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Butterflies in the Chthulucene: Reading Nabokov Geologically

What does it mean to read Nabokov’s accounts of butterflies in the Anthropocene, a

geological epoch defined, so Donna Haraway asserts, by human exceptionalism as a

precondition for Man’s battle against Nature (2016: 30)? The question entails

considering literature broadly, and Nabokov’s literary and scientific practices in

particular. Regarding the epoch itself, we have to ask ourselves what it means to read

and interpret literature—a practice of telling stories about stories—and reflect on how

we got here and how we might get out. And, furthermore, how might Nabokov’s

writings about butterflies serve these reflections? These are the questions I want to

address in this paper. I begin by laying out what I think it means to be a literature of the

Anthropocene and how that relates to other media for storytelling about the Earth.

Building on that analysis, I then proceed to a reading of and with Nabokov’s butterflies

as he presents them in three texts: his novel Dar (The Gift, 1938), his research paper

on neotropical Plebejinae published in 1945, and a chapter from his memoir Speak,

Memory first published in the New Yorker in 1948. Nabokov’s butterflies, I argue, first

demonstrate the embeddedness of their flight in Anthropocene space and time, but then

following the second world war and Nabokov’s further displacement they come to

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contribute to what I call, following Haraway, an “art science practice” for “living on a

damaged planet” (2016: 67). This is not meant to represent a comprehensive survey of

his stories about butterflies—it leaves out significant short stories, for example, like

“The Aurelian” and “Terra Incognita”—but my purpose is not to offer such analysis. If

anything, it is a selective reading of Nabokov’s butterflies, a hijacking of their flight and

mimetic behaviour for the geological proportions of the Anthropocene.

The very matter of how Nabokov should be read has dominated Nabokov

scholarship almost since the beginning. Many, but perhaps most prominently Brian

Boyd, argue that he should be read in the way that the author suggested himself, for

acutely perceived detail and attention paid to the mysteries of literary structure that his

works embody (Boyd 1999, Toker 1989). Richard Rorty (1989) famously argued, in

contrast, that he must be read ethically. Vladimir Alexandrov (1991) has argued that the

driving impulse of his writing was the development of a transcendental,

“otherworldly” realm. More recently, others have suggested that Nabokov might be

read “perversely” as the embodiment or the projection of sexual desire (Naiman 2010,

Couturier 2014). And within these readings, interest in Nabokov’s lepidoptery (the

study of butterflies and moths) has grown exponentially with the work of Kurt Johnson,

Dieter Zimmer, Stephen Blackwell, Brian Boyd and others. What I would like to suggest

is that we read Nabokov’s art and science practices together—not too far from

Blackwell’s position (2016)—as, in fact, an entangled art science practice, and that if the

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divine is indeed a driving impulse of his work as Alexandrov has suggested, and it is

something salvific and even liberating in Nabokov’s imagination, then he only learned

about the divine through the art science practice of lepidoptery and fiction, grounded in

an attentiveness to detail far beyond the readily visible. This attentiveness to the other-

than-human is the foundation, I believe, of a type of storytelling for the Anthropocene.

The would-be dismissal of the move to read Nabokov geologically—that is, in

the context of the Anthropocene, charged with political, social, and ecological

concerns—is rooted in the author’s own insistent rejection of utilitarianism as an

organizing principle for more-than-human life, represented in the study of biology as

evolution, which Nabokov saw as a utilitarian struggle for survival (Alexander 2016:

226). In response to this, I appeal to the overwhelming case for the use of art and other

mimetic structures not just for mere survival but for what Gerald Vizenor calls

“survivance,” which is something “more than survival, more than endurance or mere

response; the stories of survivance are an active presence” (1998: 15). The use of

Nabokov’s art science stories about butterflies goes beyond what Nabokov describes in

The Gift as the “грубая спешка чернорабочих сил” (the “rough haste of unskilled

labor”; Nabokov Dar 1990: 100/Nabokov The Gift 1991: 100).1 This is a way of reading

Nabokov butterflies usefully, yet beyond the limits of utilitarianism or the mere

struggle for survival.

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To read Nabokov in such a manner, I read him together with two main sources:

Haraway and, two Nishnaabeg thinkers, Vizenor and Leanne Simpson, who have

articulated strategies for thinking through and resisting the forces of the Anthropocene,

though not by name. Haraway has a word for an epoch of more-than-human resistance

to the Anthropocene: she calls it the ‘Chthulucene.’ In the following sections of this

paper, I am going to first define the Chthulucene in Haraway’s terms, then Indigenize it

as an essential step for reading, thinking, and acting in the Anthropocene, and then

imagine where literature has found its way into the Anthropocene before showing how

Nabokov’s butterflies specifically find their way into and then out of the Anthropocene

to align themselves with the forces of the Chthulucene.

