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[Fwd: RE: pinning down ADA's Krolik]
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EDITOR's NOTE. NABOKV-L thanks Brian Boyd for the item below.
Pinning Down Krolik
Brian Boyd
Since Don has called for more contributions:
Naturally I have a pack of ADA annotations up my sleeve, but it is the
most
recent surprises that always seem the most exciting. Here is one that
offers
an interesting example of the kind of cooperation between scholars that
Don
was exhorting us to, although this particular confluence happened
outside
the list.
I wrote somewhere last year (I think it was on Nabokv-L) that we
wouldn't
crack all the Lepidoptera allusions in Nabokov, or even get a perfect
text
of "Father's Butterflies," until we discovered a lepidopterist fluent in
Russian and English who had read all Nabokov. We are now getting close!
In November 2000 I attended a conference with a Nabokov subsection at
the
Tauric University of Simferopol (Crimea), where I was lucky enough to
meet
Professor Konstantin Efetov, a distinguished and enthusiastic
lepidopterist,
a specialist in moths, an authority on the family Zygaenidae (Forester
and
Burnet moths).
Nabokov, incidentally, mentions Zygaenidae only twice: once by name, in
Chapter 2 of DAR (p. 150 of the Chekhov and Ardis editions: "Na
skabioze, v
kompanii s moshkoy, pomestilas' krasno-sinyaya, s sinimi syazhkami,
tsyganka, pokhozhaya na ryazhennogo zhuka"; Vintage GIFT 133: "A
blue-and-red Burnet moth with blue antennae, resembling a beetle in
fancy
dress, was settled on a scabiosa in company with a midge": notice that
in
the Russian there is no "Burnet moth," which VN added in the
translation,
but only the apt metaphor "gypsy"); and, once, by description,
appropriately, in his poem "Krym," "Crimea" (1920): "Ya lyubovalsya
motyl'kami / stepnymi - s krasnymi glazkami / na tyomnykh krylyshkakh .
. .
Tekla / ot teni k teni zolotistoy, / podobna muzyke volnistoy, /
neizyasnimaya Yaila!": "I would feast my eyes on the moths / of the
steppe,
with red eyespots / on dark winglets. . . . There flowed / from shade to
golden shade, / like a musical wave, / the ineffable Yaila!" Dr Efetov
has
been able to identify, from the location, the Yaila (the grassy
steppeland
sloping slowly down northwards from the tops of the mountains on the
Crimea's southern coast), and from the color of the eyespots, that the
moth
belongs to one of five possible members of the genus Zygaena, most
probably
Z. carniolica.
Dr Efetov has not only collected and published extensively on Crimean
Lepidoptera (one of his own catches on July 1, 1988 was the first
recorded
Crimean capture since Nabokov's, the first ever recorded, on July 2,
1918,
of Eugonia xanthomelas; since no other capture had been recorded in the
area, Nabokov's identification had been presumed erroneous and was
omitted
from a 1985 catalogue of Crimean butterflies, but reinstated in Efetov's
own
1990 catalogue), but has also collected Lepidoptera in many of the areas
of
Central Asia where in DAR Godunov-Cherdyntsev has collected, and has an
excellent knowledge of the history of lepidopterology, especially in
Russia.
I put Dieter E. Zimmer (still revising his invaluable Guide to Nabokov's
Butterflies and Moths), in touch with Dr Efetov. In answer to one of
Zimmer's questions about one of Nabokov's Crimean catches, which Nabokov
lists as Euchloe belia var. uralensis, Efetov identifies it as Euchloe
ausonia volgensis Krulikovsky, 1897.
"Krulikovsky" made my eyebrows dance like caterpillars. Since ADA's Dr
Krolik is a passionate lepidopterist, active in the 1880s, who has named
numerous species of butterfly, I asked Dr Efetov if Krulikovsky was a
distinguished enough lepidopterist for Nabokov to have known of him, and
for
it to be likely that he was at least one basis for Krolik. I also
pointed
out that Krolik's name fitted into a pattern of doctors with
international
rabbit-names in ADA (Krolik, Seitz, Lagosse, Coniglietto, Kunikulinov).
Professor Efetov agreed that Krolik must reflect Krulikovsky:
"Krulikovsky (=Krulikowsky), Leon (=Leonid) Konstantinovich (1864-1930)
is a
famous Russian lepidopterist. He lived in the town of Sarapul, Vyatka
Province (Guberniya). He collected in the central and southern Urals, in
the
Kazan, Saratov and Ufa Provinces, in Central Asia and eastern Siberia.
Krulikovsky was a member of the Russian Entomological Society since
1888. He
published many papers about the Lepidoptera of different regions of
Russia.
