfly
in Speak, Memory (p. 12) as well as in two of his earliest lepidopteral
publications in which he notes the presence of the Peacock in 1918 in
the Crimea,and once again in 1929, while vacationing in the French
Pyrenees. The novels The Gift (p.109), and Ada (p.524) also make passing
reference to the Peacock butterfly.
Nabokov often used butterflies in his work as parts of significant
patterns and such is the case for the Vanessa io or Peacock butterfly in
Speak, Memory. It first occurs in the Foreword where Nabokov writes of
his enormous effort to recall missing details from his past. A cigarcase is mentally retrieved thanks to its conjuncture with the location
where the young Nabokov had caught a rare hawkmoth in June 1907 and
where his father had, many years earlier, first encountered "a Peacock
butterfly very scarce in our northern woodlands." The scene triggering
the recollection is played out in full in chapter III, scene seven where
Nabokov writes of "the almost pathological keenness of the retrospective
faculty" he believes he inherited from his father. As an example of his
father's powers of memory he writes "There was a certain spot in the
forest, a footbridge across a brown brook, where my father would piously
pause to recall the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August,
1883, his German tutor had netted for him. The thirty-year-old scene
would be gone through again. He and his brothers had stopped short in
helpless amazement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log
and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four
cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each. In tense silence, not
daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to [his tutor] Herr
Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly. My
cabinet inherited that specimen a quarter of a century later." Nabokov
does not name the butterfly in the scene. It is that "pavonian eyespot"
that confirms the identification: "pavonian" referring to the circles on
the insect's wings that resemble those on the tail of the Peacock.
Dieter Zimmer's magnificent A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths
2001 provides an excellent description. The very handsome creature is
bit over two inches (50-60mm) in wingspread: "In the corners of each of
its dark reddish brown and quiet ragged wings there is a large eyespot,
a red one on the primaries and a blue one on the secondaries (p. 176).
Incidentally, Nabokov incorporates a fictionalized version of this event
in The Gift where the hero Fyodor recounts his father’s discovery of the
capture of his first Peacock butterfly (p. 121). In Ada there is passing
mention that Van and Ada while strolling about Lake Geneva notice the
“indolent Peacock” butterflies. Zimmer also notes that in the spring
of 1972, Nabokov netted a Peacock in the gardens of the Montreux Palace
Hotel while being filmed for a German TV documentary.
Nabokov remarks that the Peacock captured by his father in 1883 and by
himself in 1907 were quite rare in the Petersburg area. Zimmer remarks
that the range of the insect has expanded over the last century and is
now found from Northern Europe all the way to Japan. In any event it is
no longer rare around Petersburg, nor around the Nabokov family country
estates about fifty miles south of the city where I saw several,
including a dead one in country manor house that Nabokov’s Uncle Ruka
had bequeathed to his favorite nephew upon his death in 1916.
I would like to believe the Peacock butterflies that I encountered in
places so memorably associated with Nabokov and his father, hint at the
ghostly presence of the author. Probably not, almost certainly not…. But
still…. At the very least, that Peacock in the Petersburg house or the
dead one I noted at the country house might have been descendants of the
1883 specimen handed down from father to son, while my 2001 butterfly
might have carried the genes of Vladimir's 1907 catch. Or not. Then too,
the Greek Psyche meant both butterfly and soul.
In any case, those who visit the Nabokov family home and country estates
in future summers will have a good chance of seeing Vanessa io.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
of NABOKV-L, sends this essay in honor of VN's birthday. Don also
reports that his book on Nabokov, Worlds in Regression, is coming out in
a new Russian edition from Symposium.
Neither Don nor I were able in insert the accompanying illustration into
his text, so please click on the attachment to get the full effect! --
SES.]
Ghosts Linger: Nabokov’s Vanessa io
Some years ago I had the privilege of teaching a summer course in the
Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg. The Museum is located at 47 Bolshaya
Morskaya in the old Nabokov family home so lovingly described in the
author’s memoir Speak, Memory. The following tale draws on that
experience.
For a person who has spent a good part of his life with Nabokov's work
at hand, working there, lecturing everyday in the old library room, was
an eerie experience. It was over eighty years since Nabokov had lingered
there but his presence was strong. Oddly so. On one of the first days of
the course I was wandering around the adjacent drawing room before class
when something flickered by at the edge of my vision. I started
searching and found a large butterfly, wings folded, perched on the
ceiling molding. It sat motionless in poor light. Later in the day, I
went into a small room off to the side where I found the creature
open-winged and much more visible. I called the students and one took a
flash picture. I had been in the city for a week or so and had not seen
any butterflies. I then inquired of the Museum staff and none of them
had even seen a butterfly in the house. It was still there the next day.
