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Clarence Brown review of of Nabokov's Butterflies
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From: "Clarence F Brown" <doctorsoup1@juno.com>
To: <nabokv-l@UCSBVM.ucsb.edu>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (71
lines) ------------------
> This appeared in the Seattle Times, 28 April 2000. >
> "Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings," edited and
> annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. New translations from
> the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov.
> Beacon Press. $45.
>
> Reviewed by Clarence Brown
>
> This is the third major publication detailing Nabokov's contributions to
> the science of lepidopterology. I know the first only by reputation,
> Dieter Zimmer's "A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths." The second,
> "Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius," by Kurt
> Johnson and Steve Coates, was reviewed by me in the Seattle Times on 24
> Oct. 1999.
> Had he not been one of our greatest novelists, it is highly unlikely
> that any of these would exist. But it can never be repeated too often
> that Nabokov was not, as is commonly thought, a great writer who also
> amused himself with butterflies. He very early established himself as an
> authority in the science, and it is telling that those scientists closest
> to his narrow specialty are the very ones who hold him in an esteem
> bordering on reverence. It is chiefly owing to Nabokov that one species,
> the Karner Blues, have so far eluded extinction.
> In the Russia of his birth he had inherited from an uncle a vast
> estate and was already, as a boy, planning to spend his wealth on
> butterfly hunts in remote parts of Asia. We have the Bolsheviks to thank
> for spoiling this dream and expelling him from his homeland. He himself
> thought that he would have been known, if at all, as the lepidopterist
> who dabbled in fiction, rather than the other way round.
> Part I is an essay by the principal editor, Brian Boyd, Nabokov's
> gifted biographer and a leading critic of his work. He links the writing
> to the science. Part II is another essay on Nabokov's standing in the
> science by a literate and witty lepidopterist named Robert Michael Pyle,
> who serves this enterprise, I imagine, as the guarantor of scientific
> probity.
> But Part III (97% of the book) is a rigorously chronological clutter
> of every surviving scrap mentioning butterflies that could be gleaned
> from Nabokov's published and unpublished writings, public and private.
> This includes, at the absolute nadir, a postcard to Hugh Heffner with a
> sketch by Nabokov blending butterfly and bunny. From there all is up.
> By far the most valuable item in this clutter is a long hitherto
> unpublished chapter of "The Gift," the greatest of Nabokov's Russian
> novels.
> The book is in many ways chaotic. But it is a glorious chaos, which
> no devout Nabokovian will find excessive. It is also immense, nearly 800
> pp. long. And there are arid stretches of taxonomic quibbling and
> painfully precise descriptions of butterfly anatomy that only another
> butterfly could love. But just as the reader's eyes begin to petrify, a
> passage in a letter or in a scientific report will turn up with
> electrifying relevance to something in the fiction.
> The rigidly chronological order juxtaposes trifles, mere biographical
> dust, with pages of towering artistic value. For the conscientious
> reader this can have extraordinary consequences. To come upon excerpted
> passages from "Lolita" after having ploughed through pages of scientific
> description is to realize for the first time how much Humbert's passion
> for the adolescent girl owed to the actual Nabokov's passion for
> butterflies.
> Consider this passage from "Lolita": "...the white wide little-boy
> shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief
> whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in a dangling
> knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder
> blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones, and the
> smooth, downward-tapering back."
> To appreciate the pictorial exactitude of this, one needs no
> collateral knowledge of the author's other life, but it is somehow a
> pleasurable shock to realize how completely of a piece was the
> sensibility, scientific and artistic at once, at the core of his genius.
> Describing an insect, he had to maintain an iron control. An adorable
> little girl was another question altogether. But just as much of a
> challenge to the observer who had only words, words, words . . .
From: "Clarence F Brown" <doctorsoup1@juno.com>
To: <nabokv-l@UCSBVM.ucsb.edu>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (71
lines) ------------------
> This appeared in the Seattle Times, 28 April 2000. >
> "Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings," edited and
> annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle. New translations from
> the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov.
> Beacon Press. $45.
>
> Reviewed by Clarence Brown
>
> This is the third major publication detailing Nabokov's contributions to
> the science of lepidopterology. I know the first only by reputation,
> Dieter Zimmer's "A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths." The second,
> "Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius," by Kurt
> Johnson and Steve Coates, was reviewed by me in the Seattle Times on 24
> Oct. 1999.
> Had he not been one of our greatest novelists, it is highly unlikely
> that any of these would exist. But it can never be repeated too often
> that Nabokov was not, as is commonly thought, a great writer who also
> amused himself with butterflies. He very early established himself as an
> authority in the science, and it is telling that those scientists closest
> to his narrow specialty are the very ones who hold him in an esteem
> bordering on reverence. It is chiefly owing to Nabokov that one species,
> the Karner Blues, have so far eluded extinction.
> In the Russia of his birth he had inherited from an uncle a vast
> estate and was already, as a boy, planning to spend his wealth on
> butterfly hunts in remote parts of Asia. We have the Bolsheviks to thank
> for spoiling this dream and expelling him from his homeland. He himself
> thought that he would have been known, if at all, as the lepidopterist
> who dabbled in fiction, rather than the other way round.
> Part I is an essay by the principal editor, Brian Boyd, Nabokov's
> gifted biographer and a leading critic of his work. He links the writing
> to the science. Part II is another essay on Nabokov's standing in the
> science by a literate and witty lepidopterist named Robert Michael Pyle,
> who serves this enterprise, I imagine, as the guarantor of scientific
> probity.
> But Part III (97% of the book) is a rigorously chronological clutter
> of every surviving scrap mentioning butterflies that could be gleaned
> from Nabokov's published and unpublished writings, public and private.
> This includes, at the absolute nadir, a postcard to Hugh Heffner with a
> sketch by Nabokov blending butterfly and bunny. From there all is up.
> By far the most valuable item in this clutter is a long hitherto
> unpublished chapter of "The Gift," the greatest of Nabokov's Russian
> novels.
> The book is in many ways chaotic. But it is a glorious chaos, which
> no devout Nabokovian will find excessive. It is also immense, nearly 800
> pp. long. And there are arid stretches of taxonomic quibbling and
> painfully precise descriptions of butterfly anatomy that only another
> butterfly could love. But just as the reader's eyes begin to petrify, a
> passage in a letter or in a scientific report will turn up with
> electrifying relevance to something in the fiction.
> The rigidly chronological order juxtaposes trifles, mere biographical
> dust, with pages of towering artistic value. For the conscientious
> reader this can have extraordinary consequences. To come upon excerpted
> passages from "Lolita" after having ploughed through pages of scientific
> description is to realize for the first time how much Humbert's passion
> for the adolescent girl owed to the actual Nabokov's passion for
> butterflies.
> Consider this passage from "Lolita": "...the white wide little-boy
> shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the white breast-kerchief
> whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end behind in a dangling
> knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable apricot shoulder
> blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones, and the
> smooth, downward-tapering back."
> To appreciate the pictorial exactitude of this, one needs no
> collateral knowledge of the author's other life, but it is somehow a
> pleasurable shock to realize how completely of a piece was the
> sensibility, scientific and artistic at once, at the core of his genius.
> Describing an insect, he had to maintain an iron control. An adorable
> little girl was another question altogether. But just as much of a
> challenge to the observer who had only words, words, words . . .