The Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg – On Literature, Butterflies & Chess

Museum of the Month is a series where I share my experiences of visiting unique and often strange museums from around the world. My aim is to rebuff the notion that museums are boring. Join me on my quest!

Nabokov Museum in St Petersburg, Russia

Lolita was my first introduction into the world of Russian literature. I loved it. From the opening paragraph I was hooked:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

After being utterly blown away by the opening line of the novel, I began reciting my own name over and over in my head – Shing – Shing – Shing – and then resigned to the fact it sounded rubbish. Why? Because it only has one syllable! With a name like Lolita you can split it up and create all these playful, little sub-personalities:

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Before you think I’m hating on my name, that’s not true, I kind of like it even though it sounds like a cleaning product brand. All I’m saying is that I’m a fan of two or three syllable names, and I’m not the only one who has thought about this: Bill Hicks agrees with me too.

The comedian hated his name. When he was trying to break through the industry he thought it was holding him back:

What comedian besides Bob Hope has ever made it with a single syllable name, first and last?’ … He obsessively counted the syllables of the big guys. ‘You know, like Jon-Nee-Car-Son, Woo-Dee-Al-Len, Rich-Ard-Pry-Or’ He went on about it for weeks and when he discovered numerology, he decided to pick a new name that would numerically spell success.

Clearly, his new name didn’t take off (I don’t know what he chose), and he had a shed-load of talent to make his way to the top of his game in spite of his, erm, one syllable name before dying at the untimely age of thirty-two.

I’m conscious that I’m digressing somewhat here, so back to Nabokov and Russian literature.

I think most of you know about the storyline of Lolita even if you haven’t read it, perhaps you have watched the Kubrick adaptation, or the critically panned Adrian Lyne re-make. But in case you are not familiar with it, it’s about a man who becomes infatuated with a young girl, and, as a way of ensuring her presence in his life, he decides to marry her mother despite being repulsed by her.  Yes, a terrible man I know, but yet a fictional character I adore! I won’t give any more of it away because there’s a lot more to the story worth reading. If you enjoy reading Lolita I also recommend The Enchanter by Nabokov which has a very similar storyline.

After falling in love with his writings, as well as a few other Great Russians, I was itching to head across the Baltic to see the country they grew up in, a country that left me feeling so curious and often mystified. So when I found myself in Saint Petersburg in none other than Nabokov’s ancestral home, where he lived until he was eighteen, I was very, very happy.

The writer’s family home has since become a small but very charming museum dedicated to his life. As you walk in, the first thing you notice is the grandeur of the wooden-clad walls and ceiling, then, across the room you see a wooden display unit filled with rows of mounted butterflies behind a panel of glass.

Nabokov museum, Saint Petersburg

Literature wasn’t his first love

Visiting the museum revealed how little I knew about his personal life, for each book I had read, they revealed little about the author apart from his exceptional wit and gift for writing. To my surprise, I discovered his first love was actually the study and science of butterflies (lepidopterological research), he said it was more pleasurable than the study and practice of literature, which is saying a good deal! But this wasn’t just a hobby of his, not only was he a best-selling author, but also the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University.

Nabokov's butterlies

During an interview released in a 1967 edition of the Paris Review he talks about his first love:

INTERVIEWER

Besides writing novels, what do you, or would you, like most to do?

NABOKOV

Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.

You can read the full interview here.

After learning about his love of butterflies it dawned on me why Nabokov may have been obsessed with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (he gave many lectures about the novella, and wrote his own literary criticism on the topic). Butterflies develop through a process of metamorphosis just like the protagonist of Kafka’s novel, ‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect’. (I’ve just realised that this post now contains what I think are the two greatest opening lines of all stories throughout history – but feel free to interject at this point with your own opinions!)

