The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord: Nabokov and His Father

5. Lepidoptera, Chess, and Sports

180 five Lepidoptera, Chess, and Sports h HUMBERT I should not have attempted to take a short cut. We’re lost. LOLITA Ask that nut with the net over there. The Butterfly Hunter. His name is Vladimir Nabokov. A fritillary settles with outspread wings on a tall flower. Nabokov snaps it up with a sweep of his net. Humbert walks toward him. With a nip of finger and thumb through a fold of the marquisette Nabokov dispatches his capture and works the dead insect out of the netbag onto the palm of his hand. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay Problems are the poetry of chess.They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity. —Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions Bicycling and riding, boating and bathing, tennis and croquet [. . .]—this is a general list of the themes that move our author. —Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift Alongside the devotion to creative writing that became Nabokov’s lifetime vocation, his great fascination with the fine arts, interest in theater, and enviable knowledge of music, V. D. Nabokov inculcated in his firstborn a lasting passion for butterflies and an enduring enthusiasm for chess and sports. All of these pursuits, without which Nabokov’s persona and his literary legacy cannot be fully comprehended, manifest themselves in his oeuvre. Lepidoptera, Chess, and Sports • 181 Butterflies The Nabokovs’ butterfly fervor can be better understood in the broader context of lepidoptery in Russia.The initial interest in butterflies dates from the eighteenth century, when Russia’s grandees, following the fashion in contemporary Western Europe, became enchanted with these splendorous insects , especially after the publication of lavishly illustrated monographs such as Maria Sybilla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), which, incidentally, Nabokov mentions in his memoir (SM 122). In 1728, at the St. Petersburg Kunstkamera, founded only a decade earlier by Peter the Great, a zoology division was established that contained and exhibited a sizable butterfly collection. Throughout the eighteenth century, a number of naturalists, among them Johann Georg Gmelin, Stepan Krasheninnikov, and Georg Wilhelm Steller, conducted expeditions to Siberia and enriched the Kunstkamera collection with a great number of local butterflies. Natural sciences , particularly lepidoptery, were greatly advanced by Carl Linnaeus’s systematization ,which was propagated in Russia by his disciples,Matvei Afonin and Alexander Karamyshev. Linnaeus’s countryman Erik Gustaf Laxman, the German Peter Simon Pallas, and the Russian Ivan Lepekhin considerably promoted the study of butterflies and moths in Russia in the midto late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim founded the Imperial Society of Naturalists in Moscow and was very instrumental in furthering lepidopteral research. The research reached its peak with the publication of von Waldheim’s five-volume Entomographia imperii Rossici, the last volume of which, Lepidoptera Rossica, written in collaboration with Eduard von Eversmann, came out in 1851. The formation of the Russian Entomological Society in 1859 and the publication of its journals, Horae So cietatis Ent omologicae Rossic ae (Trudy R usskogo ent omologicheskogo obshchestva, since 1861) and Russian Entomological Review (Russkoe entomologicheskoe obozrenie, since 1901), additionally advanced the national interest in lepidoptery at the turn of the twentieth century, when Vladimir Dmitrievich and later his eldest son developed an enthusiasm for butterflies.1 According to Nabokov, his father “caught” the lepidopteral passion from one of his German tutors (see SM 173). The senior Nabokov remembered “the rare butterfly that, on the seventeenth of August, 1883, his German tutor 1. For a detailed survey of the history of lepidopterology in Russia and about the Russian Entomological Society, see Korolev and Murzin, Istoriia lepidopterologicheskikh issledovanii v Rossii; Medvedev, “140 let Russkomu entomologicheskomu obshchestvu.” 182 • The Tender Friendship and the Charm of Perfect Accord had netted for him” (SM 75)—so unforgettable was the event that its precise date was forever etched in his memory. “He and his brothers had stopped short in helpless excitement 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,” the younger Nabokov later wrote. “In tense silence, not daring to strike himself, he had handed his net to Herr Rogge, who was groping for it, his eyes fixed on the splendid fly” (75). As a tribute to his father, Nabokov projects on the father of the protagonist of his...