Defining and Indigenizing the Chthulucene

The “Chthulucene,” in Haraway’s formulation, is an epoch of entangled

resistance to human exceptionalism “past, present, and to come,” and as such

transcends the period of the Anthropocene, going as far back as the emergence of life

some 4 billion years ago (2016: 101). The term itself does not come from Lovecraft’s

Cthulu but from the Greek khthonios, which Haraway translates as “of, in, or under the

earth and the seas—a rich terran muddle for SF, science fact, science fiction, speculative

feminism, and speculative fabulation” (2016: 53). Haraway’s term is also derived in part

from the name of a “tentacular arachnid,” the Pimoa cthulu, which she views as an

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other-than-human guide for tentacular thinking and SF storytelling in the Chthulucene

(2016: 31). The various commitments to truth in the works that I am stringing together—

from fiction, to memoir, to scientific research—and the entanglement of the human and

the butterfly in Nabokov’s imagination provocatively suggest such an “SF” ontology far

from the conventions of traditional science fiction in which the imagined, the eminently

visible, the barely visible, and the yet-to-be-seen intermingle to tell and retell stories of

the more-than-human. This paper asks to what degree can Nabokov’s butterflies be

counted among the spiders, octopi, corals, squids, cuttlefish, whopping cranes, and

lichens and other critters that are tangled up in SF storytelling practices.

Through Indigenous scholarship, which has offered considerable contributions

to matters that pertain to the Anthropocene—such as land, decolonization, and our

relationship to the other-than-human—I do wish to adjust or clarify Haraway’s

definition of the Chthulucene. Metis scholar Zoe Todd has insisted that the “more-than-

human” or “ontological” turn, particularly those aspects of it that insist on the sentience

of the other-than-human, owe a lot to Indigenous knowledge, and this debt too often

goes unpaid (Todd 2014). My turn to Indigenous knowledge in the discussion of the

Anthropocene, even when applied to such an apparently remote context such as

Nabokov’s butterflies, seeks to answer Todd’s call to “Indigenize” the Anthropocene

(Todd 2015). In particular, in my discussion of Nabokov and the Chthulucene, I will

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draw from the work of Leanne Simpson, who shares a story of eel migration on

Nishnaabeg land as a story of survivance and resistance to settler colonialism, one of

the fundamental social, ecological, and anthropocentric processes behind the

Anthropocene. It should be noted that I was raised a settler on Nishnaabeg land; by

deploying a Nishnabeg story of survivance a lens for reading Nabokov’s butterflies in

the Anthropocene, I hope to learn in a reflective way from the miraculous transoceanic

migrations of Nabokov’s butterflies across Imakpik and down to the Americas, and

their reconstitution of what I call a more-than-human ecological community, as a way

of imagining a decolonized geography for the Chthulucene.2

Literature of the Anthropocene

What does it mean to talk about a literature of the Anthropocene? Where does literature

fit in the geological and human stratifications that define the epoch? We should remind

ourselves that literature (or at least modern prose—the form of literature that I am

mainly interested in) receives its very existence and its dreams of immortality from

Anthropocene dreams of infinite growth, grounded in an endless resource base of trees

rendered into wood-based pulp and paper. The discursive immortality and very

existence of literary texts depends, in other words, on material extractions, and

deforestation—divorced from the fleshy material of oral storytelling—is land writing in

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the embryonic stages of a literature of the Anthropocene. Oral storytelling, by contrast,

uses the body as its medium—and it depends on the same things that bodies do:

intergenerational exchange, lively cycles of birth and death, and the reproduction of

cultural memory and cultural modes of expression grounded in the strong social ties

that constitute a more-than-human community. In the terms laid out by foundational

media studies scholar Harold Innis, oral storytelling considered along these lines has a

‘time bias’—an orientation towards expansion in time (2008: 105). The freeing of

storytelling from the time bias of the body and its community frees literature to pursue,

instead, a ‘space bias’—the orientation of a medium towards expansion in space—

severed ostensibly from the situated body of the author.

