'Sometimes It Even Alights on Corpses'

In 1967, Vladimir Nabokov gave an interview to Archbishop Ioann (Strannick) for  Russkaya mysl’ (Russian Thought), a Paris-based Russian language newspaper. The archbishop writes:

“During our conversation I expressed the thought (with a clearly ‘apologist’ deviation in V.V.’s direction) that throughout his whole life he had sought after butterflies and his pursuit of this half-real creature was perhaps linked with the highest stage of spiritual consciousness. Vladimir Vladimirovich did not agree with this too-light conjecture and energetically said that a butterfly is not a semi-angelic being. ‘Sometimes it even alights on corpses.’”

There’s much one would like to know about this interview, not published in Russkaya mysl’ until this date, June 1, in 1978, a year after Nabokov’s death. The interviewer may be Dmitry Shakhovskoy (1902-1989), a poet who used the name “Strannik” (Russian for wanderer or pilgrim). Why did Nabokov agree to speak with him? Was the interview conducted in person or, as was Nabokov’s custom, in writing? Why the eleven-year delay in publication?

Much attention has been devoted to Nabokov’s interest in the afterlife, especially in connection with Pale Fire (1962), which explicitly treats the theme after the death of Hazel Shade. The epigraph to Invitation to a Beheading (1936; English translation, 1959), attributed to the fictional Delalande’s Discours sur les ombres, is “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous croyons mortels (“As a fool believes himself to be God, we believe ourselves to be mortal”). The narrator of Transparent Things (1972) speaks to us from the afterlife. Nabokov in interviews was cagey about his interest in the spiritual realm, and never explicitly shared personal convictions. In the interview above, I sense Nabokov brushing aside a sentimental question, one that suggests nature mysticism. Nabokov was a scientist with contempt for sentimental poshlust. Perhaps he wished to shock his interviewer with the juxtaposition of a butterfly and a dead body.

The remark reminded me of the film with the cheesiest of endings, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), based on Remarque’s cheesy novel. We know butterflies light on corpses to consume moisture and salts, and at least one species feeds on decomposing flesh. 

[The excerpt from the interview with Russkaya Mysl is included in Nabokov’s Butterflies (eds. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, 2000).]

[ADDENDUM: The narrator of The Gift (1938; English trans., 1963), Nabokov’s final Russian-language novel, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, paraphrases the Nabokov-created Delalande’s Discourse on Shades: “I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, ‘but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job’ . . . And then again: the unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage . In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks.”]