Sergey Karapukhin: I've been rereading Pale Fire and got interested in Kinbote's note on "My dark Vanessa" (270), where he says: "It is so like the heart of a scholar in search of a fond name to pile a butterfly genus upon an Orphic divinity on top of the inevitable allusion to Vanhomrigh, Esther!"  I found Matt Roth's valuable 2010 posting in the NABOKV-L archives where he had identified the divinity as Phanes ("the luminous, enlightening, appearing one"), one of the important Orphic divinities, son of Aether. Matt also wrote in that posting: "Some scientists doubt that this was the origin of the genus name, but VN must have seen the connection somewhere and noted it[  ] Even though Phanes was the name used by "simpler mortals" for Eros (in the Orphic Argonautica, 15-16), in other Orphic fragments Phanes is an epithet for Dionysus; or is identified with Metis ("counsel, wisdom") and Eros; or is one with the great all-seeing Zeus; or, as an independent deity, is a "repetition of the character Time" with some new features (androgynous, world-illuminating, first-born).[   ] In the note, if I understand it correctly, Kinbote doesn't know (as VN surely did) that the name of the genus must come from either a poem by Swift (Vanessa Fabricius [1807]) or an Orphic divinity (Phanessa Sodoffsky [1837]): he lumps all his references together." ..

 

Jansy Mello:  There's a medical term for hair and nails: "phaneros" [I quote one sentence where it is mentioned online: "The skin, mucous membranes, annexes (sebaceous and sudoriparous glands) and the phaneros (hair and nails) are tissues with rapid cellular proliferation..." ], related to the Greek word for "manifest, shining"* (as in "diaphanous" perhaps? It's certainly present in "epiphany").**  and, although this particular use of "phanes - phaneros" is unrelated to things Nabokovian or Vanessa butterflies, I chose to bring it up because the List has just been discussing John Shade's nail-parings, musings about fingers and "scarf-skin" (all these "phaneroi"...), closing with an image of which he was particularly fond ( "making mouths" while snipping off things, or wringing hair), as in PF's verses: "And I make mouths as I snip off the thin/  Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call "scarf-skin." (also present in "ADA': "Girl stepping into a pool under the little cascade to wash her tresses, and accompanying the immemorial gesture of wringing them out by making wringing-out mouths — immemorial too." )