inter15.txt.htm -
11 >
pursuit, but if I could manage to collect at least one hundred
of these things I would publish reproductions of those
particular paintings w^hich include butterflies, and enlarge
parts of the picture with the butterfly in life-size.
Curiously, the Red Admirable is the most popular; I've
collected twenty examples.
That particular butterfly appears frequently in your
own work, too. In Pale Fire, a Red Admirable lands on
John Shade's arm the minute before he is killed, the insect
appears in King, Queen Knave just after you've withdrawn
the authorial omniscience-- killing the characters, so to
speak-- and in the final chapter of Speak, Memory, you
recall having seen in a Paris park, just
before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a
leash of thread by a little girl. Why are you so fond of
Vanessa atalanta?
Its coloring is quite splendid and I liked it very much in
my youth. Great numbers of them migrated from Africa to
Northern Russia, where it was called "The Butterfly of Doom"
because it was especially abundant in 1881, the year Tsar
Alexander II was assassinated, and the markings on the
underside of its two hind wings seem to read "1881." The Red
Admirable's ability to travel so far is matched by many other
migratory butterflies.
The painters you admire are for the most part realists,
yet it would not be altogether fair to call you a "realist. "
Should one find this paradoxical? Or does the problem derive
from nomenclature? The problem derives from pigeonholing.
Your youngmanhood coincides with the experimental
decade in Russian painting. Did you follow these developments
closely at the time, and what were (are) your feelings about,