Subject
Fw: Daily Telegraph Review of _Nabokov's Butterflies_ edited &
compiled by Brian Boyd & Robert Pyle
compiled by Brian Boyd & Robert Pyle
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Daily Telegraph (London) March 25, 2000, p. A 4
Nabokov's Butterflies, ed by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, tr by
Dmitri
Nabokov, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, GBP25, ISBN 0541557222
Lepping around on the hilltops
Winged scraps illuminate an account of a novelists scientific passion, says
Maggie Gee
Lightness of touch is the gift with which Nabokov lifts the heart. The
great
Russian-American novelist's preferred word for butterfly-chasing was
"lepping", a high-speed blur of leaping and lepidoptera. On their 50th
wedding anniversary, he gave his wife, VИra, a card with one of his
iridescent butterfly drawings and a brief, tender inscription - "Here we are
at last, my darling". Winged scraps like this are the best thing in this
783-page volume compiled by Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd and the
lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle, who have garnered every sentence from
Nabokov's novels, letters and poems that deals with butterflies, along with
examples of his scientific writings. The translator is Nabokov's son
Dmitri.
Aged seven, laid low with pneumonia, Nabokov lost his talent as an infant
mathematical prodigy and found in its place a passion for the butterflies
his
mother had placed around his sick-bed. At nine he proposed a name for his
first subspecies. Ten years later, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, he was
forced to leave his collections behind - except for a Hawkmoth pupa which
finally hatched in his overheated railway carriage. Nabokov's
lepidopterological interests became professional in the 1940s after he and
VИra fled Germany for America. As Cornell University's curator of
lepidoptera, he spent up to 14 hours a day at the microscope pioneering a
way
of identifying male butterflies by their sexual organs. (Interrupted in
this
work by the necessity of attending to important visitors to the museum, he
is
said to have eventually broken away with the brief, courteous explanation
that he had to play with his genitalia.)
Parts of his scientific papers are impenetrably technical, but in a tight
descriptive corner the novelist slyly creeps back: "sagum well developed ...
with the points of the furca, converging in front (i.e. on the ventral side)
of the aedeagus in the manner of a stiffly bulging short waistcoat".
Rhe centrepiece of the volume, but not its most enjoyable part, is "Father's
Butterflies", the previously unpublished appendix Nabokov planned for his
novel The Gift (1937). Its hero is Fyodor Godunov, an ИmigrИ writer whose
father disappeared on an entomological expedition. Nabokov's own
butterfly-loving father, murdered by Right-wing thugs in 1922, is the
ghostly
presence in its pages. This in theory lends a special interest to the
fictional appendix in which Fyodor Godunov explicates his dead father's
eccentric theories of evolution.
Unfortunately these 52 pages are dense with sentences and paragraphs of a
length Nabokov would never have countenanced in a published work. Only at
the end does a personal note of loss and longing for the dead father sound:
"Whatever may lie in store for the soul ... there must remain a faint hum,
vague as stardust, even if its source vanishes with the earth."
Better to read the lyrical, faintly old-fashioned butterfly poems, or "The
Aurelian", a story Nabokov wrote in 1930 about Pilgram, the grim owner of a
cramped back-street butterfly shop, who dies in the dark just before
realising his lifelong dream of himself loping across sunlit slopes chasing
butterflies. Nabokov himself, unlike so many gloomier 20th-century writers,
did not neglect the life of the body. Perhaps that accounts for the
radiance
in his writing. This volume contains many photographs of him, tall, tilted
forward, blissfully lepping through the Alps with his net, on strong
football-player's legs.
Daily Telegraph (London) March 25, 2000, p. A 4
Nabokov's Butterflies, ed by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, tr by
Dmitri
Nabokov, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, GBP25, ISBN 0541557222
Lepping around on the hilltops
Winged scraps illuminate an account of a novelists scientific passion, says
Maggie Gee
Lightness of touch is the gift with which Nabokov lifts the heart. The
great
Russian-American novelist's preferred word for butterfly-chasing was
"lepping", a high-speed blur of leaping and lepidoptera. On their 50th
wedding anniversary, he gave his wife, VИra, a card with one of his
iridescent butterfly drawings and a brief, tender inscription - "Here we are
at last, my darling". Winged scraps like this are the best thing in this
783-page volume compiled by Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd and the
lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle, who have garnered every sentence from
Nabokov's novels, letters and poems that deals with butterflies, along with
examples of his scientific writings. The translator is Nabokov's son
Dmitri.
Aged seven, laid low with pneumonia, Nabokov lost his talent as an infant
mathematical prodigy and found in its place a passion for the butterflies
his
mother had placed around his sick-bed. At nine he proposed a name for his
first subspecies. Ten years later, fleeing the Bolshevik revolution, he was
forced to leave his collections behind - except for a Hawkmoth pupa which
finally hatched in his overheated railway carriage. Nabokov's
lepidopterological interests became professional in the 1940s after he and
VИra fled Germany for America. As Cornell University's curator of
lepidoptera, he spent up to 14 hours a day at the microscope pioneering a
way
of identifying male butterflies by their sexual organs. (Interrupted in
this
work by the necessity of attending to important visitors to the museum, he
is
said to have eventually broken away with the brief, courteous explanation
that he had to play with his genitalia.)
Parts of his scientific papers are impenetrably technical, but in a tight
descriptive corner the novelist slyly creeps back: "sagum well developed ...
with the points of the furca, converging in front (i.e. on the ventral side)
of the aedeagus in the manner of a stiffly bulging short waistcoat".
Rhe centrepiece of the volume, but not its most enjoyable part, is "Father's
Butterflies", the previously unpublished appendix Nabokov planned for his
novel The Gift (1937). Its hero is Fyodor Godunov, an ИmigrИ writer whose
father disappeared on an entomological expedition. Nabokov's own
butterfly-loving father, murdered by Right-wing thugs in 1922, is the
ghostly
presence in its pages. This in theory lends a special interest to the
fictional appendix in which Fyodor Godunov explicates his dead father's
eccentric theories of evolution.
Unfortunately these 52 pages are dense with sentences and paragraphs of a
length Nabokov would never have countenanced in a published work. Only at
the end does a personal note of loss and longing for the dead father sound:
"Whatever may lie in store for the soul ... there must remain a faint hum,
vague as stardust, even if its source vanishes with the earth."
Better to read the lyrical, faintly old-fashioned butterfly poems, or "The
Aurelian", a story Nabokov wrote in 1930 about Pilgram, the grim owner of a
cramped back-street butterfly shop, who dies in the dark just before
realising his lifelong dream of himself loping across sunlit slopes chasing
butterflies. Nabokov himself, unlike so many gloomier 20th-century writers,
did not neglect the life of the body. Perhaps that accounts for the
radiance
in his writing. This volume contains many photographs of him, tall, tilted
forward, blissfully lepping through the Alps with his net, on strong
football-player's legs.