Mourning Cloak Butterfly in Pale Fire
I have been
browsing PALE
FIRE after an absence of some years. As you know, the butterflies in PF
have
been received a good deal of well-merited
attention -- most importantly in Dieter Zimmer’s fine
A Guide to Nabokov’s
Butterflies and Moths, 2001. Boyd’s
annotations to
Library of America edition and the Luksemburg-Il’in
Russian
notes on PF also additional points of interest. On a second
reading this
time around, I stumbled upon a very nice and apparently hitherto
unnoticed
butterfly allusion. It occurs in Kinbote’s
Foreword.
“Another, much thinner, set of a dozen cards, clipped together and enclosed in the same manila envelope as the main batch, bears some additional couplets running their brief and sometimes smudgy course among a chaos of first drafts. As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fé.”
NB Shade standing “like an official mourner.” The “black butterflies,”i.e. the ashes fluttering up from Shades’s incinerator are obviously being likened to “Mourning Cloaks.” I offer the picture below.
The Nymphalis
(formerly Vanessa) antiopa is quite common
in the
Although Vanessa atalanta (the Red Admiral) plays a key role in PF, the “Mourning Cloak” makes only this one quasi-covert appearance. According to Zimmer, the Morning Cloak occurs in a number of VN’s artistic and etymological writings. The British common name is “Camberwell Beauty” while the Russian popular name traurnitsa derives from the Russian (<German) root mean “mourn.” Antiopa was the name of at least two women in classical mythology--both of whom came to tragic ends. One of them figures in a Shakespeare play, drawn apparently from Plutarch.