Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  9. From my 1992 review of Nabokov’s Otherworld (1991), by the most distinguished of such readers, Vladimir Alexandrov:

  But is the “otherworld” Nabokov”s “main theme”? Nabokov himself declared that he “can’t find any so-called main ideas, such as that of fate, in my novels.” He was interested in the physical world, in the world of heart and mind and imagination, and in whatever might lie behind the human mind. To stress one of these as fundamental distorts and reduces Nabokov.

  In his introduction, Alexandrov acknowledges that to focus directly on the subject necessarily betrays Nabokov’s obliqueness on these matters. But after his fertile, flexible, many-faceted introduction, Alexandrov becomes more rigid and much less sceptical on individual novels than he indicated he should be.

  Readers admire Nabokov’s gift for vivid detail, his evident love of the things of this world. Alexandrov makes Nabokov out to be a neo-Platonist or almost a Gnostic, who prefers to escape the sordidness of materiality. He makes the “otherworld” a place of first resort rather than, as Nabokov made it, something that might offer an explanation when all others are exhausted.

  Take the first novel Alexandrov discusses. Because Luzhin cannot cope with the real world outside the chessboard, Alexandrov singles him out as the man attuned to the otherworld… . He overlooks both Luzhin’s evident blindness to most of life and Nabokov’s emphatic distinction between chess problem composition, in which an element of timelessness can be achieved, and chess play, where the clock ticks on relentlessly.

  When Luzhin leaves an uncompleted chess game in a state of stupor because he can no longer focus on the outside world, he tries to head home. He reaches a river and sees “great female figures” on a bridge. At this point, Alexandrov thinks of “the so-called guardians that heroes in many mythological quests must confront in order to complete their quests… . More specifically, the entire ominous realm through which Luzhin passes after the game recalls the Gnostic view of the world of matter as fallen.” Alexandrov ignores the point that the statues indicate that this is a specific bridge in Berlin and not the simple bridge by the sawmill near Luzhin’s Russian country home, which Luzhin in his confusion hopes to reach.

  As he so often does, Alexandrov here disregards the fictional situation and the internal connections of the novel (in this case, a theme of “home” that if examined carefully does indicate the possibility of intervention from the beyond). Luzhin’s suicide, according to Alexandrov, “seems less the act of a madman than an attempt to transcend an evil realm by releasing the soul from the fetters of the body.” Suicide as an ideal, an escape from an evil realm? When Nabokov stresses his “belief in the goodness of man … goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one’s world … This world I said was good” [LL 373–75]? Would it not be better to judge the works by their own workings, rather than by an automatic presumption in favor of an “otherworld”?

  10. “Prof. Woodbridge in an Essay on Nature Postulates the Reality of the World,” New York Sun, 10 December 1940, 15.

  7. NABOKOV’S AFTERLIFE

  1. See especially D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985); and Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); and Pifer, “Did She Have a Precursor: Lolita and Wharton’s The Children,” in Nabokov’s World, vol. 2: Reading Nabokov, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (London: Palgrave/School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2002), 186–92.

  2. Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1965), 10.

  8. NABOKOV, LITERATURE, LEPIDOPTERA

  1. Ronald Wilkinson, perhaps the foremost recent historian of lepidopterology, had planned in the 1970s and 1980s to republish Nabokov’s collected scientific papers. In the course of the project he wrote this line to Edward Tenner of Princeton University Press (February 16, 1979, Princeton University Press archives).

  2. Adalbert Seitz (1860–1938) began publishing his book, The Butterflies of the World, the most comprehensive ever attempted, in 1906. A last (sixteenth) installment was published in 1954, but the work was never quite finished.

  3. As the lepidopterist Kurt Johnson has remarked to me, “There is no better place to get on a ‘thought-wave’ that just carries itself” than “out wandering about, collecting.”

  4. D. Barton Johnson, “The Butterfly in Nabokov’s Eye,” Nabokov Studies 4 (1997):–14.

  5. Alexander B. Klots, A Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America, East of the Great Plains (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 195, 164. Klots (1903–1989) was a professor of biology at the City College of New York and research associate at the American Museum of Natural History.

  6. Kurt Johnson letter to Brian Boyd, July 24, 1995.

  7. Diana Butler, “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing 16 (1960): 58–84; repr., in Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Phyllis A. Roth (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), 59–73, was the first to link the scene where Nabokov captured the female of Lycaeides sublivens with the scene in the novel, but she opted to read into the connection a strained symbolic rather than the plain topographical similarity.

  8. The chapter in which this exchange occurs was rejected by the New Yorker for political reasons: Nabokov’s frank criticism of Soviet prisons.

  9. Dmitri Nabokov, “On Revisiting Father’s Room,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, ed. Peter Quennell (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), 136.

  10. Or, in a more explicit earlier formulation, “a seemingly incongruous detail over a seemingly dominant generalization” (LL 374).

