In Jackson Hole and in the Grand Canyon, on the mountain slopes above Telluride, Colo., and on a celebrated pine barren near Albany, N.Y., dwell, and will dwell, in generations more numerous than editions, the butterflies I have described as new. Several of my finds have been dealt with by other workers; some have been named after me. One of these, Nabokov’s Pug (Eupithecia nabokovi McDunnough), which I boxed one night in 1943 on a picture window of James Laughlin’s Alta Lodge in Utah, fits most philosophically into the thematic spiral that began in a wood on the Oredezh around 1910—or perhaps even earlier, on that Nova Zemblan river a century and a half ago.
Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Already when I was ten, tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.
In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent fun. He arrived one summer night—in 1913, I think—from a town some twenty-five miles away. His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stouthearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.
On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone. Breakfastless, with hysterical haste, I gathered my net, pill boxes, killing jar, and escaped through the window. Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self-disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden—patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.
Let me look at my demon objectively. With the exception of my parents, no one really understood my obsession, and it was many years before I met a fellow sufferer. One of the first things I learned was not to depend on others for the growth of my collection. One summer afternoon, in 1911, Mademoiselle came into my room, book in hand, started to say she wanted to show me how wittily Rousseau denounced zoology (in favor of botany), and by then was too far gone in the gravitational process of lowering her bulk into an armchair to be stopped by my howl of anguish: on that seat I had happened to leave a glass-lidded cabinet tray with long, lovely series of the Large White.
Her first reaction was one of stung vanity: her weight, surely, could not be accused of damaging what in fact it had demolished; her second was to console me: Allons donc, ce ne sont que des papillons de potager!—which only made matters worse. A Sicilian pair recently purchased from Staudinger had been crushed and bruised. A huge Biarritz example was utterly mangled.
Smashed, too, were some of my choicest local captures. Of these, an aberration resembling the Canarian race of the species might have been mended with a few drops of glue; but a precious gynandromorph, left side male, right side female, whose abdomen could not be traced and whose wings had come off, was lost forever: one might reattach the wings but one could not prove that all four belonged to that headless thorax on its bent pin. Next morning, with an air of great mystery, poor Mademoiselle set off for St. Petersburg and came back in the evening bringing me (“something better than your cabbage butterflies”) a banal Urania moth mounted on plaster. “How you hugged me, how you danced with joy!” she exclaimed ten years later in the course of inventing a brand-new past.
Our country doctor, with whom I had left the pupae of a rare moth when I went on a journey abroad, wrote me that everything had hatched finely; but in reality a mouse had got at the precious pupae, and upon my return the deceitful old man produced some common Tortoiseshell butterflies, which, I presume, he had hurriedly caught in his garden and popped into the breeding cage as plausible substitutes (so he thought). Better than he, was an enthusiastic kitchen boy who would sometimes borrow my equipment and come back two hours later in triumph with a bagful of seething invertebrate life and several additional items. Loosening the mouth of the net which he had tied up with a string, he would pour out his cornucopian spoil—a mass of grasshoppers, some sand, the two parts of a mushroom he had thriftily plucked on the way home, more grasshoppers, more sand, and one battered Small White.
In the works of major Russian poets I can discover only two lepidopteral images of genuinely sensuous quality: Bunin’s impeccable evocation of what is certainly a Tortoiseshell:
And there will fly into the room
A colored butterfly in silk
To flutter, rustle and pit-pat
On the blue ceiling …
The author’s father and mother, Elena Ivanovna Nabokov, born Rukavishnikov (1876–1939), in 1900, on the garden terrace at Vyra, their estate in the Province of St. Petersburg. The birches and firs of the park behind my parents belong to the same backdrop of past summers as the foliage of photograph facing this page.
My brother Sergey and I, aged one and two, respectively (and looking like the same infant, wigless and wigged), in December 1901, in Biarritz. We had, I suppose, come there from Pau where we were living that winter. A shining wet roof—that is all I remember from that first trip to the South of France. It was followed by other trips, two to Biarritz (autumn 1907 and 1909) and two to the Riviera (late autumn 1903 and early summer 1904).
My father, aged thirty-five, with me aged seven, St. Petersburg, 1906.
and Fet’s “Butterfly” soliloquizing:
Whence have I come and whither am I hasting
Do not inquire;
Now on a graceful flower I have settled
And now respire.
In French poetry one is struck by Musset’s well-known lines (in Le Saule):
Le phalène doré dans sa course légère
Traverse les prés embaumés
which is an absolutely exact description of the crepuscular flight of the male of the geometrid called in England the Orange moth; and there is Fargue’s fascinatingly apt phrase (in Les Quatres Journées) about a garden which, at nightfall, se glace de bleu comme l’aile du grand Sylvain (the Poplar Admirable). And among the very few genuine lepidopterological images in English poetry, my favorite is Browning’s
On our other side is the straight-up rock;
And a path is kept ’twixt the gorge and it
By boulder-stones where lichens mock
The marks on a moth, and small ferns fit
Their teeth to the polished block
(“By the Fire-side”)
It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies. “None,” calmly replied that sturdy Swiss hiker with Camus in his rucksack when purposely asked by me for the benefit of my incredulous companion if he had seen any butterflies while descending the trail where, a moment before, you and I had been delighting in swarms of them. It is also true that when I call up the image of a particular path remembered in minute detail but pertaining to a summer before that of 1906, preceding, that is, the date on my first locality label, and never revisited, I fail to make out one wing, one wingbeat, one azure flash, one moth-gemmed flower, as if an evil spell had been cast on the Adriatic coast making all its “leps” (as the slangier among us say) invisible. Exactly thus an entomologist may feel some day when plodding beside a jubilant, and already helmetless botanist amid the hideous flora of a parallel planet, with not a single insect in sight; and thus (in odd proof of the odd fact that whenever possible the scenery of our infancy is used by an economically minded producer as a ready-made setting for our adult dreams) the seaside hilltop of a certain recurrent nightmare of mine, whereinto I smuggle a collapsible net from my waking state, is gay
