The Gift (16 page)
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
He worked in close touch with his remarkable Russian contemporaries. Kholodkovski calls him “the conquistador of Russian entomology.” He collaborated with Charles Oberthur, Grand Duke Nikolai Mihailovich, Leech and Seitz. Scattered throughout entomological
journals are hundreds of his papers, of which the first—“On the peculiarities of the occurrence of certain butterflies in the Province of St. Petersburg” (Horae Soc. Ent. Ross.)—is dated 1877, and the last—
“Austautia simonoides
n. sp., a Geometrid Moth Mimicking a Small Parnassius” (Trans. Ent. Soc. London)—is dated 1916. He conducted a weighty and acrimonious polemic with Staudinger, author of the notorious
Katalog
. He was vice-president of the Russian Entomological Society, Full Member of the Moscow Soc. of Investigators of Nature, Member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Soc, and Honorary Member of a multitude of learned societies abroad.
Between 1885 and 1918 he covered an incredible amount of territory, making surveys of his route on a three-mile scale for a distance of many thousands of miles and forming astounding collections. During these years he completed eight major expeditions which in all lasted eighteen years; but between them there was also a multitude of minor journeys, “diversions” as he called them, considering as part of these minutiae not only his trips to the less-well-investigated countries of Europe but also the journey around the world he had made in his youth. Tackling Asia in earnest he investigated Eastern Siberia, Altai, Fergana, the Pamirs, Western China, “the islands of the Gobi Sea and its coasts,” Mongolia, and “the incorrigible continent” of Tibet—and described his travels in precise, weighty words.
Such is the general scheme of my father’s life, copied out of an encyclopedia. It still does not sing, but I can already hear a living voice within it. It remains to be said that in 1898, at thirty-eight years of age, he married Elizaveta Pavlovna Vezhin, the twenty-year-old daughter of a well-known statesman; that he had two children by her; that in the intervals between his journeys.…
An agonizing, somehow sacrilegious question, hardly expressible in words: was her life with him happy, together and apart? Shall we disturb this inner world or shall we limit ourselves to a mere description of routes—
arida quaedam viarum descripto?
“Dear Mamma, I now have a great favor to ask of you. Today is the 8th of July, his birthday. On any other day I could never bring myself to ask you. Tell me something about you and him. Not the
sort of thing I can find in our shared memories but the sort of thing you alone have gone through and preserved.” And here is part of the reply:
… imagine—a honeymoon trip, the Pyrenees, the divine bliss of everything, of the sun, the brooks, the flowers, the snowy summits, even the flies in the hotels—and of being every moment together. And then, one morning, I had a headache or something, or the heat was too much for me. He said he would go for a half hour’s stroll before lunch. With odd clearness I remember sitting on a hotel balcony (around me peace, the mountains, the wonderful cliffs of Gavarnie) and reading for the first time a book not intended for young girls,
Une Vie
by Maupassant. I remember I liked it very much at the time. I look at my little watch and I see that it is already lunchtime, more than an hour has passed since he left. I wait. At first I am a little cross, then I begin to worry. Lunch is served on the terrace and I am unable to eat. I go out onto the lawn in front of the hotel, I return to my room, I go outside again. In another hour I was in an indescribable state of terror, agitation, God knows what. I was traveling for the first time, I was inexperienced and easily frightened, and then there was
Une Vie
.… I decided that he had abandoned me, the most stupid and terrible thoughts kept getting into my head, the day was passing, it seemed to me that the servants were gloating at me—oh, I cannot convey to you what it was like! I had even begun to thrust some dresses into a suitcase in order to return immediately to Russia, and then I suddenly decided he was dead, I ran out and began to babble something crazy and to send for the police. Suddenly I saw him walking across the lawn, his face more cheerful than I had ever seen it before, although he had been cheerful the whole time; there he came, waving his hand to me as if nothing had happened, and his light trousers had wet green spots on them, his panama had gone, his jacket was torn on one side.… I expect you have already guessed what had happened. Thank God at least that he finally caught it after all—in his handkerchief, on a sheer cliff—if not he would have spent the night in the mountains, as he coolly explained to me.… But now I want to tell you about something else, from a slightly later period, when I already knew what a really good separation could be. You were quite small then, coming up to three, you can’t remember. That spring he went off to Tashkent. From there he was due to set off on a journey on the first of June and to be away for not less than two years.
