The Gift

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Simultaneously with the Englishman Tutt, who observed the same thing in the Swiss Alps as he in the Pamirs, my father discovered the true nature of the corneal formation appearing beneath the abdomen in the impregnated females of Parnassians, and explained how her mate, working with a pair of spatulate appendages, places and molds on her a chastity belt of his own manufacture, shaped differently in every species of this genus, being sometimes a little boat, sometimes a helical shell, sometimes—as in the case of the exceptionally rare dark-cinder gray orpheus Godunov—a replica of a tiny lyre. And as a frontispiece to my present work I think I would like to display precisely this butterfly—for I can hear him talk about it, can see the way he took the six specimens he had brought back out of their six thick triangular envelopes, the way he lowered his eyes with the field magnifier close to the abdomen of the only female—and how reverently his laboratory assistant relaxed in a damp jar the dry, glossy, tightly folded wings in order later to drive a pin smoothly through the insect’s thorax, stick it in the cork groove of the spreading board, hold down flat upon it by means of broad strips of semitransparent paper its open, defenseless, gracefully expanded beauty, then slip a bit of cotton wool under its abdomen and straighten its black antennae—so that it dried that way forever. Forever? In the Berlin museum there are many of my father’s captures and these are as fresh today as they were in the eighties and nineties. Butterflies from Linnaeus’ collection now in London have subsisted since the eighteenth century. In the Prague museum one can see that same example of the showy Atlas moth that Catherine the Great admired. Why then do I feel so sad?

  His captures, his observations, the sound of his voice in scientific words, all this, I think, I will preserve. But that is still so little. With the same relative permanence I would like to retain what it was, perhaps, that I loved most of all about him: his live masculinity, inflexibility and independence, the chill and the warmth of his personality, his power over everything that he undertook. As if playing a game, as if wishing in passing to imprint his force on everything, he would pick out here and there something from a field outside entomology and thus he left his mark upon almost all branches of natural science: there is only one plant described by him out of all those he collected, but that one is a spectacular species of birch; one bird—a most fabulous pheasant; one bat-but the biggest one in the world. And in all parts of nature our name echoes a countless number of times, for other naturalists gave his name either to a spider, or to a rhododendron, or to a mountain ridge—the latter, by the way, made him angry: “To ascertain and preserve the ancient native name of a pass,” he wrote, “is always both more scientific and more noble than to saddle it with the name of a good acquaintance.”

  I liked—I only now understood how much I liked it—that special easy knack he showed in dealing with a horse, a dog, a gun, a bird or a peasant boy with a two-inch splinter in his back—he was constantly being brought people who were wounded, maimed, even infirm, even pregnant women, who probably took his mysterious occupation for voodoo practice. I liked the fact that, in contradistinction to the majority of non-Russian travelers, Sven Hedin for example, he never changed his clothes for Chinese ones on his wanderings; in general he kept aloof, was severe and resolute in the extreme in his relations with the natives, showing no indulgence to mandarins and lamas; and in camp he practiced shooting, which served as an excellent precaution against any importuning. He was entirely uninterested in ethnography, a fact that for some reason greatly irritated certain geographers, and his great friend, the Orientalist Krivtsov, almost wept when reproaching him: “If only you had brought back one wedding song, Konstantin Kirillovich, had described one local dress!” There was one professor at Kazan who attacked him especially; proceeding from some sort of humanitarian-liberal premises he convicted him of scientific aristocratism, of a haughty contempt for Man, of disregard for the reader’s interests, of dangerous eccentricity—and of much more. And once at an international banquet in London (and this episode pleases me most of all), Sven Hedin, sitting next to my father, asked him how it had happened that, traveling with unprecedented freedom over the forbidden parts of Tibet, in the immediate vicinity of Lhasa, he had not gone to look at it, to which my father replied that he had not wanted to sacrifice even one hour’s collecting for the sake of visiting “one more filthy little town”—and I can see so clearly how his eyes must have narrowed as he spoke.