Of course, comparing oral storytelling to storytelling on wood-based paper is a

theoretical contrast, and does not refer to a historical moment. But the origins of wood-

based paper literature point to a moment in this trajectory from the spatially limited to

the spatially expansive; a moment in the Anthropocene when the structure of human

behaviour becomes global and carbon dioxide begins to accumulate in the earth’s

geological strata, beyond its metabolic limits (Steffen 2000, Angus 2016: 118-120). Before

the mid-nineteenth century—before 1843 when wood-based pulp was first successfully

rendered into paper, and before 1848 when the Anthropocene kicked it up a notch3—

print was still more or less confined, at least, to urban communities. Then, before the

mid-nineteenth century, the paper industry was tied to the city because paper was still

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tied to human bodies—not to the bodies themselves, but to their rags. The turn from

rag-based pulp and paper to wood-based establishes the material foundations of

storytelling free from the city and into the country: and significantly, for the

psychological dimensions of the Anthropocene’s legitimacy, largely out-of-sight and

out-of-mind. An excellent example of the significance of the spatial dynamics of

extraction in Anthropocene literature comes from reading Dickens’s critique of an

urban paper factory in Bleak House, a point that German Communications theorist

Lothar Müller makes in his magnificent book on paper and literary history, White

Magic.4 As opposed to the time bias of oral storytelling (where the medium is the body

in its community) or even rag-based paper, the wood-based paper medium, thus, has

an incredible space bias—one that the introduction of the Anthropocene concept

acknowledges is geological in scale.

In Innis’s own terms, paper has a space bias because it is so lightweight, easily

reproducible in the case of wood-based paper, and easy to transport (as opposed to, say

petroglyphs, caves and communities; Innis 2007: 26-27 and Innis 2008); his focus was on

paper as a finished medium. If we look towards its material extractions, though (as Jussi

Parikka does when discussing the materiality of digital media in the Anthropocene) we

observe a key facet of this epoch in its once preferred medium: paper is not only about

being light, it is also about taking the heavy opacity of landscapes (in this case, forests)

and rendering them light and readily transportable; it is a history of evacuating and

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circulating the lightness from landscape. Significantly in the context of the

Anthropocene, which is also known as the “Capitalocene”5, this is the same story as

paper money; indeed, it was Benjamin Franklin’s dream to free trade further from the

confines of a barter economy and even the heavy opacity of the coin in order for capital

to circulate more plentifully (1729). And this is only an earlier version of the digital, that

likewise renders, among other things, the Congo’s cobalt even lighter.

Acknowledging the space bias of paper, what is it specifically that gives this

space bias its geological character? Certainly, on the one hand, there is the accumulation

of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases in the Earth system registered in its

atmosphere and in its ice core records along with the expansion of the Pan-European

World System (Waters et al. 2016: 5). Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, an ecologist and a

climatologist respectively, add that the geological character of the Anthropocene is not

just limited to the accumulation of so-called greenhouse gases in the Earth System, and

includes the increasingly frequent transoceanic voyages that begin with Columbus in

the long sixteenth century. This, along with the deaths of 50 million people indigenous

to Abya Yala (‘South America’), was a fundamental precondition to the globalization of

the European system and the effective annihilation of the Atlantic Ocean as a geological

barrier between Europe, Turtle Island (‘North America’) and Abya Yala (2015: 176). As

Lewis and Maslin point out, the Columbian and subsequent transatlantic voyages, were

both ecological and geological in character:

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The cross-continental movement of dozens of other food species (such as

the common bean, to the New World), domesticated animals (such as the

horse, cow, goat and pig, all to the Americas) and human commensals (the

black rat, to the Americas), plus accidental transfers (many species of

earth worms, to North America; American mink to Europe) contributed to

a swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth without geological

precedent (2015: 174).

The social stratifications of colonialism and global capitalism, in other words, were

inseparable from the ecological and geological formations of the Earth. Below, when

discussing the transpacific journey of Nabokov’s butterflies in contrast to his own

transatlantic one, the socio-ecological (or “naturecultural”; Haraway 2003: 9) and the

geological entangle themselves similarly as one of the fundamental principles

underlying Nabokov’s postwar imagination.

It is important to remember—before emphasizing the space bias of literature too

heavily—that literature, as opposed to newspaper for example, also suggest a time bias:

not through the endurance of a token but by the reproduction of type. As a form of

land-writing, the work of literature endures in its disembodied form, insuring its

endurance through manufactured reproduction and global dissemination. Thinking of

these works as acts of land-writing, as stories that tell stories of and about the Earth,

their logic is expansive in both space and time. Forces of the Anthropocene are always

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coming here, they are coming to stay, and literature—as both discourse and material—

has had an important role to play. How, I want to know while reading Nabokov in

particular, can this permanence and this expansion be turned on its head, so that we

might imagine a new and radically restructured geological epoch, not dominated by

human exceptionalism but, perhaps, by the other-than-human?