The Museum library contains a number of volumes from its original
holdings. One of these is The Natural History of British Butterflies and
Moths by Edward Newman, FLS. It is a rather large volume with figures by
George Willis and engravings by John Kirchner, published by William
Glaisher in London, circa 1870, the year after the birth of Nabokov's
father, Vladimir Dmitrievich. The volume contains the Nabokov Ex libris
plate in it, and has an exotic history. Nabokov's father had collected
butterflies as a boy and it is likely that he had acquired the volume
and then passed it on to his son. After the Revolution, the family
library was broken up and, in part, distributed to other libraries.
Following the dissolution of the USSR and the subsequent establishment
of the Nabokov Museum, Vadim Stark, founder of the Saint Petersburg
Nabokov Foundation, discovered it in the holdings of the Library of the
Russian Academy of Sciences. He borrowed the book from the Academy for a
couple of Museum exhibits, but couldn't convince the library to donate
it to the Museum. In 1999, an American benefactor of the Museum, Terry
Myers, brought a copy of Newman's book as a gift to the Nabokov Museum.
With Terry's permission, Vadim Stark and Elena Kuznetsova, the museum's
librarian, exchanged the donated copy for the original with the young
Nabokov's colorings. I browsed the volume and found the mostly black and
white illustrations that had been hand-colored by the young Vladimir
Nabokov. Among the chosen few was the Vanessa io (now the Inachis io) or
Peacock butterfly. This proved to be the species now visiting the old
family townhouse.
Dieter Zimmer's A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths
(Hamburg,2001) tells us that Nabokov refers to this particular butterfly
in Speak, Memory (p. 12) as well as in two of his earliest lepidopteral
publications in which he notes the presence of the Peacock in 1918 in
the Crimea,and once again in 1929, while vacationing in the French
Pyrenees. The novels The Gift (p.109), and Ada (p.524) also make passing
reference to the Peacock butterfly.
Nabokov often used butterflies in his work as parts of significant
patterns and such is the case for the Vanessa io or Peacock butterfly in
Speak, Memory. It first occurs in the Foreword where Nabokov writes of
his enormous effort to recall missing details from his past. A cigarcase is mentally retrieved thanks to its conjuncture with the location
where the young Nabokov had caught a rare hawkmoth in June 1907 and
where his father had, many years earlier, first encountered "a Peacock
butterfly very scarce in our northern woodlands." The scene triggering
the recollection is played out in full in chapter III, scene seven where
Nabokov writes of "the almost pathological keenness of the retrospective
faculty" he believes he inherited from his father. As an example of his
father's powers of memory he writes "There was a certain spot in the
forest, a footbridge across a brown brook, where my father would piously
pause to recall the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August,
1883, his German tutor had netted for him. The thirty-year-old scene
would be gone through again. He and his brothers had stopped short in
helpless amazement at the sight of the coveted insect poised on a log
and moving up and down, as though in alert respiration, its four
cherry-red wings with a pavonian eyespot on each. In tense silence, not
daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to [his tutor] Herr
Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly. My
cabinet inherited that specimen a quarter of a century later." Nabokov
does not name the butterfly in the scene. It is that "pavonian eyespot"
that confirms the identification: "pavonian" referring to the circles on
the insect's wings that resemble those on the tail of the Peacock.
Dieter Zimmer's magnificent A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths
2001 provides an excellent description. The very handsome creature is
bit over two inches (50-60mm) in wingspread: "In the corners of each of
its dark reddish brown and quiet ragged wings there is a large eyespot,
a red one on the primaries and a blue one on the secondaries (p. 176).
Incidentally, Nabokov incorporates a fictionalized version of this event
in The Gift where the hero Fyodor recounts his father’s discovery of the
capture of his first Peacock butterfly (p. 121). In Ada there is passing
mention that Van and Ada while strolling about Lake Geneva notice the
“indolent Peacock” butterflies. Zimmer also notes that in the spring
of 1972, Nabokov netted a Peacock in the gardens of the Montreux Palace
Hotel while being filmed for a German TV documentary.
Nabokov remarks that the Peacock captured by his father in 1883 and by
himself in 1907 were quite rare in the Petersburg area. Zimmer remarks
that the range of the insect has expanded over the last century and is
now found from Northern Europe all the way to Japan. In any event it is
no longer rare around Petersburg, nor around the Nabokov family country
estates about fifty miles south of the city where I saw several,
including a dead one in country manor house that Nabokov’s Uncle Ruka
had bequeathed to his favorite nephew upon his death in 1916.
I would like to believe the Peacock butterflies that I encountered in
places so memorably associated with Nabokov and his father, hint at the
ghostly presence of the author. Probably not, almost certainly not…. But
still…. At the very least, that Peacock in the Petersburg house or the
dead one I noted at the country house might have been descendants of the
1883 specimen handed down from father to son, while my 2001 butterfly
might have carried the genes of Vladimir's 1907 catch. Or not. Then too,
the Greek Psyche meant both butterfly and soul.
In any case, those who visit the Nabokov family home and country estates
in future summers will have a good chance of seeing Vanessa io.
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