  He was endowed with an even temper, self-control, strong willpower and a vivid sense of humor; but when he became angry his wrath was like a sudden stroke of frost (Grandmother said behind his back: “All the clocks in the house stopped”), and I can well remember those sudden silences at table and the kind of absentminded look that immediately appeared on Mother’s face (ill-wishers among our female kin maintained that she “trembled before Kostya”), and how one of the governesses at the end of the table would hastily place her palm on a glass which was on the point of tinkling. The cause of his wrath could be a blunder by someone, a miscomputation by the steward (Father was well versed in the estate affairs), a flippant remark made about an intimate of his, trite political sentiments in the spirit of soapbox patriotism brought out by some ill-starred guest, or finally some misdemeanor or other of mine. He who in his time had slaughtered countless multitudes of birds, he who had once brought the newly wed botanist Berg the complete vegetable covering of a motley little mountain meadow in one piece, the size of a room in area (I imagined it rolled up in a case like a Persian carpet), which he had found somewhere at some fantastic height among bare cliffs and snow—he could not forgive me a Leshino sparrow wantonly shot down with a Montecristo rifle or the young pondside aspen I had slashed with a sword. He could not stand procrastination, hesitation, the blinking eyes of a lie, could not stand hypocrisy or syrupiness—and I am sure that had he caught me out in physical cowardice he would have laid a curse on me.

  I have not said everything yet; I am coming up to what is perhaps most important. In and around my father, around this clear and direct strength, there was something difficult to convey in words, a haze, a mystery, an enigmatic reserve which made itself felt sometimes more, sometimes less. It was as if this genuine, very genuine man possessed an aura of something still unknown but which was perhaps the most genuine of all. It had no direct connection either with us, or with my mother, or with the externals of life, or even with butterflies (the closest of all to him, I daresay); it was neither pensiveness nor melancholy—and I have no means of explaining the impression his face made on me when I looked through his study window from outside and saw how, having suddenly forgotten his work (I could feel inside me how he had forgotten it—as if something had fallen through or trailed off), his large wise head turned slightly away from the desk and resting on his fist, so that a wide crease was raised from his cheek to his temple, he sat for a minute without moving. It sometimes seems to me nowadays that—who knows—he might go off on his journeys not so much to seek something as to flee something, and that on returning, he would realize that it was still with him, inside him, unriddable, inexhaustible. I cannot track down a name for his secret, but I only know that that was the source of that special—neither glad nor morose, having indeed no connection with the outward appearance of human emotions—solitude to which neither my mother nor all the entomologists of the world had any admittance. And strange: perhaps the estate watchman, a crooked old man who had twice been singed by night lightning, the sole person among our rural retainers who had learned without my father’s help (who had taught it to a whole regiment of Asian hunters) to catch and kill a butterfly without mangling it (which, of course, did not stop him advising me with a businesslike air not to be in a hurry to catch small butterflies, “tiddlers” as he expressed it, in spring, but to wait till summer when they would have grown up), namely he, who frankly and with no fear or surprise considered that my father knew a thing or two that nobody else knew, was in his own way right.

  However that may have been, I am convince
d now that our life then really was imbued with a magic unknown in other families. From conversations with my father, from daydreams in his absence, from the neighborhood of thousands of books full of drawings of animals, from the precious shimmer of the collections, from the maps, from all the heraldry of nature and the cabbalism of Latin names, life took on a kind of bewitching lightness that made me feel as if my own travels were about to begin. Thence, I borrow my wings today. Among the old, tranquil, velvet-framed family photographs in my father’s study there hung a copy of the picture: Marco Polo leaving Venice. She was rosy, this Venice, and the water of her lagoon was azure, with swans twice the size of the boats, into one of which tiny violet men were descending by way of a plank, in order to board a ship which was waiting a little way off with sails furled—and I cannot tear myself away from this mysterious beauty, these ancient colors which swim before the eyes as if seeking new shapes, when I now imagine the outfitting of my father’s caravan in Przhevalsk, where he used to go with post-horses from Tashkent, having dispatched in advance by slow convoy a store of supplies for three years. His Cossacks went round the neighboring villages buying horses, mules and camels; they prepared the pack boxes and pouches (what was there not in these Sartish yagtans and leather bags tried by centuries, from cognac to pulverized peas, from ingots of silver to nails for horseshoes); and after a requiem on the shore of the lake by the burial rock of the explorer Przhevalski, crowned with a bronze eagle—around which the intrepid local pheasants were wont to roost—the caravan took the road.

