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Fw: nachlass of Vladimir Nabokov,
auctioned last week by his son Dmitri ...
auctioned last week by his son Dmitri ...
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From: Sandy P. Klein
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1215745,00.html
The literary lepidopterist
John Mullan
Thursday May 13, 2004
The Guardian
Vladimir Nabokov: died while on a butterfly hunt
Sales of a dead writer's papers are common enough, but the nachlass of Vladimir Nabokov, auctioned last week by his son Dmitri, was unusual. The entire collection fetched almost ё500,000, and among the items attracting the highest prices were the novelist's delicate drawings of butterflies. Most of them are fanciful in name as well as colouring. Nabokov drew them sometimes as doodles, sometimes as a small gift, especially for his wife.
They are prized by collectors not just because Nabokov was a great writer. He was also, by the time he died in 1977, the world's best known lepidopterist. Collecting butterflies was as much a passion as writing. In his wonderful autobiography of a Russian childhood, Speak, Memory, he recalls its birth, at the age of 7. He chased his first papillons on his family's country estate near St Petersburg. When he fled the Nazis for America in 1940 he was stirred most by the thought of all the new butterflies of the new continent. Appropriately, he was to die partly as a consequence of a fall in the Alps while butterfly hunting. His net, he recalled, caught in a tree "like Ovid's lyre".
He did not just collect butterflies, he examined them under the microscope. His favourite haunt was not a library but the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Classification of specimens required painstaking recording of wing markings, it also often involved minute analysis of the male genitalia. He wrote learned papers on the subject ("Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides HЭbner") and planned as his magnum opus not a great novel but a complete catalogue of the Butterflies of Europe. Though he worked on it for years, it was too huge to finish.
He belonged to an international community of entomologists, which included gifted amateurs such as himself. They acknowledged him as the greatest expert on the American family of Polyommatini, the so-called "blues" of his adopted country. In his honour, species have been named after him and after characters in his novels (Nabokovia ada, Paralycaeides shade). His collections are in the museums of Harvard and Cornell (he lost three collections moving around Europe).
Aficionados of his fiction (and the odd detractor) might think that Nabokov's vocation was connected to his achievements as a writer. He recalls from childhood the business of killing a specimen with characteristic, discomfiting vividness: "the subsiding spasms of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the hard crust of its thorax". Precise, beautiful, unsettling: just like his fiction.
Vladimir Nabokob author page
VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977)
"My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English."
Birthplace
St Petersburg, Russia
Education
Trinity College, Cambridge (French and Russian literature)
Other jobs
Academic, translator (Pushkin, Lermontov), critic, English teacher, tennis coach
Did you know?
He composed the first crossword puzzles in Russian.
Critical verdict
Forced to flee first Russia and then Germany, Nabokov spent some time in America, where he wrote Lolita, the novel that allowed him finally to take up writing full-time (it can be read as a metaphor for the impossibility of understanding between the old world and the new). By far the most frequently read of his novels - "Lolita is famous, not I", he once said - Nabokov himself described it as a "firebomb". Now working in English, he collaborated on translations of his work in each direction; although he was dismissive of his second language, he is regarded as perhaps the ! stylist of the century (John Updike commented that "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.").
Recommended works
Lolita; the triple-layered novel/poem Pale Fire; the comic Pnin; the overtly political Bend Sinister.
Influences
He strongly admired Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Joyce, while Invitation to a Beheading shares the mood and style of Kafka's The Trial. Lewis Carroll is a lighter reference point (Nabokov produced what is considered the best Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland).
Now read on
Calvino shares his playful, self-reflexive qualities; Amis is one of the few authors with a similarly consummate grasp of style (and see the fascinating essay-cum-interview Meeting Mrs Nabokov).
Adaptations
Fassbinder's 1978 Despair, adapted by Tom Stoppard and featuring Dirk Bogarde, is worth seeing. Kubrick's 1962 Lolita, adapted by Nabokov, succeeds brilliantl! y - despite a rather adult Lolita - by virtue of Peter Sellers's extra ordinary performance, inventive direction and a willingness to depart from the wordy, 'unfilmable' novel. Adrian Lyne's 1997 version, despite much looser censorship laws and Jeremy Irons relishing an archetypally Ironsesque role, looked too much like a Pepsi advert to justify the subject matter. Versions of the Luzhin Defence and Laughter in the Dark are both planned for the near future.
Recommended biography
Speak, Memory is his intensely novelistic memoir of an extraordinary life; Stacy Schiff's Vera, focusing on his wife, is a fascinating work.
Criticism
Alfred Appel's annotated Lolita (authorised by Nabokov) unpacks the novel's allusions. See Nabokov's own Lectures on Literature, from his university teaching, for a writer's take on criticism.
On this site
13 May 2004
The literary lepidopterist
Sales of a dead writer's papers are common enough, but the nachlass of Vladimir Nabokov, auctioned last week by his son Dmitri, was unusual. The entire collection fetched almost ё500,000, and among the items attracting the highest prices were the novelist's delicate drawings of butterflies. Most of them are fanciful in name as well as colouring. Nabokov drew them sometimes as doodles, sometimes as a small gift, especially for his wife.
8 May 2004
Exiles in a small world
An early campus novel, Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, published while Lolita was banned, first established his credentials as a writer of rare ability, writes David Lodge
25 Aug 2000
The Nabokov gambit
They failed with Lolita (twice) and now they've failed with The Luzhin Defence. Why do the novels of the great prose sorcerer Vladimir Nabokov always defeat the film-makers?
25 Mar 2000
The wings of desire
Jay Parini discovers how much Nabokov's lepidoptery informed his literature in Nabokov's Butterflies
19 Mar 2000
Forget Lolita - let's hear it for lepidoptery...
Science doesn't quite meet literature in a collection of technical papers and butterfly inspired writing in Nabokov's Butterflies
1 Feb 1990
Private strife
Review: Selected Letters 1940-77
9 Jan 1987
Nabokov's nymphet novella
Angela Carter reviews The Enchanter