On the novelist’s birthday, revisit Vladimir Nabokov’s essay on his obsession with butterflies, from 1948.
On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, my first glance upon awakening was for the chink between the shutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not open the shutters at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for its picture in a puddle.
Soon after the wardrobe affair, I found a spectacular moth, and my mother killed it with ether. In later years, I used many killing agents, but the least contact with the initial stuff would always cause the door of the past to fly open. Once, as a grown man, I was under ether during an operation, and with the vividness of a decalcomania picture I saw my own self in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged Emperor moth under the guidance of my smiling mother.
By my early teens, I was already voraciously reading entomological periodicals, especially British and Russian ones. Great upheavals were taking place in the development of systematics. Since the middle of the century, Continental lepidopterology had been, on the whole, a simple and stable affair, smoothly run by the Germans. Its high priest, Dr. Staudinger, was also the head of the largest firm of insect dealers.
Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first, it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception.
I found out very soon that an entomologist indulging in his quiet quest was apt to provoke strange reactions in other creatures. In this respect, America has shown more interest in my doings than other countries have—perhaps because I was in my forties when I came here to live, and the older the man, the queerer he looks with a butterfly net in his hand.
T he “English” park that separated our house from the hayfields was an extensive and elaborate affair, with labyrinthine paths and 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 its natural wild state always fell short of complete success. No gardener could cope with the hillocks of black earth that the pink hands of moles kept heaping up on the tidy sand of the main path.
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