Of course VN knew about him.
" 'Krulikovsky' is a Polish surname.
"Krolik (in Russian) = krulik (in Polish) = rabbit (in English)."
I have suggested another connection between the rabbit-doctor names in
"Annotations to ADA, 15," The Nabokovian 44 (2000), 81-84. The two most
important of the rabbit doctors, Krolik and Lagosse, have strong
associations with eros and erotica. Nabokov, who was being published in
The
New Yorker and in Playboy in the 1960s, the decade in which he was
writing
ADA, wrote to Playboy pointing out that the Playboy bunny, which always
featured in some form or another on the cover of Playboy magazine,
looked
like a butterfly with an eyespot (for Nabokov's drawing, see Nabokov's
Butterflies, p. 667). I suspect, although I did not make quite explicit
in
"Annotations 15," that Nabokov was also thinking of the butterfly that
features in each issue of The New Yorker, peered at by the beau Eustace
Tilley, and on the cover of each February anniversary issue, again
flitting
in some way before a version of Eustace Tilley, and that together
prompted
Nabokov in both Pale Fire and ADA to rename The New Yorker, The Beau and
the
Butterfly.
Somehow Playboy and its Bunny evoked an echo in VN's mind with
butterflies
and The Beau and the Butterfly.
One reason may be that butterflies and rabbits had been associated in
his
mind for some time. In Speak, Memory he recalls "By 1910, I had dreamed
my
way through the first volumes of Seitz's prodigious picture book Die
Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde" (123). As he wrote ADA, the name Adalbert
Seitz naturally came to mind, and he has Ada in 1888 pretend to visit
Kaluga
"to consult Dr. Krolik's cousin, the gynecologist Seitz (or 'Zayats,' as
she
transliterated him mentally since it also belonged, as Dr. 'Rabbit' did,
to
the leporine group in Russian pronunciation)" (I.37: "zayats," as the
German
"Seitz" almost sounds to a Russian ear, is the Russian for "hare").
No one is likely to be able to discover when Nabokov first noticed that
the
names of two celebrated lepidopterists, Seitz and Krulikowsky, both
"belonged to the leporine group," but with his eye for pattern and his
early
knowledge of both lepidopterists, it may well have been a "found
pattern"
that sat dormant in his mind for a long time until the
Playboy-Bunny-Beau-Butterfly prompted him to complicate the pattern much
further.
His justification? Probably that he felt nature's patterns, in
Lepidoptera
and in mimicry, were still more convoluted.
And as he said, he preferred the obscure fact to the obvious symbol.
But Nabokov also seems to set up a deliberate opposition-and-association
between the proliferation of rabbit names, and the prolific breeding
capacities of rabbits, on the one hand, and on the other the pointed
sterility of the Veens, despite their rampant sexuality, and Ada's
failure
to develop the world-wide larvarium she had hoped to establish with
Krolik.
Indeed she even inters some of Krolik's larvae in his grave. Perhaps
here as
in other ways Nabokov suggests that these Veens and their hectic
coupling
parallel the Villa Venuses (themselves a rococo reflection of the
Playboy
clubs) and their ultimate sterility and deadness.
By the end of the summer of 1884, "Dr. Krolik was swiftly running on
short
legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in another
hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884)--as it was known until changed
to
A. prittwitzi Stumper (1883) by the inexorable law of taxonomic
priority."
(I.8). Could the emphasis on error here (Prittwitz was the German
general
relieved of his command only three weeks into World War I, after a
series of
disastrous military defeats, and "Stumper" means "blunderer, bungler")
reflect a mistake VN might have recognized in his own youthful "A Few
Notes
on Crimean Lepidoptera," as he was compiling his Butterflies of Europe
in
1963-65, just before beginning ADA? In his 1920 article he had
identified as
Euchloe belia var. uralensis a butterfly that Efetov and Zimmer concur
is
actually Euchloe ausonia (Hubner [1804]) ssp. volgensis Krulikovsky
(1897)
and not Anthocharis belia Linnaeus 1767, which belongs to a very closely
related Pierid genus. VN noted the species emerging in April 1918, the
month
the German army, with defeat not far ahead, occupied the Crimea, and he
saw
it often "in the parks and gardens of the coast" (Nabokov's Butterflies
100)
during that strangely carefree summer. But was he led astray in naming
it by
German lepidopterological taxonomy, which he would consistently
criticize in
later years (see Nabokov's Butterflies 202: "Germans, 'masterful
collectors,
but wretched classifiers,' as [Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev] put it";
309:
"The complete absurdity which the Germans attain through complete
ignorance
of the principles of modern taxonomy . . . ")?
