[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 cigarette case 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.