That was already the second big absence during our time together. I often think now that if all the years he spent without me from the day of our wedding were added together they would amount in all to no more than his present absence. And I also think of the fact that it sometimes seemed to me then that I was unhappy, but now I know that I was always happy, that that unhappiness was one of the colors of happiness. In short, I don’t know what came over me that spring, I had always been sort of batty when he went away, but that time I was quite disgracefully so. I suddenly decided that I would catch up with him and travel with him at least till autumn. Secretly I gathered a thousand things together; I had absolutely no idea what was needed, but it seemed to me that I was stocking up everything well and properly. I remember binoculars, and an alpenstock, and a camp-bed, and a sun helmet, and a hareskin coat straight out of
The Captain’s Daughter
, and a little mother-of-pearl revolver, and some great tarpaulin affair that I was afraid of, and a complicated water bottle that I couldn’t unscrew. In short, think of the equipment of Tartarin de Tarascon: How I managed to leave you little ones, how I said good-by to you—that’s in a kind of mist, and I don’t remember any more how I slipped out from Uncle Oleg’s surveillance, how I got to the station. But I was both frightened and cheerful, I felt myself a heroine, and on the stations everyone looked at my English traveling costume with its short
(entendons-nous:
to the ankle) checked skirt, with the binoculars over one shoulder and a kind of purse over the other. That’s how I looked when I jumped out of the tarantass in a settlement just outside of Tashkent, when in the brilliant sunlight, I shall never forget it, I caught sight of your father within a hundred yards of the road: he was standing with one foot resting on a white stone, one elbow on a fence, and talking to two Cossacks. I ran across the gravel, shouting and laughing; he turned slowly, and when I suddenly stopped in front of him like a fool, he looked me all over, slit his eyes, and in a horribly unexpected voice spoke three words: “You go home.” And I immediately turned, and went back to my carriage, and got in it, and saw he had put his foot in exactly the same place and had again propped his elbow, continuing his conversation with the Cossacks. And now I was driving back, in a trance, petrified, and only somewhere deep within me preparations had started for a storm of tears. But then after a couple of miles [and here a smile broke through the written line] he overtook me, in a cloud of dust, on a white horse, and we parted this time quite differently, so that I
resumed my way to St. Petersburg almost as cheerfully as I had left it, only that I kept worrying about you two, wondering how you were, but no matter, you were in good health.
No—somehow it seems to me that I do remember all this, perhaps because it was subsequently often mentioned. In general our whole daily life was permeated with stories about Father, with worry about him, expectations of his return, the hidden sorrow of farewells and the wild joy of welcomings. His passion was reflected in all of us, colored in different ways, apprehended in different ways, but permanent and habitual. His home museum, in which stood rows of oak cabinets with glassed drawers, full of crucified butterflies (the rest—the plants, beetles, birds, rodents and reptiles—he gave to his colleagues to study), where it smelled as it probably smells in Paradise, and where the laboratory assistants worked at tables along the one-piece windows, was a kind of mysterious central hearth, illuminating from inside the whole of our St. Petersburg house—and only the noonday roar of the Petro-pavlovsk cannon could invade its quiet. Our relatives, non-entomological friends, the servants and the meekly touchy Yvonna Ivanovna talked of butterflies not as of something really existing but as of a certain attribute of my father, which existed only insofar as he existed, or as of an ailment with which everybody had long since got used to coping, so that with us entomology turned into some sort of routinary hallucination, like a harmless domestic ghost that sits down, no longer surprising anyone, every evening by the fireside. At the same time, none of our countless uncles and aunts took any interest in his science and had hardly even read his popular work, read and reread by dozens of thousands of cultured Russians. Of course Tanya and I had learned to appreciate Father from earliest childhood and he seemed even more enchanting to us than, say, that Harold about whom he told stories to us, Harold who fought with the lions in the Byzantine arena, who pursued brigands in Syria, bathed in the Jordan, took eighty fortresses by storm in Africa, “the Blue Land,” saved the Icelanders from starvation—and was famed from Norway to Sicily, from Yorkshire to Novgorod. Then, when I fell under the spell of butterflies, something
unfolded in my soul and I relived all my father’s journeys, as if I myself had made them: in my dreams I saw the winding road, the caravan, the many-hued mountains, and envied my father madly, agonizingly, to the point of tears—hot and violent tears that would suddenly gush out of me at table as we discussed his letters from the road or even at the simple mention of a far, far place. Every year, with the approach of spring, before moving to the country, I would feel within me a pitiful fraction of what I would have felt before departing for Tibet. On the Nevski Avenue, during the last days of March, when the wooden blocks of the spacious street pavements gleamed dark blue from the damp and the sun, one might see, flying high over the carriages, along the façades of the houses, past the city hall, past the lindens in the square, past the statue of Catherine, the first yellow butterfly. In the classroom the large window was open, sparrows perched on the windowsill and teachers let lessons go by, leaving in their stead squares of blue sky, with footballs falling down out of the blueness. For some reason I always had bad marks in geography and what an expression our geography teacher would have when he used to mention my father’s name, how the inquisitive eyes of my comrades turned on me at this point and how within me the blood rose and fell from suppressed rapture and from fear of expressing that rapture—and now I think of how little I know, how easy it is for me to make some idiotic blunder in describing my father’s researches.
