Word: nabokovs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Nabokov's mother, Elena Ivanovna, who lived on in exile until 1939, read aloud to Vladimir in three languages. More important, she encouraged his attempts at poetry and nourished his susceptibility to sound and color. Mother and son shared a strong sense that certain colors and certain letters of the alphabet are related?p was an unripe apple green, for instance; y's and u's had a brassy "olive sheen." Matching colors and letters, Nabokov evolved a new private word, Kzspygv, which meant but did not spell "rainbow...
...series of nannies and governesses assisted his mother in teaching Vladimir to speak and read English (before he could read Russian). Tutors and coaches turned Nabokov into a competent boxer and a skilled tennis player?good enough, in fact, so that later, in straitened exile, he helped pay his way by giving lessons. More or less on his own he became an expert at chess problems and a collector of butterflies...
There was nothing soft or dreamy about Nabokov. He seems to have been an astonishingly disciplined, highly competitive, hopeless overperformer. His cousin Nicolas, a composer living in Hamburg, remembers Vladimir at 18 as tall, handsome and insufferably skillful at nearly everything?though he always smelled slightly of the ether he used to kill the specimen butterflies he caught. When Vladimir was enrolled in a liberal school expressly chosen by his father, he resented a master's suggestion that the Nabokov coachman deposit him several blocks away so he could arrive at class democratically afoot. A more galling comment, though, came...
...pursuit of butterflies and poetic perceptions provided Nabokov with a conception central to his existence?of art and science seen not as antagonists but as allies in capturing and celebrating the delightful, eccentric and always individual surfaces of life. Yet his feeling at times encompasses an almost mystic vision of beatitude. "This is ecstasy," he once wrote about standing alone in green woods among rare butterflies. "Behind the ecstasy is something else which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill...
Entomologists still credit Nabokov as a serious lepidopterist. He described a dozen new variations of butterfly (mainly in the broad-ranging subfamily of blues), including the Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov. His reports were models of precision, experts recall. But, in a prose necessarily dense with taxonomical terms, a few refreshing poetic riffs occurred: "From the opposite side of the distally twinned uncus," Nabokov wrote in a 1944 report describing genus Lycaeides, "and facing each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists (of the old school) with the uncus hoods lending a Ku Klux Klan touch...