Tales of NABOKOV 101: St. Petersburg, Russia

  

    By D. Barton Johnson

 

This summer will see the fourth session of NABOKOV 101 at the Nabokov Museum in Saint Petersburg. The Museum is located at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya in the old Nabokov family home so lovingly described in Speak, Memory.

Two  or three years ago, I and Alexander Dolinin had the privilege of teaching a very diverse group of students in the Museum’s NABOKOV 101 program.

 

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, 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 perched, wings folded, 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 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 the 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 has the Nabokov Ex libris 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 Lena Kuznetsova, the museum's librarian, exchanged the donated copy for the orignal 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 house.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                           

  

Dieter Zimmer’s A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths (Hamburg, 1996) tells us that Nabokov refers to this particular butterfly in Speak, Memory (p. 12), The Gift (p. 109), and Ada (p.524), as well as in two of his lepidopteral publications.

 

Nabokov often used butterflies in his work as parts of meaningful 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 three, 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 resembling those on the tail of the peacock. Dieter Zimmer’s magnificent A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001 pictures the butterfly and 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). Zimmer also notes that in the spring of 1972, Nabokov netted a Peacock in the gardens of the Montreaux Palace Hotel while being filmed for a German TV documentary.   

 

Nabokov remarks that the Peacock captured by his father in 1883 and 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 Uncle Ruka’s Rozhdestveno manor house which is now under restoration.

 

I would like to believe that the Peacock butterflies that I encountered inside two 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 first drawing room Peacock might have been a direct descendant of the 1883 specimen handed down from his father to son, while my 2001 butterfly might have carried the genes of Vladimir’s 1907 catch. Or not.

 

In any case, those who attend NABOKOV 101 or visit the family home and estates in future summers will have a good chance of seeing Vanessa io.