  After that I see the caravan, before it gets drawn into the mountains, winding among hills of a paradisean green shade, depending both on their grassy raiment and on the apple-bright epidotic rock, of which they are composed. The compact, sturdy Kalmuk ponies walk in single file forming echelons: the paired packloads of equal weight are seized twice with lariats so that nothing can shift and a Cossack leads every echelon by the bridle. In front of the caravan, a Berdan rifle over his shoulder and a butterfly net at the ready, wearing spectacles and a nankin blouse, Father rides on his white trotter accompanied by a native horseman. Closing the detachment comes the geodesist Kunitsyn (this is the way I see it), a majestic old man who has spent half a lifetime in imperturable wanderings, with his instruments in cases—chronometers, surveying compasses, an artifical horizon—and when he stops to take a bearing or to note down azimuths in his journal, his horse is held by an assistant, a small anemic German, Ivan Ivanovich Viskott, formerly chemist at Gatchina, whom my father had once taught to prepare bird skins and who took part from then on in all the expeditions, until he died of gangrene in the summer of 1903 in Dyn-Kou.

  Further I see the mountains: the Tyan-Shan range. In search of passes (marked on the map according to oral data but first explored by my father) the caravan ascended over steep slopes and narrow ledges, slipped down to the north, to the steppe teeming with saigas, ascended again to the south, here fording torrents, there trying to get across high water—and up, up, along almost impassable trails. How the sunlight played! The dryness of the air produced an amazing contrast between light and shadow: in the light there were such flashes, such a wealth of brilliance, that at times it became impossible to look at a rock, at a stream; and in the shadow a darkness which absorbed all detail, so that every color lived a magically multiplied life and the coats of the horses changed as they entered the cool of the poplars.

  The boom of water in the gorge was enough to stun a man; head and breast filled with an electric agitation; the water rushed with awesome force—as smooth, however, as molten lead—then suddenly swelled out monstrously as it reached the rapids, its varicolored waves piling up and falling over the lustrous brows of the stones with a furious roar; and then, crashing from a height of twenty feet, out of a rainbow and into darkness, it ran further, now changed: seething, smoke-blue and snowlike from the foam, it struck first one side and then the other of the conglomeratic canyon in such a way that it seemed the reverberating mountain fastness could never withstand it; on its banks, meanwhile, in blissful quiet, the irises were in bloom—and suddenly a herd of marais dashed out of a black firwood onto a dazzling Alpine meadow and halted, quivering. No, it was only the air quivering … they had already vanished.

  I can conjure up with particular clarity—in this transparent and changeable setting—my father’s principal and constant occupation, the occupation for whose only sake he undertook these tremendous journeys. I see him leaning down from the saddle amid a clatter of sliding stones to sweep in with a swing of his net on the end of its long handle (a twist of the wrist causing the end of the muslin bag, full of rustling and throbbing, to flip across the ring, thus preventing escape) some royal relative of our Apollos, which had been skimming with a ranging flight over the dangerous screes; and not only he but also the other riders (the Cossack corporal Semyon Zharkoy, for example, or the Buryat Buyantuyev, or else that representative of mine whom I sent in the wake of my father throughout my boyhood) work their way fearlessly up the rocks, in pursuit of the white, richly ocellated butterfly which they catch at last; and here it is in my father’s fingers, dead, its hairy yellowish incurved body resembling a willow catkin, and the glazy underside of its crisp folded wings showing the blood-red maculation at their roots.

  He avoided dawdling in Chinese roadhouses, especially overnight, because he disliked them for their “bustle devoid of feeling” that consisted solely of shouting without the slightest hint of laughter; but strangely enough, in his memory later the smell of these inns, that special air belonging to any place where Chinese dwell—a rancid mixture of kitchen fumes, smoke from burned manure, opium and the stable—spoke more to him of his beloved hunting than the recollected fragrancy of mountain meadows.