  11. Nabokov, Stikhi (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979), 3.

  12. As reported in Strannik (Archbishop Ioann), “Nachalo Nabokoviany,” Russ kaya Mysl’, June 1, 1978, 10.

  13. For The Gift, see VNRY 468–78. I naively assumed Thecla bieti an invented butterfly discovered by Fyodor’s father; Dieter Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths (Hamburg: privately printed, 1998), 153, corrects and explains, and Zimmer, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001 (Hamburg: privately printed, 2001), 152–56, wonderfully expatiates. For Pale Fire, see NPMAD, chapters 9–10.

  14. Nabokov had previously admired Howe’s skill as an illustrator of Lepidoptera but was critical of his science (SL 367–69), as were many lepidopterists— including some of the volume’s contributors—and of his editing of Butterflies of North America. But the section on Plebijinae, by Howe, Robert L. Langston, and John C. Downey, was technically one of the best in the book.

  15. Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books, 1999), 87.

  16. Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 87.

  17. Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 84.

  18. Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 89.

  19. D. B. Stallings and J. R. Turner, “New American Butterflies,” Canadian Entomologist 78 (1947): 135.

  20. Klots, A Field Guide, 164. Klots would later write to William McGuire at Princeton University Press (November 22, 1981): “I know that I (not alone) was a bit worried as to what he might do when I first learned of his intention to work in the butterflies. It would have been so easy for an inspired, but untrained amateur to do a lot of damage that it would take more plodding workers years to repair. . . . I was greatly pleased with the intelligence and thoroughness of his work, which was published in a format that made it usable. (We have gifted amateurs who couldn’t be bothered with such things as accurate references and bibliographies.) . . . Certainly we gained from his imaginative ability to see relationships and to trace postulated evolutionary trends. In fact I don’t know anybody else who could have done this. . . . My own relations with Nabokov were always cordial. The inaccuracies he pointed out in my Field Guide were just that and needed to be exposed. And [in the 1960s] he very kindly collected for us some species in the south of France that we needed at the Museum.
”

  21. Cyril F. dos Passos, A Synonymic List of the Nearctic Rhopalocera (New Haven, Conn.: The Lepidopterists’ Society Memoir No. 1, 1964), iv. In a letter to Edward Tenner of Princeton University Press (February 21, 1979), dos Passos commented that Nabokov was “unfortunately not well known to most American entomologists.”

  22. Downey to Kurt Johnson, August 12, 1996.

  23. Reported in Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 98.

  24. Obituary, Journal of the Lepidopterists’ Society, 34, no. 2 (1980).

  25. BB interview with Kurt Johnson, June 1996; Johnson to BB, August 16, 1996.

  26. Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 290.

  27. Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues, 90.

  28. Kurt Johnson and David Matusik, “Five New Species and One New Subspecies of Butterflies from the Sierra de Baorucco of Hispaniola,” Annals of the Carnegie Museum 57 (1988): 221–54; Albert Schwarz and Kurt Johnson, “Two New Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) from Cuba,” Caribbean Journal of Science 28 (1992): 149–57; and D. S. Smith, L. D. Miller and J. Y. Miller, The Butterflies of the West Indies and South Florida (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). The preferability of Nabokov’s Caribbean terminology to Riley’s is summarized most recently in Zsolt Bálint and Kurt Johnson, “Polyommatine Lycaenids of the Oreal Biome in the Neotropics, Part II: The Itylos Section (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae, Polyommatinae),” Annales Historico-Naturales Musei Nationalis Hungarici 86 (1994): 53–77; and Johnson and Coates, Nabokov’s Blues.

  29. Bálint and Johnson, “Polyommatine Lycaenids,” 54, 57.

  30. Zsolt Bálint, “A Catalogue of Polyommatine Lycaenidae (Lepidoptera) of the Xeromontane Oreal Biome in the Neotropics as Represented in European Collections,” Reports of the Museum of Natural History, University of Wisconsin 29 (1993): 2.

  31. Vladimir Nabokov, “The Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hüb[ner]. (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera),” Psyche 50 (September–December 1943): 88.

  32. Robert Michael Pyle, my coeditor for Nabokov’s Butterflies, adds the caveat of an experienced field naturalist: “Cladistic analysis sometimes suggests likely paths that might nonetheless be artificial because of plastic characters: exactly why Nabokov would have been likely to have stuck, as other good taxonomists do, to conservative traits observed precisely. Although cladistics uses more ‘individuating details,’ it is far less selective in doing so. Quantity of data is in, the ‘good eye’ is out.”

  33. Roger Vila, Charles D. Bell, Richard McNiven, Benjamin Goldman-Huertas, Richard H. Ree, Charles R. Marshall, Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Dubi Benyamini, and Naomi E. Pierce, “Phylogeny and Palaeocology of Polyommatus Blue Butterflies Show Beringia Was a Climate-Regulated Gateway to the New World,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2011): 1–8, doi: 10.1098/ rspb.2010.2213.