A Lepidopterocentric Geography in The Gift

Nabokov’s art science practice is dominated by the complexities of literary structure, of

ontology, and of the mimetic, migratory, and phylogenetic patterns of lepidoptera. In

my reading of The Gift, I want to show how these complexities are themselves entwined,

that they are lepidopterocentric, and yet remain bound to anthropocentric political

entities of empire and nation. I will, first, outline the basis of the entanglement of

ontology, lepidoptera, and the art science practice of storytelling laid out in The Gift;

second, demonstrate the ways in which this generates a geography bound to

anthropocentric structures of empire and nation; and, third, argue that this geography

nevertheless provides the basis for one that will become untethered to such structures.

Following this section of the paper, I will go on to show how Nabokov’s construction of

such an imagined community in The Gift lays the foundation for a more-than-human SF

imagined community for the Chthulucene in Speak, Memory and Notes on Neotropical

Plebejinae.

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The Gift takes place in the late 1920s, with a focus on its protagonist, Fyodor

Godunov-Cherdyntsev, a young émigré living in Berlin. It is, above all, a novel about

storytelling, each of the five chapters organized around one form of storytelling or

another in the development of the protagonist’s literary gift: Chapter One contains

Fyodor’s volume of poetry that is published at the novel’s outset; Chapter Two contains

an attempted biography of his father, a lepidopterist explorer, whose limited

ethnographic and extensive naturalist observations of Central Asia, according to Dieter

Zimmer, are based on, plus or minus, 106 different sources (2002/2003: 34); Chapter

Three—the middle chapter—is the structural linchpin of the novel, accumulating

Fyodor’s influences and various nemeses in the Berlin émigré scene, and his re-

discovery and subsequent research on the Russian liberal, utilitarian author Nikolai

Chernyshevsky in preparation for a biography; Chapter Four is that biography, a form

of literary “target practice” against the Chernyshevsky’s “myopic,” utilitarian views on

society, art and science; Chapter Five is the point at which all Fyodor’s training in

storytelling, as well as his novel-long pursuit of his love interest Zina, intersect,

producing, in modernist fashion, the novel we have just read.

My analysis here is focused on Chapter 2 as a key chapter in the formulation of

Nabokov’s art science practice of storytelling in the Anthropocene, though I begin with

an addendum to the novel, in which Fyodor expands on his father’s lepidopterological

system. In that addendum, “My Father’s Butterflies,” the protagonist Fyodor Godunov-

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Cherdyntsev makes an explicit claim that the ontological scope of the butterfly includes

the stories and other cultural acts of mimesis that blur the lines between art and science,

and between the human ‘culture’ and the butter ‘nature’:

I personally belonged to the category of curieux who, in order to acquaint

themselves properly with a butterfly and to visualize it, require three

things; its artistic depiction, a compendium of all that has been written

about it, and its insertion within the general system of classification. With

no words and no art, without a penetrating and synthesizing process of

thought, for me a butterfly would remain incomplete (Nabokov 2000: 203-

204).

The ontological completeness of the butterfly, according to this passage, includes verbal

and pictorial representation within categories of scientific and artistic creativity. The

stories we tell about a butterfly, in other words, are constitutive of its very being. The

Black Apollo butterfly’s various manifestations and entanglements in The Gift serve as a

prime example of how the stories we tell about a being are entangled with it, how

storytelling practices also contribute to being, and how these structures emerge from

the close observation of the other-than-human. We find the point of contact between the

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Black Apollo’s storied and tangible existences in the figure—and imagination—of

Fyodor’s father, Konstantin Kirillovich. In chapter 2, Konstantin Kirilloich recites a line

from Pushkin’s poem Khudozhniku (“To the Artist”): “Tut Apollon—ideal, tam Niobeia—

pechal’,” (“Here is Apollo—an ideal, there is Niobe who is grief”), at which point the

“рыжим крылом да перламутром ниобея мелькала над скабиозами прибежной

лужайки, где м первых числах июня попадался изредка маленький ‘черный’

аполлон” (“the russet wing and mother-of-pearl of a Niobe fritillary flashed over the

scabiosas of the riverside meadow, where, during the first days of June, there occurred

sparsely the small Black Apollo”; D 88/G 98). The flight of the two butterflies is

inseparable from the confrontation of Apollo and Niobe the realm of Greek mythology

and in Pushkin’s poetry, thus entangling mythological, poetic, and entomological being.

