Nabokov avidly pursued his lifelong passion for hunting, collecting, and studying butterflies. The technical name for the branch of entomology dedicated to butterflies is “Lepidoptera,” and Nabokov prized the meticulous attention to precise aesthetic detail associated with this science. He also admired the mimicry observable in some butterflies, which he associated with the artifice and deception involved in great literature.
The picture above shows the Red Admirable butterfly, whose technical name is “Vanessa Atalanta,” which appears several times in Pale Fire. In Strong Opinions, Nabokov responds to an interviewer’s question about the Vanessa Atalanta:
The Vanessa Atalanta “appears frequently in your own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on John Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed, the insect appears in King, Queen Knave just after you’ve withdrawn the authorial omniscience—killing the characters, so to speak—and in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, you recall having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of Vanessa atalanta?
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 mirgratory butterflies (Strong Opinions 169-70).
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov also explains the similarity between the mimicry of butterflies and the creative deception of art.
“The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things.
[. . .] When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-holes are generously thrown in. ‘Natural selection,’ in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of ‘the struggle for life’ when a protective device was carried to the point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception” (125).