No, it has none of the poetic appeal that I demand from all art, be it letters or the little music I know.
The art teacher in Pnin says that Picasso is supreme, despite his commercial foibles. Kinbote in Pale Fire likes him too, gracing his rented house with «a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse», and your Kinbotish questioner recalls a reproduction of Picasso's Chandelier, pot et casserole emaillee on your writing desk, 1966 (the same one Kinbote had up on his wall during his reign as King Charles). Which aspects of Picasso do you admire?
The graphic aspect, the masterly technique, and the quiet colors. But then, starting with Guernica, his production leaves me indifferent. The aspects of Picasso that I emphatically dislike are the sloppy products of his old age. I also loathe old Matisse. A contemporary artist 1 do admire very much, though not only because he paints Lolitalike creatures, is Balthus.
How are you progressing with your book on the butterfly in art?
I am still working, at my own pace, on an illustrated Butterflies in Art work, from Egyptian antiquity to the Renaissance. It is a purely scientific pursuit. I find an entomological thrill in tracking down and identifying the butterflies represented by old painters. Only recognizable portraits interest me. Some of the problems that might be solved are: were certain species as common in ancient times as they are today? Can the minutiae of evolutionary change be discerned in the pattern of a five-hundred-year-old wing? One simple conclusion I have come to is that no matter how precise an Old Master's brush can be it cannot vie in artistic magic with some of the colored plates drawn by the illustrators of certain scientific works in the nineteenth century. An Old Master did not know that in different species the venation is different and never bothered to examine its structure. It is like painting a hand without knowing anything about its bones or indeed without suspecting it has any. Certain impressionists cannot afford to wear glasses. Only myopia condones the blurry generalizations of ignorance. In high art and pure science detail is everything.
Who are some of the artists who rendered butterflies? Might they not attribute more symbolism to the insect than you do?
Among the many Old Masters who depicted butterflies (obviously netted, or more exactly capped, by their apprentices in the nearest garden) were Hieronymous Bosch (14501516), Jan Brueghel (15681625), Albrecht Durer (14711528), Paolo Porpora (16171673), Daniel Seghers (15901661), and many others. The insect depicted is either part of a still-life (flowers or fruit) arrangement, or more strikingly a live detail in a conventional religious picture (Durer, Francesco di Gentile, etc.). That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.
In 1968 you told me you hoped to travel to various European museums for research purposes. Have you been doing that?
Yes, that's one reason we've been spending so much time in Italy, and in the future will be traveling to Paris and the Louvre, and to the Dutch museums. We've been to small towns in Italy, and to Florence, Venice, Rome, Milano, Naples, and Pompeii, where we found a very badly drawn butterfly, long and thin, like a Mayfly. There are certain obstacles: still-lifes are not very popular today, they are gapfillers, generally hanging in dark places or high up. A ladder may be necessary, a flashlight, a magnifying glass! My object is to identify such a picture if there are butterflies in it (often it's only «Anonymous» or «School of____), and get an efficient person to take a photograph.
Since I don't find many of those pictures in the regular display rooms I try to find the curator because some pictures may turn up in their stacks. It takes so much time: I tramped through the Vatican Museum in Rome and found only one butterfly, a Zebra Swallowtail, in a quite conventional Madonna and Child by Gentile, as realistic as though it were painted yesterday. Such paintings may throw light on the time taken for evolution; one thousand years could show some little change in trend. It's an almost endless pursuit, but if I could manage to collect at least one hundred of these things I would publish reproductions of those particular paintings which include butterflies, and enlarge parts of the picture with the butterfly in life-size. Curiously, the Red Admirable is the most popular; I've collected twenty examples.
That particular butterfly appears frequently in your own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on John Shades 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 migratory butterflies.
The painters you admire are for the most part realists, yet it would not be altogether fair to call you a «realist». Should one find this paradoxical? Or does the problem derive from nomenclature?
The problem derives from pigeonholing.
Your youngmanhood coincides with the experimental decade in Russian painting. Did you follow these developments closely at the time, and what were (are) your feelings about, say, Malevich, Kandinsky, or, to choose a more representational artist, Chagall?
I prefer the experimental decade that coincided with my boyhood — Somov, Benois (Peter Ustinov's uncle, you know), Vrubel, Dobuzhinski,*[ *Who, ca. 1912-13, was young Nabokov's drawing master; see Speak, Memory, pp. 92-94, and 236] etc. Malevich and Kandinsky mean nothing to me and I have always found Chagall's stuff intolerably primitive and grotesque.
Always?
Well, relatively early works such as The Green Jew and The Promenade have their points, but the frescoes and windows he now contributes to temples and the Parisian Opera House plafond are coarse and unbearable.
What of Tchelitchew, whose Hide and Seek (another version of Speak, Memory's Find What the Sailor Has Hidden?) in part describes the experience of reading one of your novels?
I know Tchelitchew's work very little.
The latter artist recalls the Ballets Russes. Were you at all acquainted with that circle, painters as well as dancers and musicians?
My parents had many acquaintances who painted and danced and made music. Our house was one of the first where young Shalyapin sang, and I have foxtrotted with Pavlova in London half a century ago.
Mr. Hilton Kramer, in a recent article in the Sunday New York Times (May 3, 1970) writes, «The accomplishments of at least two living artists who are widely regarded as among the greatest of their time — George Balanchine and Vladimtr Nabokov — are traceable, despite the changes of venue and language and outlook, to the esthetic dream that nourished Diaghilev and the artists he gathered around him in St. Petersburg in the nineties». This is, I suppose, what Mary McCarthy meant when she characterized Pale Fire as a «Faberge gem». Are these analogies just?
I was never much interested in the ballet. «Faberge gems» I have dealt with in Speak, Memory (Chapter Five, p. 111).* [*There the memoirist recalls a morning tour of St. Petersburg with his governess, the majestic Mademoiselle: «We drift past the show windows of Faberge whose mineral monstrosities, jeweled troykas poised on marble ostrich eggs, and the like, highly appreciated by the imperial family, were emblems of grotesque garishness to ours.] Dalanshin, not Dalanchine (note the other mistransliterations). I am at a loss to understand why the names of most of the people with whom I am paired begin with a B.