These degrees of reflection and convergence of multiple modalities—the mythological,

the entomological, and the poetic—assume their basis from the mimetic behaviour

Konstantin Kirillovich observes in butterflies. Reflecting on his father’s butterfly

lessons, Fyodor makes the case that the structure of reality is fundamentally mimetic

structure when he narrates that his father told him,

[…] невероятном художественном остроумии мимикрии, которая не

объяснима борьбой за жизнь (грубой спешкой чернорабочих сил

эволюции), излишне изысканна для обмана случайных врагов,

пернатых, чешуйчатых и прочих (мало разборчивых, да и не столь уж

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до бабочек лакомых), и словно придумана забавником-живописцем

как раз ради умных глаз человека. (D 100)

[…] about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise, which was not

explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolution’s

unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental

predators, feathered, scaled and otherwise, (not very fastidious, but then

not too fond of butterflies), and seemed to have been invented by some

waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man. (G 110)

It is impossible to separate Nabokov’s brilliant observations of butterflies from their

anthropocentric purpose in this passage, but aside from that, it points clearly to the

inseparability of artistic practice and the mimetic and phylogenetic patterns of

butterflies, and that this entanglement belies the mimetic structure of reality as a whole,

which includes artistic practice, the otherworldly, flora, and fauna, centring the latter

rather than the Anthropos.

The extent to which the recurrent patterns learned from butterfly mimesis

structured Nabokov’s narratives is well known if variously phrased, by Stephen

Blackwell (2009: 92) among others, and more recently Victoria Alexander (2016: 225);

indeed, it was articulated by Nabokov himself in Speak, Memory (1989: 125). A return to

the Apollo butterfly in The Gift is enough proof of the connection between butterfly

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mimesis and the structure of narrative for present purposes. The Apollo butterfly

(binomial name: Parnassius apollo) appears again as a “small Parnassius” in the science

practice of Konstantin Kirillovich who, Fyodor tells us, published an article entitled,

“Austautia simonoides n. sp., a Geometrid Moth Mimicking a Small Parnassius” (D: 92/G:

103). This mimetic entanglement of the Apollo with the “geometrid moth” in turn takes

us back to Fyodor’s first book of poetry, quoted in the first chapter:

Зато уж высмотрю четыре

прелестных газовых крыла

нежнейшей пяденицы в мире

средь пятен белого ствола. (D: 23)

I shall not fail, though, to detect

The four lovely gauze wings

Of the softest Geometrid moth in the world

Spread flat on a mottled pale birchtrunk. (G: 24)

The mimetic relationship the Black Apollo shares with the Niobe fritillary (in which

they both ‘mimic’ Pushkin’s poem) and the Geometrid moth (whom it mimics itself)

manifests itself as improbable patterns of recurrence over 70 pages (23, 88, 92) is a

relationship the author shares with his butterflies. Mimesis becomes the governing

principle of both nature and culture, and of artistic practice, and of scientific

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observation. It becomes, in other words, the foundational principle for the construction

of a more-than-human community in natureculture: a lepidoperocentric ontology is for

the mutual flourishing or “survivance” of both the human and the lepidoptera.

However, despite its lepidopterocentric ontology that challenges the human

exceptionalism of the Anthropocene, the imagined geography that Nabokov, Fyodor,

and Konstantin Kirillovich share—also centred on butterflies—remains tied to that of

the Russian empire, even after its apparent dissolution. This is partially implied by the

Russian empire as a unique category for the distribution lepidoptera in the work of

Konstantin Kirillovich, such as Lepidoptera Asiatic and The Butterflies and Moths of the

Russian Empire, modelled on the work that Nikolai Przhevalskii, Aleksei Grum-

Grzhimaylo, and others who pursued scientific expeditions in the newly acquired Asian

territories of the nineteenth century. The scientific organization of butterflies becomes a

cornerstone of an imagined geography of a Russian that centres the unity of the

European centre with the Asian periphery. Perhaps the best example of The Gift’s

colonial lepidopterocentric geography occurs when Fyodor’s father returns from an

entomological expedition to Siberia. There he had discovered for the first time to his

knowledge a variety of reddish-gray Epicnaptera moth. Now going for a walk with his

family in Leshino Park near St. Petersburg, he discovers that very same moth under a

leaf and exclaims, “Well, I'm damned! Stoilo tak daleko taskat’sia” (“Well, I’m damned! I

need not have traveled so far!” [D 86; G 95]). The migration of lepidoptera contracts the

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variety from St. Petersburg to Siberia into a single community that follows their

lightweight and winged migration. Perhaps unusually—in a manner that requires more

thorough study—Nabokov shares such an imagined geography of a biocentric empire

after the Revolution with fellow émigré Petr Savitskii. Savitskii based his on four so-

called biomes that spanned the width of the Eurasian empire. These biomes erased the

variety of landscape, and in particular the supposed continental boundary posed by the

Ural mountain range. As Mark Bassin notes, Savitskii’s biogeography stemmed from

the work of nineteenth-century Slavophiles such as Nikolai Danilevskii, whose

ideological motivation in constructing such a geography was to insist upon the

legitimacy—indeed the naturalness—of the subsumption of Asia into the Russian

Empire (1991: 14-16).