Pinning Down Krolik
Brian Boyd
Since Don has called for more contributions:
Naturally I have a pack of ADA annotations up my sleeve, but it is the
most
recent surprises that always seem the most exciting. Here is one that
offers
an interesting example of the kind of cooperation between scholars that
Don
was exhorting us to, although this particular confluence happened
outside
the list.
I wrote somewhere last year (I think it was on Nabokv-L) that we
wouldn't
crack all the Lepidoptera allusions in Nabokov, or even get a perfect
text
of "Father's Butterflies," until we discovered a lepidopterist fluent in
Russian and English who had read all Nabokov. We are now getting close!
In November 2000 I attended a conference with a Nabokov subsection at
the
Tauric University of Simferopol (Crimea), where I was lucky enough to
meet
Professor Konstantin Efetov, a distinguished and enthusiastic
lepidopterist,
a specialist in moths, an authority on the family Zygaenidae (Forester
and
Burnet moths).
Nabokov, incidentally, mentions Zygaenidae only twice: once by name, in
Chapter 2 of DAR (p. 150 of the Chekhov and Ardis editions: "Na
skabioze, v
kompanii s moshkoy, pomestilas' krasno-sinyaya, s sinimi syazhkami,
tsyganka, pokhozhaya na ryazhennogo zhuka"; Vintage GIFT 133: "A
blue-and-red Burnet moth with blue antennae, resembling a beetle in
fancy
dress, was settled on a scabiosa in company with a midge": notice that
in
the Russian there is no "Burnet moth," which VN added in the
translation,
but only the apt metaphor "gypsy"); and, once, by description,
appropriately, in his poem "Krym," "Crimea" (1920): "Ya lyubovalsya
motyl'kami / stepnymi - s krasnymi glazkami / na tyomnykh krylyshkakh .
. .
Tekla / ot teni k teni zolotistoy, / podobna muzyke volnistoy, /
neizyasnimaya Yaila!": "I would feast my eyes on the moths / of the
steppe,
with red eyespots / on dark winglets. . . . There flowed / from shade to
golden shade, / like a musical wave, / the ineffable Yaila!" Dr Efetov
has
been able to identify, from the location, the Yaila (the grassy
steppeland
sloping slowly down northwards from the tops of the mountains on the
Crimea's southern coast), and from the color of the eyespots, that the
moth
belongs to one of five possible members of the genus Zygaena, most
probably
Z. carniolica.
Dr Efetov has not only collected and published extensively on Crimean
Lepidoptera (one of his own catches on July 1, 1988 was the first
recorded
Crimean capture since Nabokov's, the first ever recorded, on July 2,
1918,
of Eugonia xanthomelas; since no other capture had been recorded in the
area, Nabokov's identification had been presumed erroneous and was
omitted
from a 1985 catalogue of Crimean butterflies, but reinstated in Efetov's
own
1990 catalogue), but has also collected Lepidoptera in many of the areas
of
Central Asia where in DAR Godunov-Cherdyntsev has collected, and has an
excellent knowledge of the history of lepidopterology, especially in
Russia.
I put Dieter E. Zimmer (still revising his invaluable Guide to Nabokov's
Butterflies and Moths), in touch with Dr Efetov. In answer to one of
Zimmer's questions about one of Nabokov's Crimean catches, which Nabokov
lists as Euchloe belia var. uralensis, Efetov identifies it as Euchloe
ausonia volgensis Krulikovsky, 1897.
"Krulikovsky" made my eyebrows dance like caterpillars. Since ADA's Dr
Krolik is a passionate lepidopterist, active in the 1880s, who has named
numerous species of butterfly, I asked Dr Efetov if Krulikovsky was a
distinguished enough lepidopterist for Nabokov to have known of him, and
for
it to be likely that he was at least one basis for Krolik. I also
pointed
out that Krolik's name fitted into a pattern of doctors with
international
rabbit-names in ADA (Krolik, Seitz, Lagosse, Coniglietto, Kunikulinov).
Professor Efetov agreed that Krolik must reflect Krulikovsky:
"Krulikovsky (=Krulikowsky), Leon (=Leonid) Konstantinovich (1864-1930)
is a
famous Russian lepidopterist. He lived in the town of Sarapul, Vyatka
Province (Guberniya). He collected in the central and southern Urals, in
the
Kazan, Saratov and Ufa Provinces, in Central Asia and eastern Siberia.
Krulikovsky was a member of the Russian Entomological Society since
1888. He
published many papers about the Lepidoptera of different regions of
Russia.
Of course VN knew about him.
