Butterfly Man: The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

Butterfly Man: The Short Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

When it comes to literature, I’ve never identified with the Russian “heavies.” My first year here, I read Amsco’s unabridged versions of Crime and Punishment and Fathers and Sons, but I never bonded with either Dostoyevsky or Turgenev.

With Nabokov, it’s different. He wrote, “I am no more guilty of imitating real life than real life is responsible for plagiarizing me.” I can sure identify with that.

He was born Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov on April 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg. In 1922, he moved to Berlin; and in 1940, to the United States. He was multilingual, but wrote his first nine novels in Russian. He was also a lepidopterist and a big chess fan.

Though he is most famous for the sensational novel Lolita, Nabokov also wrote short stories. Nabokov’s Dozen, his collection of thirteen stories, is rich in detail and emotion. One is particularly powerful.

“Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster” is about Siamese twins. In this story, Floyd (brother to Lloyd) reflects on their childhood. Their mother had been attacked, and later died soon after giving birth to them (“Of sheer horror and grief, I imagine,” Floyd tells us.) As toddlers, their bodies had trouble handling their “clumsy conjunction,” but their minds accepted it as normal. (What else did they know?) One would reach for a daisy, while the other stooped to pick a fig. Somehow, one always managed to get his way.

On religious feast days, strangers of all kinds (including a seven-foot-tall shepherd and curious children) came to peer at the conjoined twins. The twins’ money-hungry Grandfather Ahem arranged for them to be viewed for cash.

Floyd had a fantasy of being “freed” from Lloyd:

I saw myself leaping from boulder to boulder and leaping into the twinkling sea, and scrambling back onto the shore and scampering about. . . . I dreamed of this at night—saw myself fleeing from my grandfather and carrying away with me a toy, or a kitten. . . . I saw myself meeting poor Lloyd, who appeared to me in my dream hobbling along, hopelessly joined to a hobbling twin while I was free to dance around them and slap them on their humble backs.

When they were twelve, their loathsome Uncle Novus planned a six-month tour for the twins. Knowing this was their last chance to have fun by the sea, they disguised themselves with a black shepherd’s cloak, and, arms around each other, sneaked out the hated gate.

The story ends sadly: mean Uncle Novus tracks them down. As the twins are carted off to a sideshow life at the uncle’s hands, Floyd imagines an adventurous stranger watching them from his boat. Nabokov writes, “He would have surely experienced a thrill of ancient enchantment to find himself confronted by a gentle mythological monster. . . . He would have worshipped it, he would have wept sweet tears. But, alas, there was nobody to greet us there save that worried crook, our nervous kidnaper, a small doll-faced man wearing cheap spectacles, one glass of which was doctored with a bit of tape.”

“Cloud, Castle, Lake” (1937) follows meek Vasili Ivanovich on the pleasure trip from hell. He’s teased and berated by the other “package-dealers,” and forced to follow their itinerary. Unexpectedly, he finds personal paradise (at an inn by the lake), and wants to leave the group, and his old life forever! Because he dares not to conform, they beat him senseless.

By far, “Signs and Symbols” (1948) is the most heart wrenching of Nabokov’s Dozen. Aging parents attempt to visit their severely deranged son (In his paranoid state, clouds talk about him to each other), but are sent away. As they wait for the bus in the rain, they see a “tiny half-dead unfledged bird . . . . helplessly twitching in a puddle.”

At home, both parents individually mourn their almost-dead son, and dread a phone call with bad news. Each recalls the son's pathetic childhood, with its phobias they’d once blindly written off as peculiarities of genius.

Of the poor mother, Nabokov writes:

This, and much more she accepted—for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case—mere possibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of pain. . . .she or her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness. . .

Suddenly, the father is obsessed with freeing their son from the asylum and bringing him home. As they make plans, the phone rings. The first two times, it’s the same wrong number. But the third . . . Maybe the last joy? Only Nabokov knew.