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  • Nabokov, Nimrod
  • Robert Roper (bio)

In May 1940 Vladimir Nabokov, his wife Vera, and their six-year-old son made it out of France just before the Nazis took Paris. They came to America: it might as well have been Argentina, but America it was, because a writer-friend had passed on to Nabokov an invitation to teach summer school in California. The ship on which they crossed to New York hit a mine and sank on its next Atlantic crossing.

It is a trope, verging on a truth, of Nabokov biography that the writer might have been lost to literature—might have gone down the rabbit hole of entomology—so rich was the fun of collecting on the new continent. With a straight face Nabokov tells us that bug-chasing was the greatest joy he ever knew. “My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting,” he declared:

I have hunted…in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts. … Incredibly happy memories, quite comparable, in fact, to those of my Russian boyhood, are associated with my research work at the [Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology]. … No less happy have been the many collecting trips taken almost every summer, during twenty years, through most of the states of my adopted country.

His collecting and his museum work made the 1940s “the most delightful and thrilling [years] in all my adult life,” and this first decade in America also saw a falling off, almost to zero, of novel-writing. “Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career,” he told an interviewer. “Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high [End Page 248] spirits…. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of Lepidoptera in a great museum.”

He did return to the novel. We can assume he spoke tongue in cheek. But in the forties he was putting to rest his “natural idiom,” his “untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue,” completing the switch to English that had begun with translations written in the 30s. That transition was painful, saddening. Altagracia de Jannelli, his American agent, forbad his writing in Russian, since works in that language could not be sold, and though he sometimes disobeyed her, in the end he submitted to this “private tragedy,” to the suppression of his heart’s inmost parlance. Lepidoptery, though, was almost as ingrained as was Russian—that they could not take away, and he practiced it with relief.

The reasons he loved collecting were many. First, the insects themselves, deceptive tender beings. Then, “one should not ignore the element of sport…of brisk motion and robust achievement…an ardent and arduous quest ending in the silky triangle of a folded butterfly… on the palm of one’s hand.” His fascination with the play and adventure of collecting began when he was seven. It was connected with Vyra, the family estate, since the Nabokovs went there in the season of good collecting. “The ‘English’ park that separated our house from the hayfields,” he writes in Speak, Memory,

was an extensive and elaborate affair with labyrinthine paths, Turgenevian benches, and imported oaks among the endemic firs and birches. The struggle that had gone on since my grandfather’s time to keep the park from reverting to the wild state always fell short of complete success. No gardener could cope with the hillocks of frizzly black earth that the pink hands of moles kept heaping on the tidy sand of the main walk. Weeds and fungi, and ridgelike tree roots crossed and recrossed the sun-flecked trails. Bears had been eliminated in the eighties, but an occasional moose still visited the grounds. [End Page 249]

There was a touch of true wildness—especially in the eyes of a seven-year-old. He had been introduced to collecting by his parents, Victorian and Anglophile in this as in much else. Elena Ivanovna, his mother, brought to the marriage a great dowry but also a collection...

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