Cupid and Psyche

First appearing in Apuleius' The Golden Ass, Cupid and Psyche is a frame story, actually told as a digression. Lucius - who at this point is trapped in the guise of an ass - is holed up in a bandit's cave next to a young maiden who has been abducted on her wedding day and is being held randsom.  At the ceaseless and uncontrollable crying of the maiden, the "drunken and half-demented" old crone in league with the bandits and who tends to the cave, tells a fairytale to lighten her spirits.

According to Bullfinch's Mythology:

"The fable of Cupid and Psyche is usually considered allegorical. The Greek name for a butterfly is Psyche, and the same word means the soul. There is no illustration of the immortality of the soul so striking and beautiful as the butterfly, bursting on brilliant wings from the tomb in which it has lain, after a dull, grovelling, caterpillar existence, to flutter in the blaze of day and feed on the most fragrant and delicate productions of the spring. Psyche, then, is the human soul, which is purified by sufferings and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness."

Clearly, it is all too fitting that Nabokov was published in the entomological journal 'Psyche'.

Also, I stumbled upon an essay on Nabokov's lepidoptery titled "No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov" by Steven Jay Gould - a contemporary (and antagonist) of E.O. Wilson - included in his book I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. The title mimics Nabokov's quote: “There is no science without fancy and no art without fact”. In the essay, Gould explores Nabokov's legacy as an author-scientist and the translation of his genius between the two seemingly distant fields of literature and lepidoptery.


The essay is partially available for preview on google books (and the MSU library has copies of I Have Landed), but I think this dissection of Gould's argument in this article is a good read instead (the essay itself repeats much of the summary and quotes we've read in Nabokov's Blues):   Nabokov was right - so is Steven Jay Gould wrong? (link)