But for all that, Nabokov’s is a non-anthropocentric geography for an imagined

community not centred on social and cultural behaviours—even if it remains tied to

them. As such, it lays the foundation for what I argue in the section below is a

biogeography of the Chthulucene, unbound to the institutions of empire and nation,

instead tied to displacement and the recuperation of a more-than-human community.

A Lepidopterocentric Geology in Speak, Memory and Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae

A turning point in Nabokov’s imagined biogeography occurs after his further

displacement, this time from Europe entirely, following the impending Nazi invasion of

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France in 1939 and that compelled him and his family to flee to the US. This crisis—and

the end of a cohesive émigré community to which Nabokov belonged—compelled a

radically new imaginative biocentric geography, this time freed from the constraints of

empire and yet still centred on butterflies. Moreover, following his journey across the

Atlantic, this imagined geography assumes a geological scale, creating a continuous

more-than-human community despite the atrocities of a militaristic and deathly

Anthropocene.

In 1945, Nabokov wrote a scientific research paper that proposed a radically new

organization of what was then known as Plebejinae (a group roughly equivalent to

today’s ‘Polyommatus’ butterflies [Vila 2011: 1]). There, assuming a speculative mode,

Nabokov invites us to take a ‘Wellsian time machine’ back to the Miocene (1945: 44),

between 23.03 and 5.333 million years ago, and observe six waves of Plebejinae

migrations across Imakpik (‘the Bering Strait’). It was only in the 1990s that Kurt

Johnson, Zsolt Balint, and Dubi Benyamini were able to confirm Nabokov’s groupings

(their research is the subject of Johnson and Coates 1999). And it was only in 2011 that

Richard Vila and others managed to verify Nabokov’s further hypothesis that such

almost unimaginable migrations did, in fact, take place. Three years later, in 1948,

Nabokov published the following passage in the New Yorker subsequently published in

chapter six of his memoir Speak, Memory. The passage, in which Nabokov begins to

describe his first butterfly catch on his family estate in Vyra, is typically tentacular:

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On the honeysuckle overhanging the carved back of a bench just opposite

the main entrance, my guiding angel (whose wings, except for the absence

of a Florentine limbus, resemble those of Fra Angelico’s Gabriel) pointed

out to me a rare visitor, a splendid pale-yellow creature with black

blotches, blue crenels, and a cinnabar eyespot above each chrome-rimmed

black tail. As it probed the inclined flower from which it hung, its

powdery body slightly bent, it kept restlessly jerking its great wings, and

my desire for it was one of the most intense I have ever experienced. Agile

Austin, our town-house janitor, who for a comic reason (explained

elsewhere) happened to be that summer in the country with us, somehow

managed to catch it in my cap, after which it was transferred, cap and all,

to a wardrobe, where domestic naphthalene was fondly expected by

Mademoiselle to kill it overnight. On the following morning, however,

when she unlocked the wardrobe to take something out, my Swallowtail,

with a mighty rustle, flew into her face, then made for the open window,

and presently was but a golden fleck dipping and dodging and soaring

eastward over timber and tundra, to Vologda, Viatka and Perm, and

beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and Verkhne Kolymsk, and from

Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the fair Island of St. Lawrence,

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and across Alaska to Dawson, and southward along the Rocky Mountains

to be finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an

immigrant dandelion under an endemic aspen near Boulder (1989: 120).

The journey Nabokov’s swallowtail takes is an SF race around the world; it is

speculative, factual, fictional, and a story of survivance in and against the

Anthropocene. Setting aside the clear embeddedness of his notion of home within the

social stratifications of the Anthropocene that this passage also at times reveals, three

components of an SF epoch emerge in this passage when considered along with his

research into neotropical Plebejinae. There is: 1) a lediptoperocentric geography that

assumes geological proportions in Nabokov’s imagination; 2) a notion of survivance

and transmotion that operates in combination with the scientific concept of ‘ecological

fitting’; and 3) an entanglement of science fact, science fiction, and speculative

fabulation in Nabokov’s SF biogeology.

