The Aurelian by Vladimir Nabokov

 


Somewhere in your past there must have been an old shopkeeper, a man with a face made distinct by bulging eyes or bulbous nose or the thick lips of a trombone player, a man with perhaps thinning hair or a moustache of some variety, from pencil thin to bushy.

If you imagine a variation of this old shopkeeper, "a flabby elderly man with a florid face, lank hair, and a grayish moustache, carelessly clipped," you will have a clear picture of Paul Pilgram, main character in Vladimir Nabokov's The Aurelian.

An Aurelian as defined by the dictionary is a collector and breeder of insects, especially of butterflies and moths; a lepidopterist.

Vladimir Nabokov offers a more exact meaning as it pertains to his story: Paul Pilgram "dreamed of things that would have seemed utterly unintelligible to his wife or his neighbors; for Pilgram belonged, or rather was meant to belong (something—the place, the time, the man—had been ill-chosen), to a special breed of dreamers, such dreamers as used to be called in the old days 'Aurelians'—perhaps on account of those chrysalids, those 'jewels of Nature,' which they loved to find hanging on fences above the dusty nettles of country lanes."

We're given Pilgram's backstory: Paul was an only child of sailor, scallywag father and sallow-skinned, light-eyed Dutch mother; he was raised in Berlin where Dad opened a shop selling exotic curios like stuffed tropical birds until one curio, butterflies, nearly took over.

Even as a boy, young Paul eagerly traded butterflies with collectors and then, following the death of Mom and Dad, curio shop became butterfly shop. Little Paul, a hobbyist by nature, became Paul Pilgram, butterfly expert.

"Write what you know," is advice frequently given to aspiring writers. The Aurelian serves as glowing example - Vladimir Nabokov, himself a topnotch lepidopterist, includes titillating details of the insect work and, of course, his beloved butterflies.

Oh, yes, Paul Pilgram is a born hobbyist. We've all met this guy, more times than not he's the prototypical dork - pasty-skinned, flabby, coke-bottle glasses, timid, socially inept, clueless outside the sphere of his one passion, his hobby.

Vladimir Nabokov, master of the craft, gives Pilgram his ticks of individuality; however, scratch the surface and there he is - a nerd hobbyist one can see at any convention for enthusiastic coin or stamp or model airplane collectors.

In 1905, having reached his mid-forties, Pilgram marries Eleanor, one prime reason: inherit her father's money. But Pilgram's calculation misfire - when his father-in-law dies, he leaves no money, only debts. Meanwhile, Pilgram doesn't want kids since the little buggers would merely be "a hindrance to the realization of what had been in his youth a delightfully exciting plan but had now gradually become a dark, passionate obsession." And that's passionate obsession as in one day traveling with butterfly net in hand to distant lands, those butterfly collector's paradises, to capture his own specimens.

In all the many years of his adulthood, Pilgram never could manage to travel beyond a few fields surrounding Berlin. Alas, material circumstances forced Pilgram to live a double life: every day plodding back and forth to his butterfly shop (with those Sunday strolls around the city with Eleanor and occasional trips to the local bar for an evening glass of rum) and dreams, both sumptuous daydreams and blessed nightdreams, of hunting butterflies on the hills near Madrid, across the planes of Tibet, down in the deep valleys of Andalusia.

But then it happened - Pilgram is about to sell a secret collection he purchased from an amateur knowing it was worth fifty times the amount he paid for it. "Pilgram decided that the dream of his life was about to break at last from its old crinkly cocoon. He spent several hours examining a map, choosing a route, estimating the time of appearance of this or that species, and suddenly something black and blinding welled before his eyes, and he stumbled about his shop for quite a while before he felt better."

What happens next to Pilgram (great name, so close to those New England Pilgrims) is for every reader to discover. Enough to say the great author doesn't hold back on his searing portrayal of a certain type of man at the crossroads of Eros and Thanatos.