  Moving across the Tyan-Shan with the caravan I can now see evening approaching, drawing a shadow over the mountain slopes. Postponing until the morning a difficult crossing (a ramshackle bridge has been thrown across the turbulent river, consisting of stone slabs on top of brushwood, but the way up on the other side is steepish, and, moreover, as smooth as glass), the caravan settles down for the night. While the colors of sunset still linger in the aerial tiers of the sky, and supper is being prepared, the Cossacks, having first taken off the animals’ sweatcloths and felt under-blankets, wash the wounds made by the packs. In the darkling air the clear ring of shoeing resounds above the ample noise of water. It has grown quite dark. Father has climbed a rock looking for a place to suit his calcium lamp for catching moths. Thence one can see in Chinese perspective (from above), in a deep gully, the redness, transparent in the darkness, of the campfire; through the edges of its breathing flame seem to float the broad-shouldered shadows of men, endlessly changing their outlines, and a red reflection trembles, without moving from the spot, on the seething water of the river. But above, all is quiet and dark, only rarely does a bell tinkle: the horses, who have already stood to receive their portion of dry fodder, are now roaming among the granite debris. Overhead, frighteningly and entrancingly close, the stars have come out, each conspicuous, each a live orbicle, clearly revealing its globular essence. Moths begin to come to the lure of the lamp: they describe crazy circles around it, hitting the reflector with a ping; they fall, they crawl over the spread sheet into the circle of light, gray, with eyes like burning coals, vibrating, flying up and falling again—and a large, brightly illumined, unhurriedly skillful hand, with almond-shaped fingernails, rakes noctuid after noctuid into the killing jar.

  Sometimes he was quite alone, without even this nearness of men sleeping in camp tents, on felt mattresses, around the camel bedded down on the campfire ashes. Taking advantage of lengthy halts in places with abundant food for the caravan animals, Father would go away for several days on reconnaissance, and in doing so, carried away by some new pierid, more than once ignored the rule of mountain hunting: never to follow a path of no return. And now I continually ask myself what did he use to think about in the solitary night: I try fervently in the darkness to d
ivine the current of his thoughts, and I have much less success with this than with my mental visits to places which I have never seen. What did he think about? About a recent catch? About my mother, about us? About the innate strangeness of human life, a sense of which he mysteriously transmitted to me? Or perhaps I am wrong in retrospectively forcing upon him the secret which he carries now, when newly gloomy and preoccupied, concealing the pain of an unknown wound, concealing death as something shameful, he appears in my dreams, but which then he did not have—but simply was happy in that incompletely named world in which at every step he named the nameless.

  After spending the whole summer in the mountains (not one summer but several, in different years, which are superimposed one on another in translucent layers) our caravan moved east through a gulch into a stony desert. We saw gradually disappear both the bed of the stream as it split and fanned out, and those plants that to the last remain faithful to travelers: stunted ammodendrons, lasiagrostis, and ephedras. Having loaded the camels with water we plunged into spectral wilds where here and there big pebbles covered completely the yielding, reddish-brown clay of the desert, in places mottled with crusts of dirty snow and outcrops of salt, which we took in the distance for the walls of the town we sought. The way was dangerous as a result of the terrible storms, during which at midday everything was blanketed in a salty brown fog; the wind roared, granules of gravel lashed one’s face, the camels lay down and our tarpaulin tent was torn to shreds. Because of these storms the surface of the land has changed unbelievably, presenting the fantastic outlines of castles, colonnades and staircases; or else the hurricane would scour out a hollow—as if here in this desert the elemental forces that had fashioned the world were still furiously in action. But there were also days of a wonderful lull, when horned larks (Father aptly called them “gigglers”) poured forth their mimetic trills and flocks of ordinary sparrows accompanied our emaciated animals. On occasion we would pass the day in isolated settlements consisting of two or three homesteads and a ruined temple. At other times we would be attacked by Tanguts in sheepskin coats and red-and-blue woolen boots: a brief colorful episode on the way. And then there were the mirages—the mirages where nature, that exquisite cheat, achieved absolute miracles: visions of water were so clear that they reflected the real rocks nearby!