Word: nabokovs
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...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...
...Nabokov's own grasp of the organic union between world and world, between observation and inspiration, goes back...
...decades between Cambridge and World War II, three pieces of great good fortune befell Nabokov. In 1925 he married Vera Evseena Slonim, the slim and beautiful daughter of a Jewish St. Petersburg industrialist also ruined by the revolution. In 1934 they had a son, Dmitri, an only child now studying opera in Italy. In 1939, having moved from Berlin to Paris to avoid the Nazis, Nabokov quite by chance received and accepted a proposal to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford...
Life in California freed Nabokov of the need to write in the bathroom. But he needed all his astonishing powers of concentration and creative effort for the challenge now facing him. "It had taken me some 40 years to invent Russia and Western Europe," he wrote of the problem, "and now I was faced by the task of inventing America...