All Actaeon (which I misspelled earlier) could possibly remind me of was a passage in Speak, Memory in which Nabokov throws in a "nymphean incarnation". It's Section Five of Chapter Ten and begins on page 210. Nabokov cleverly tells of "collecting "Parnassius Mnemosyne", strange butterflies of ancient lineage. While out hunting and- you know what? I'll just type it out for you kind folks because he speaks better than I ever shall.
"My quest had led me into a dense undergrowth of milky-white racemosa and dark alder at the very edge of the cold, blue river, when suddenly there was an outburst of splashes and shouts, and from behind a fragrant bush, I caught sight of Polenka and three or four other naked children bathing from the ruins of an old bathhouse a few feet away. Wet, gasping, one nostril of her snub nose running, the ribs of her adolescent body arched under her pale, goose-pimpled skin, her calves flecked with black mud, a curved comb burning in her damp-darkened hair, she was scrambling away from the swish and clack of water-lily stems that a drum-bellied girl with a shaven head and a shamelessly excited excited stripling wearing around the loins a kind of string, locally used against the evil eye, were yanking out of the water and harrying her with; and for a second or two-before I crept away in a dismal haze of disgust and desire- I saw a strange Polenka shiver and squat on the boards of the half-broken wharf, covering her breasts against the east wind with her crossed arms, while with the tip of her tongue she taunted her pursuers.
I've yet to find a Parnassius Mnemosyne, that wasn't more than a mnemonic.
If you will read along and down the rows of lines, you will find Nabokov telling a story that surely never happened but ends with Polenka telling her friend (YOU and Me?) [look, the young master does not know me] (212), followed by "- and that was the only time I ever heard her speak."
What a poet! What A Poet!
Section Six!
"The summer evenings of my boyhood when I used to ride her cottage speak to me in that voice of hers now."
Read Section Six!
"On a road among fields, where it met the desolate highway, I would dismount and prop my bicycle against a telegraph pole. A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms. or glowing slits in dark banks, or flat, ethereal beaches that looked like mirages of desert islands. I did not know then (as I know perfectly well now) what to do with such things- how to get rid of them, how to transform them into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the BLESSED SHIVER- and this inability enhanced my oppression. A colossal Shadow would begin to invade the fields, and the telegraph poles hummed in the stillness, and the night-feeders ascended the stems of their plants. Nibble, nibble, nibble-went a handsome striped caterpillar, not figured in Spuler, as he clung to a campanula stalk, working down with his mandible along the edge of the nearest leaf out of which he was eating a leisurely hemicircle, then again extending his neck, and again bending it gradually, as he deepened the neat concave. Automatically, I might slip him, with a bit of his plantlet, into a matchbox to take home with me and have him produce next year a Splendid Surprise, but my thoughts were elsewhere: Zina and Colette, my seaside playmates; Louise, the prancer; all the flushed, low-sashed, silky-haired little girls at festive parties; languorous Countess G., my cousin's lady; Polenka smiling in the agony of my new dreams-- all would merge to form somebody I did not know but was bound to know soon."
SPULER?
CAMPANULA?
PLANTLET?-?PLANTLET! Nymphett?
I really hope I'm wrong about what I just read. But maybe you should read chapter 13, Part I of Lolita, and tell me if there aren't a few relations.
The next paragraph is for his wife and about her as well.
Can you believe him?
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