Speak, Memory

In his youth Carl Heinrich Graun had a fine tenor voice; one night, having to sing in an opera written by Schurmann, chapel-master of Brunswick, he got so disgusted with some airs in it that he replaced them by others of his own composition. Here I feel the shock of gleeful kinship; yet I prefer two other ancestors of mine, the young explorer already mentioned and that great pathologist, my mother’s maternal grandfather, Nikolay Illarionovich Kozlov (1814–1889), first president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Medicine and author of such papers as “On the Development of the Idea of Disease” or “On the Coarctation of the Jugular Foramen in the Insane.” At this convenient point, I may as well mention my own scientific papers, and especially my three favorite ones, “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” (Psyche, Vol. 52, Nos. 1–2 and 3–4, 1945), “A New Species of Cyclargus Nabokov” (The Entomologist, December 1948), and “The Nearctic Members of the Genus Lycaeides Hübner” (Bulletin Mus. Comp. Zool., Harvard Coll., 1949), after which year I found it no longer physically possible to combine scientific research with lectures, belles-lettres, and Lolita (for she was on her way—a painful birth, a difficult baby).

The Rukavishnikov blazon is more modest, but also less conventional than the Nabokov one. The escutcheon is a stylized version of a domna (primitive blast furnace), in allusion, no doubt, to the smelting of the Uralian ores that my adventurous ancestors discovered. I wish to note that these Rukavishnikovs—Siberian pioneers, gold prospectors and mining engineers—were not related, as some biographers have carelessly assumed, to the no less wealthy Moscow merchants of the same name. My Rukavishnikovs belonged (since the eighteenth century) to the landed gentry of Kazan Province. Their mines were situated at Alopaevsk near Nizhni-Tagilsk, Province of Perm, on the Siberian side of the Urals. My father had twice traveled there on the former Siberian Express, a beautiful train of the Nord-Express family, which I planned to take soon, though rather on an entomological than mineralogical trip, but the revolution interfered with that project.

My mother, Elena Ivanovna (August 29, 1876—May 2, 1939), was the daughter of Ivan Vasilievich Rukavishnikov (1841–1901), landowner, justice of the peace, and philanthropist, son of a millionaire industrialist, and Olga Nikolaevna (1845–1901), daughter of Dr. Kozlov. My mother’s parents both died of cancer within the same year, he in March, she in June. Of her seven siblings, five died in infancy, and of her two older brothers, Vladimir died at sixteen at Davos, in the eighteen-eighties, and Vasiliy in Paris, in 1916. Ivan Rukavishnikov had a terrible temper and my mother feared him. In my childhood all I knew about him were his portraits (his beard, the magisterial chain around his neck) and such attributes of his main hobby as decoy ducks and elk heads. A pair of especially large bears he had shot stood upright with redoubtably raised front paws in the iron-barred vestibule of our country house. Every summer I gauged my height by the ability to reach their fascinating claws—first those of the lower forelimbs, then those of the upper. Their bellies proved disappointingly hard, once your fingers (accustomed to palpate live dogs or toy animals) had sunk in their rough brown fur. Now and then they used to be taken out into a corner of the garden to be thoroughly whacked and aired, and poor Mademoiselle, approaching from the direction of the park, would utter a cry of alarm as she caught sight of two savage beasts waiting for her in the mobile shade of the trees. My father cared nothing for the shooting of game, greatly differing in this respect from his brother Sergey, a passionate sportsman who since 1908 was Master of the Hounds to His Majesty the Tsar.