Dear Don,
Alfred Appel Jr. (1970) asked why VN was so
fond of Vanessa atalanta. The
writer replied that "Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in my
youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to Northern Russia, where it
was called "The Butterfly of Doom" because it was especially abundant in
1881, the year Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on
the underside of its two hind wings seem to read '1881.' The Red
Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many
other
migratory butterflies." (_Strong Opinions_, 170)
Probably Nabokov selected this
association bt. the Red Admiral and DOOM ( in Pale Fire it
appears as a "heraldic butterfly", somewhere) to signal not only
death or madness but, also, an authorial intervention.
At least, this is what I gathered from VN's
introductory remarks to Bend Sinister where, as he explains, the term "bend
sinister" points to the heraldic bar which splits
an escutcheon in two
from left to right : "This choice of title [ for the
novel BS] was an
attempt to suggest an outline
broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being".
The theme
rises again at the end with his coming in to rescue Adam: "it was
then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an
inclined beam of pale light causing instantaneous madness, but at least
saving him from the senseless agony of his logical
fate".
"The inclined beam of pale light", with
color variations, often occurs in VN's novels and it is inserted
with such elegance that it often may escape our notice.
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 4:04 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Red Admiral vs Cabbage
White
Hi, Carolyn. Many
thanks for the Red Admiral Rothschild reference. I'll
check it out
today. What I had in mind was not so much that the general
proposition
that Red Admiral = death but that VN's inteview comment that the
asserted
presence of the figure 1881 on the hind wind heralded
the death of Tsar Alexander
II. I have not been
abl