Written after his own unwilling migration across the Atlantic—in an epoch

defined by such migrations—the journey of Nabokov’s swallowtail, represents a

transoceanic migration for the Chthulucene that re-entangles the human with the other-

than-human in a reconstituted geography of home. It is a model of transmotion and

survivance in an Anthropocene that is also, as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste

Fressoz insist, a ‘Thanatocene’. With that term, from the name of the personification of

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death in Greek mythology ‘Thanatos’, Bonneuil and Fressoz argue for the link between

warfare and the environment in the Anthropocene (2016: 127). Surely this term draws

our attention to the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 50 million Indigenous people

in the long sixteenth century. It also must include the stories of those who were

displaced from Europe and obliged to leave their homes and make the transatlantic

journey during the Second World War, who can be included among the many millions

more who were displaced, largely from Africa, and forced to make their own

transatlantic journey as slaves, refugees, and economic immigrants. In this context, the

migration of Nabokov’s swallowtail offers itself as a storied account of a symmetrical

and transpacific journey to the crises of the Anthropocene—an alternative biocentric

imagination of continents shifting not from the perspective of power, empire or capital,

but from the perspective of someone displaced who pays acute attention to the other-

than-human. Nabokov’s butterflies magically and imaginatively move continents not

through acts of violence but through acts of survivance.

Telling stories of migration and the subsequent reconstitution with home and

community despite the incredible violence of the Anthropocene, and as a strategy of

survivance within the Anthropocene, is reminiscent of a story about eel migration that

Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson shares in her book on Nishnaabeg resilience in the

face of colonialism, and indeed provided me with inspiration for starting to think of

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how one might read Nabokov in the context of a geological epoch defined in large part

by a long history of colonial violence against the more-than-human:

[The eels’] sheer numbers and ability to travel, adapt and celebrate the

flux of the ecological context, the diversity of life and power of mass

mobilization, impressed and informed Nishnaabeg thinkers. So much so

that when one of our people had a vision for a mass migration from the

Atlantic region to the Great Lakes, it resonated with the people because

they had already witnessed their relatives completing a similar journey.

This mobilization is the reason we survived the most dangerous and

oppressive parts of the colonial regime, because it stretched us to a greater

degree to learn how to flourish in a greater diversity of environments. As

well, it spread our citizens over a larger land mass. This is itself afforded

us some protection from colonialism because it place groups of our people

in more protected areas, enabling them to carry forward the language,

culture, and political traditions to a greater degree than in the south and

eastern doorways of our nation (2011: 88).

If the Anthropocene is defined by colonialism and the death-baring forces of the

European system across, then the lessons learned from these eels—who form part of a

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more-than-human community with the Nishnaabeg as their relatives—are lessons

about a different sort of epoch, one that intends to not only survive but flourish through

a practice of remembering, considering, and telling stories of the other-than-human.

Simpson counts these stories and lessons as essential to the project of Nishnaabeg

survivance, “re-creation,” and “resurgence”. The story of the eels, that prepares the

Nishnaabeg to survival and ultimately flourish within the Anthropocene, is similar to

Nabokov’s imaginative geography of his butterflies: their story of migration and

flourishing, along with own sense of belonging to an imagined community together

with them, allows him to overcome his own displacement.

Crucially to Nabokov’s imaginative geology, the dynamics the more-than-human

re-assemblage of community are also highlighted in the preceding passage; Nabokov

reunites with his swallowtail, whom he finds “on an immigrant dandelion under an

endemic aspen.” The reunion of an endemic and immigrant assemblage of human and

butterfly (plus dandelion and aspen)—not defined by militaristic or economic

displacement but through mutual survivance—after transoceanic migrations of the

Anthropocene is fundamental to imagining a geography for the Chthulucene.

“Ecological fitting,” a concept by Dan Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist from the

University of Pennsylvania, illuminates the scientific basis of this re-assemblage. It

describes a process “in which novel interspecific associations arise nearly

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instantaneously due to preadaptation” (Shapiro 2016). For example, if a butterfly

oviposits on a plant that it has just encountered, for example, it is because it is

“preadapted” to some phytochemical property of the plant, and have thus found

another ecological fit. This was the subject of a recent talk by Arthur Shapiro delivered

at the Yolo Basin Foundation in Davis California.6 Shapiro—who, in a coincidence that

Nabokov might appreciate, collected the southern most specimen in Kurt Johnson, Zsolt

Balint, and Dubi Benyamini’s successful attempt to vindicate Nabokov’s grouping of

Lycaenidae (Johnson and Coates 1999: 219-220)—specializes in the interaction of

endemic and migrant species of butterflies and their host plants in California. He

deferred to Janzen’s concept of the ecological fit to describe the status of butterflies in

novel ecosystems that have been indelibly changed in the history of the Anthropocene.

