'We Are the Caterpillars of Angels'

One-hundred years ago today, in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov, recently turned twenty-four, wrote a poem in Russian, here translated by his son Dmitri and Brian Boyd: 

“No, life is no quivering quandary!

Here under the moon things are bright and dewy.

We are the caterpillars of angels; and sweet

It is to eat from the edge into the tender leaf.

 

“Dress yourself up in the thorns, crawl, bend, grow strong—

and the greedier was your green track,

the more velvety and splendid

the tails of your liberated wings.”

 

Four years earlier, Nabokov and his family had fled the Bolsheviks, and a year before his father had been fatally shot by Russian ultra-rightists. And yet he composes a poem almost greeting card-ready. The metaphor is lepidopteral: we are merely the larval stage in our life cycle, angels-to-be. Caterpillars, like us, are rapacious feeders. By eating we earn our wings. Soon, Nabokov would begin writing is first novel Mary (1925; trans. 1970).

 

Angels make frequent cameo appearances in Nabokov’s work, most famously at the close of Lolita, when Humbert Humbert writes: “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.”

 

In his next novel, Pale Fire, Nabokov’s poet John Shade, in Canto 3 of his poem, reads a magazine account of a woman, Mrs. Z, who has had a near-death experience. With the suicide of his daughter, Shade has grown obsessed with evidence for the continuation of life after death, a theme readers can trace across Nabokov’s career as a writer. Shade writes:

 

“[T]he account contained

A hint of angels, and a glint of stained

Windows, and some soft music, and a choice

Of hymnal items, and her mother’s voice.”

 

Almost thirty years earlier Nabokov writes in a letter to his wife Véra: “Heavenly paradise, probably, is rather boring, and there’s so much fluffy Seraphic eiderdown there that smoking is banned. . . . mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.”

 

[The poem near the top is found in Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), edited by Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, a 782-page compendium of Nabokov’s work, scientific and artistic, on Lepidoptera, and a perfect bedside volume.  The final quoted passage can be found in Letters to Véra (eds. and trans. Olga Voronina and Boyd, 2014).]