At the beginning of April, to open the season, the members of the Russian Entomological Society used to make a traditional trip to the other side of Black River, in a suburb of St. Petersburg, where in a birch grove which was still naked and wet, still showing patches of holey snow, there occurred on the trunks, its feeble transparent wings pressed flat against the papery bark, our favorite rarity, a specialty of the province. Once or twice they took me with them too. Among these elderly family men cautiously, tensely practicing sorcery in an April wood, there was an old theater critic, a gynecologist, a professor of international law and a general—for some reason I can recall especially clearly the figure of this general (X. B. Lambovski—there was something Paschal about him), his fat back bending low, with one arm placed behind it, next to the
figure of my father, who had sunk on his haunches with a kind of Oriental ease—both were carefully examining in search of pupae a handful of reddish earth dug up with a trowel—and even to this day I am wondering what the coachmen waiting on the road made of all this.
Sometimes, in the country, Grandmother would sail into our schoolroom, Olga Ivanovna Vezhin, plump, fresh-complexioned, in mittens and lace:
“Bonjour les enfants,”
she would sing out sonorously and then, heavily accenting the prepositions, she informed us:
“Je viens de voir
DANS
le jardin
,
PRÈS
du cèdre
,
SUR
une rose un papillon de toute beauté: il était bleu, vert, pourpre, doré—et grand comme ça.”
“Quickly take your net,” she continued, turning to me, “and go into the garden. Perhaps you can still catch it.” And she sailed out, completely oblivious to the fact that if such a fabulous insect were to come my way (it was not even worth a guess as to what banal garden visitor her imagination had so adorned), I would have died of heartbreak. Sometimes, to give me special pleasure, our French governess would choose a certain fable of Florian’s for me to learn by heart, about another impossibly gaudy
petit-maître
butterfly. Sometimes some aunt or other would give me a book by Fabre, whose popular works, full of chitchat, inaccurate observations and downright mistakes, my father treated with scorn. I also remember this: one day, upon missing my net I went out to look for it on the veranda and met my uncle’s orderly returning from somewhere with it on his shoulder, all flushed and with a kindly and shy smile on his rosy lips: “Just see what I’ve caught for you,” he proclaimed in a satisfied voice, dumping the net on the floor; the mesh was secured near the frame by a bit of string, so that a bag was formed in which a variety of live matter swarmed and rustled—and good heavens, what rubbish there was in it: thirty-odd grasshoppers, the head of a daisy, a couple of dragon-flies, ears of wheat, some sand, a cabbage butterfly crushed out of all recognition, and finally, an edible toadstool noticed on the way and added just in case. The Russian common people know and love their country’s nature. How many jeers, how many conjectures and questions have I had occasion to hear when, overcoming my embarrassment, I walked through the village with my net! “Well,
that’s nothing,” said my father, “you should have seen the faces of the Chinese when I was collecting once on some holy mountain, or the look the progressive schoolmistress in a Volga town gave me when I explained to her what I was doing in that ravine.”