If a migrant butterfly comes to a new ecosystem, Shapiro pointed out, it loses its

endemic host with which it once had an ecological fit. It can only regain that fit if 1) it

finds a different species of host plant in its new environment with the same

phytochemical property or 2) the host plant also migrates and they meet again around

the world. A third narrative for ecological fitting transpires when a species loses its host

because of the destruction of habitat but finds a new host plant that has migrated just in

time. These are stories of “life among the capitalist ruins,” in Anna Tsing’s formulation

for the Anthropocene (2015); Shapiro also spoke to the resilience of some species in this

epoch, especially those able to live off of urban weeds. Sadly, however, the Eurasian

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swallowtail that Nabokov describes in the passage from Speak, Memory quoted above,

the Papilio machaon, does not have an ecological fit; Nabokov’s SF dandelion and aspen

are not enough, as its host has been devastated by the radical transformation of nature

since the Industrial Revolution and it has found no other. Meanwhile, however, its

Turtle Island cousin, the Papilio zelicaon thrives in California, because—though its

endemic hosts (water hemlock and Oenanthe sarmentosa) have been devastated—it has

found an ecological fit with two migrant species: anise and poison hemlock. Shapiro

writes that those weeds, poison hemlock and anise, gave the Papilio zelicaon “a passport

out of the tules and into landfills, vacant lots, [and] disturbed riparian forests” (2016). It

found an ecological fit, in other words, for Chthulucene survivance despite the forces of

the Anthropocene that act against the more-than-human.

I like both examples of the swallowtail—the imagined and real ones of Nabokov

and Shapiro—because they tell us both about the urgencies of the Anthropocene and

about SF tales of survivance like in Simpson’s account of the Nishnaabeg and the eel.

They remind us of the human forces of history that have assumed a geological scope,

but also that—amidst the devastation of the Anthropocene—there are stories to be told

and retold about more-than-human survivance.

27

Nabokov’s stories, and his own experience from Petersburg, to Western Europe,

to the US, offer stories of both epochs while challenging the fundamental human

exceptionalism of the Anthropocene. The well-known aspects of his art science

practice—his close attention to butterflies, the mimetic structure of his narratives—

reflect the sometimes complex dynamics of the Anthropocene, which has been

represented too monolithically by those who too readily conflate all humans within its

anthropocentric forces, too equally assign blame across humanity, and too readily erase

powerful stories of resilience and resistance among those who align themselves with the

more-than-human. Reading Nabokov geologically, we observe these complexities in the

dynamics of a literature that sticks with us for the long haul, we recognize the scale of

that devastation, of which he and his generation of European immigrants were only a

small part, and the urgencies with which we are presented. We also, I think crucially for

the act of reading Nabokov in the Anthropocene, observe that his butterflies are neither

limited to utilitarian survival nor limited to beauty alone, but rather offer their stories as

powerful more-than-human models of survivance in the ruins of the Anthropocene.

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1 From here on citations to The Gift will begin with a reference to Dar (“D”) in reference to Nabokov 1990, followed by a reference to the English translation as The Gift (“G”) in Nabokov 1991. 2 Reading Nabokov’s butterflies in this way represents an under-racialized account of a decolonized geography of migration, but I nevertheless maintain my position that his accounts of butterflies remain powerful stories for the Chthulucene when aligned with other Indigenous or racialized SF stories of migration. For those looking for a wellspring of such stories, dedicated specifically to the project of a decolonizing migration, I refer them to Walia (2013). 3 The period in general corresponds with the popular position that the Anthropocene began with the Industrial Revolution. Andreas Malm (2016) traces the rise of a “fossil capitalism” akin to the Anthropocene to the English cotton industry, and the associated proliferation of the steam engine at roughly this time. I am also thinking of George Caffentzis’s periodization of capitalism as an economic and ecological system, that

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turned to the study and application of thermodynamics in response to the revolutions of 1848 (2013). 4 “As literature mined the urban underworld and social misery for material resources, a shadow was cast over paper and the rooms through which it moved. This shadow was darkest in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House” (Müller 165). 5 “Capitalocene” was coined by Andreas Malm and then popularized by Jason Moore and, to a lesser extent, Donna Haraway, who uses it alongside Chthulucene, Anthropocene and Plantationocene (Haraway 2016: 100-101). 6 I am grateful for Shapiro’s willingness to share the slides of his talk with me via email.