  34. Personal communication.

  35. Kurt Johnson to BB, July 24, 1995.

  36. Now considered to be not Lysandra cormion, a new species, but a cross between Lysandra coridon and Meleageria daphnis; see Klaus G. Schurian, “Bemerkungen zu ‘Lysandra cormion’ Nabokov 1941 (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae),” Nachrichten des entomologischen Vereins Apollo [Frankfurt] n.s. 10 (1989): 183–92; Schurian, “Nachtrag zu den Bemerkungen zu ‘Lysandra cormion’ (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae),” Nachrichten des entomologischen Vereins Apollo [Frankfurt] n.s. 12 (1991): 193–95; and Zimmer, A Guide (1998), 53.

  37. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (New York: Norton, 1992), 132–33.

  9. NETTING NABOKOV: REVIEW OF DIETER E. ZIMMER, A GUIDE TO NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS 2001

  1. David Sexton, “The True Loves of Nabokov,” review of Nabokov’s Butterflies, Evening Standard, March 20, 2000, 55.

  10. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORK OF FICTIONAL PLAY

  1. Sir Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 140.

  2. Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

  3. Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 2008).

  4. Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 617–45.

  5. Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam, 2006).

  6. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition”; Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions,” Current Biology 16 (2006): 1818–23.

  7. Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).

  8. Daniel L.Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 362 (2007): 773–86.

  9. John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts,” Substance 30 (2001): 6–27.

  10. See chapter 20; see also Galdys Reichard, Roman Jakobson, and Elizabeth Werth, “Language and Synesthesia” Word 5 (August 1949); Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia (Cambridge. Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 2009).

  11. Rebecca Saxe and Simon Baron-Cohen, Theory of Mind, special issue of Social Neuroscience, 2006 (Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press, 2007); Dan Sperber, “Meta-representations in an Evolutionary Perspective,” in Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, ed. D. Sperber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–38.

  12. Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007).

  13. See Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (New York, London: Routledge, 2007).

  11. STACKS OF STORIES, STORIES OF STACKS

  1. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 158.

  2. Michael Tomasello, quoted in David Sloan Wilson, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (New York: Delacorte, 2007), 169.

  3. BB, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 104, citing Michelle Scalise-Sugiyama, “Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 238.

  4. Marek Kohn and Steve Mithen, “Handaxes: Products of Sexual Selection?” Antiquity 73 (1999): 518–26.

  5. Barry Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  6. “Confabulation” is the filling in by fiction of gaps in our knowledge, most strikingly demonstrated in those who have right-hemisphere strokes that, say, paralyze a limb that the patient’s mind refuses to recognize as paralyzed, or those who have had cerebral commisurotomies, severing the corpus callosum that normally acts as the information interchange between the two cerebral hemispheres. When doctors ask stroke victims to move a paralyzed limb or commisurotomy patients to explain why they made a choice in tests where each hemisphere has been offered different information, the left hemisphere immediately invents or confabulates an answer, without the individuals’ apparent recognition of their invention. Like the writers of recent “neurofiction,” who create characters with conditions like autism, de Clérambault’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, Nabokov would have been fascinated.

  7. Ángel Gurría-Quintana, “Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction Interview No. 187,” Paris Review 175 (Fall–Winter 2005): 119.

  8. Marie Nyreröd, Ingmar Bergman—3 dokumentärer om film, teater, Fårö och livet, 2004.

  9. Robert Root-Bernstein, “The Art of Innovation: Polymaths and Universality of the Creative Process,” in International Handbook on Innovation, ed. Larisa Shavinin (Amsterdam: Elsevier),
267–78; Root-Bernstein, “The Sciences and the Arts Share a Common Creative Aesthetic,” in The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, ed. A. I. Tauber (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 49–82.

  10. Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996).

  12. NABOKOV’S HUMOR

  1. Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 44.

  2. Unpublished letter to Véra Nabokov, 10 January 1924.

  13. NABOKOV AS STORYTELLER

  1. For the metaphysics, see chapters 6 and 7 and their notes. Among work on Nabokov’s morals, see Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Boyd, NAPC; Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Richard Rorty, “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 141–68.

  2. D. Barton Johnson and Brian Boyd, “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s World, vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (London: Palgrave/School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2002), 18–25; also see this volume, chapter 7.

  3. For a particularly comprehensive and subtle but uninvitingly formalistic analysis of Nabokovian narrative, see Pekka Tammi, Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985).

  4. Letter to Katharine White, March 17, 1951: “Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past . . .) will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (SL 117).

  5. For Nabokov’s brief but important references to preparation and transition as items in the storyteller’s toolkit, see his “Commentary to Eugene Onegin,” EO 3.80; SIC 10; LL 151; LRL 73.

  6. See Josef Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1991), and Dan Sperber, ed., Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).