" 'Krulikovsky' is a Polish surname.
"Krolik (in Russian) = krulik (in Polish) = rabbit (in English)."
I have suggested another connection between the rabbit-doctor names in
"Annotations to ADA, 15," The Nabokovian 44 (2000), 81-84. The two most
important of the rabbit doctors, Krolik and Lagosse, have strong
associations with eros and erotica. Nabokov, who was being published in
The
New Yorker and in Playboy in the 1960s, the decade in which he was
writing
ADA, wrote to Playboy pointing out that the Playboy bunny, which always
featured in some form or another on the cover of Playboy magazine,
looked
like a butterfly with an eyespot (for Nabokov's drawing, see Nabokov's
Butterflies, p. 667). I suspect, although I did not make quite explicit
in
"Annotations 15," that Nabokov was also thinking of the butterfly that
features in each issue of The New Yorker, peered at by the beau Eustace
Tilley, and on the cover of each February anniversary issue, again
flitting
in some way before a version of Eustace Tilley, and that together
prompted
Nabokov in both Pale Fire and ADA to rename The New Yorker, The Beau and
the
Butterfly.
Somehow Playboy and its Bunny evoked an echo in VN's mind with
butterflies
and The Beau and the Butterfly.
One reason may be that butterflies and rabbits had been associated in
his
mind for some time. In Speak, Memory he recalls "By 1910, I had dreamed
my
way through the first volumes of Seitz's prodigious picture book Die
Gross-Schmetterlinge der Erde" (123). As he wrote ADA, the name Adalbert
Seitz naturally came to mind, and he has Ada in 1888 pretend to visit
Kaluga
"to consult Dr. Krolik's cousin, the gynecologist Seitz (or 'Zayats,' as
she
transliterated him mentally since it also belonged, as Dr. 'Rabbit' did,
to
the leporine group in Russian pronunciation)" (I.37: "zayats," as the
German
"Seitz" almost sounds to a Russian ear, is the Russian for "hare").
No one is likely to be able to discover when Nabokov first noticed that
the
names of two celebrated lepidopterists, Seitz and Krulikowsky, both
"belonged to the leporine group," but with his eye for pattern and his
early
knowledge of both lepidopterists, it may well have been a "found
pattern"
that sat dormant in his mind for a long time until the
Playboy-Bunny-Beau-Butterfly prompted him to complicate the pattern much
further.
His justification? Probably that he felt nature's patterns, in
Lepidoptera
and in mimicry, were still more convoluted.
And as he said, he preferred the obscure fact to the obvious symbol.
But Nabokov also seems to set up a deliberate opposition-and-association
between the proliferation of rabbit names, and the prolific breeding
capacities of rabbits, on the one hand, and on the other the pointed
sterility of the Veens, despite their rampant sexuality, and Ada's
failure
to develop the world-wide larvarium she had hoped to establish with
Krolik.
Indeed she even inters some of Krolik's larvae in his grave. Perhaps
here as
in other ways Nabokov suggests that these Veens and their hectic
coupling
parallel the Villa Venuses (themselves a rococo reflection of the
Playboy
clubs) and their ultimate sterility and deadness.
By the end of the summer of 1884, "Dr. Krolik was swiftly running on
short
legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in another
hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884)--as it was known until changed
to
A. prittwitzi Stumper (1883) by the inexorable law of taxonomic
priority."
(I.8). Could the emphasis on error here (Prittwitz was the German
general
relieved of his command only three weeks into World War I, after a
series of
disastrous military defeats, and "Stumper" means "blunderer, bungler")
reflect a mistake VN might have recognized in his own youthful "A Few
Notes
on Crimean Lepidoptera," as he was compiling his Butterflies of Europe
in
1963-65, just before beginning ADA? In his 1920 article he had
identified as
Euchloe belia var. uralensis a butterfly that Efetov and Zimmer concur
is
actually Euchloe ausonia (Hubner [1804]) ssp. volgensis Krulikovsky
(1897)
and not Anthocharis belia Linnaeus 1767, which belongs to a very closely
related Pierid genus. VN noted the species emerging in April 1918, the
month
the German army, with defeat not far ahead, occupied the Crimea, and he
saw
it often "in the parks and gardens of the coast" (Nabokov's Butterflies
100)
during that strangely carefree summer. But was he led astray in naming
it by
German lepidopterological taxonomy, which he would consistently
criticize in
later years (see Nabokov's Butterflies 202: "Germans, 'masterful
collectors,
but wretched classifiers,' as [Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev] put it";
309:
"The complete absurdity which the Germans attain through complete
ignorance
of the principles of modern taxonomy . . . ")?