Melissa Annetta: Vladimir Nabokov at the Little Cottonwood

I have a delightful Russian-language anthology of Vladimir Nabokov miscellania, which I acquired in Utah, of all places. For me, that makes a fun little Nabokov connection with Utah even funner.

The following is taken entirely from Will South's book, Andy Warhol Slept Here? (there are lots of other fun stories in the book) which Signature Books has generally posted free, in its entirety, on their website.
http://signaturebookslibrary.org/?p=21175

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Vladimir Nabokov was a twice-exiled writer and scientist; first from his native Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution, then from Paris in advance of the Nazi invasion of Western Europe. He arrived in America in 1940, and over the next two decades established himself as one of the most brilliant authors of the twentieth century.

Nabokov struggled financially in America for years, supporting his wife, his young son, and himself on his wages from teaching Russian literature at Wellesley College and later at Cornell. Then, in 1955, he achieved stunning success, artistically and financially, with the publication of the sumptuous and sinister novel Lolita. A classic story saturated with derangement, romance, and fate, Lolita remains a literary force that reverberates through the American cultural consciousness.

Long before the publication of Lolita, Nabokov’s word magic caught the attention of University of Utah professor Brewster Ghiselin, who invited Nabokov to the University’s Annual Writers Conference. Nabokov accepted. His only serious concern about attending, he expressed to Ghiselin, was hygienic: “Last but not least—will I have a private bath or shower?” He and his son, Dmitri, also managed to find time during the conference to play some tennis with a member of the local literati, Wallace Stegner.

Nabokov’s first and perhaps more meaningful visit to Utah, however, came very early in his American career. His publisher, James Laughlin, owned the Alta Lodge in the Wasatch mountains. Nabokov asked Laughlin if he could stay at the hotel, which was largely empty due to the war.

Vladimir Nabokov with University of Utah students in 1949.
Photograph courtesy Special Collections, University of Utah Marriott Library.

In June 1943 Vladimir was able to indulge the passion that occupied him as much as writing: butterfly collecting. Nabokov was a serious lepidopterist and worked during this period at the Harvard Entomological Museum. At Alta he roamed what he called “the tapering lines of firs on the slopes amid a grayish green haze of aspens” in search of rare winged species. According to biographer Brian Boyd:

For Nabokov, Utah was a fortunate choice: one of the few states in which little butterfly collecting had been done, and with mountain ranges isolated by deserts and therefore likely to have evolved new species. Despite a severe climate with icy winds and noisy thunderstorms, he would walk along the valleys and mountain slopes, whenever the sun came out, from twelve to eighteen miles a day, clad only in shorts and tennis shoes, offering a generous target for gadflies. He wanted to rediscover the haunts of Melissa Annetta, a long-lost subspecies of the Lycaeides genus that he had been working on the previous winter, and with the help of nine-year-old Dmitri, he found it on lupine among firs on both sides of the Little Cottonwood River, not far from Alta.

Vladimir Nabokov in Salt Lake City with son, Dimitri, and wife, Véra.