Inside the Nabokov Museum
The old-world interior of the Nabokov Museum

Museums in Saint Petersberg
Back when Playboy used to actually produce good writing

His love for nature started very young after he found some old books belonging to his mother, kept from when she was a child. She was taught natural history as a young girl under the teaching of a prominent Russian Zoologist and Darwinian called Vladamir Shimkevich. At the time it was unusual for a girl to have such a privileged education but the Nabokovs came from an ancestry of nobility. Impressively, the family spoke Russian, English, and French in their household, and Nabokov was fluent in all three from an early age. In fact, much to his father’s chagrin, Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian! In my Fodor guidebook there is a quote by the writer that reads, “My head speaks English, my heart speaks Russian and my ear speaks French”.

Nabokov Museum
Cabinets containing personal belongs of Nabokov

In the rest of the museum you can discover other pieces of miscellaneous from his life, and tad-bits of information that add more texture to what he was like. One of the highlights for me was the information about his love for chess (I’m a HUGE chess fan, and that’s another reason why I was keen to go to Russia). If I didn’t already love him for his literature, then I would have loved him for his chess accomplishments.

Nabokov playing chess Vera
Nabokov playing chess with his wife Vera

All in all, although this museum is small, it is perfectly formed. I came away feeling like I had gotten to know the man behind the literary works on a more personal level – as a boy, a naturist, and an avid chess player.

Chess inside the Nabokov Museum

Nabokov once said, ‘A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist‘. I completely agree.

Additional Information about the Nabokov Museum

How to get there: 47, Bolshaya Morskaya Street, just around the corner from St. Isaac’s Square.
Opening times: Tuesday-Friday: 11.00 -18.00. Saturday: 12.00 – 17.00. Closed Sunday, Monday
Entrance fee: Free!
Website: www.nabokovmuseum.org

 

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12 Responses

  1. So, would you be willing to be patient enough to teach me how to play chess? I’ve always wanted to learn. That was a very fun play on syllables and names. I bet you have all of us saying names, including our own, out loud lol! I have books from both my mother and father as children and I really liked that part best. My mother taught interpersonal communication and speech/debate for the university. My dad taught history and home economics. They also passed those books onto me as well. Those are treasures always! I really loved this, Shing 🙂

    1. I would love to teach you chess!! But I can’t promise I’m a good teacher! However, it sounds like your parents were… you’re making me feel all nostalgic Mike!

  2. I didn’t read the book Lolita but I know the story behind it and I have to admit that I would have been interested in visiting this museum too. How do you do it? You always find cool museums to visit that aren’t always the more common ones and I love reading about it on your blog 🙂

  3. Nabokov is my favorite writers of all times! Though I like Lolita a lot, my favorite novels are Ada and Pale Fire (the last one’s just twisted my mind). This museum is #1 thing on my St Petersburg bucket list 😉

    1. Ada – yes!! But I haven’t read Pale Fire…. I must now and I will report back to you! 🙂 Great that you love Nabokov too, and when you visit St Petersburg don’t forget the Dostoevsky Museum, I didn’t have time to go but I hear the museum is excellent and you can spend longer there than inside the Nabokov Museum which is quiet small as I mentioned.

  4. Great post about an interesting place and a great writer. If I remember correctly, Lolita was the first novel he wrote in English.

    About a year ago I was visiting the LACMA in Los Angeles. A special showing on Stanley Kubrick. On the section about the movie Lolita, there was this letter from The Bible Presbyterian Church in Tampa, Florida:

    “Dear Mr. Kubrick:
    This is just to let you know that many of us regret sincerely your making the picture based on the novel, “Lolita”.
    It is so obvious to everyone, although you might dislike to admit it, that it is based upon sex appeal. And that appeal is quite degenerate in its nature. It can accomplish no good.
    Cordially yours,
    (signature) Max F Stowe”

    Amazing, isn’t it?

    1. Hi! I loved reading your comment. I’m a huge fan of Stanley Kubrick and thought about booking a flight to LA especially for this exhibition in 2013, instead one of my friends who was in LA for work at the time visited on my behalf haha.

      This letter is awesome, thank you so much for sharing it with me. It’s definitely not the kind of book or movie that will please everyone, eh?

      The section on The Shining looked awesome – I can’t believe Stephen King didn’t like the film adaptation!!

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