Pas de Deux.

Bookseller Notes

A tour-de-force from the renowned Finnish artist/printer, combining meticulous scholarship with a striking aesthetic in a highly detailed exploration of the parallels between Nabokov's life as writer and lepidopterist, and that of his particular study, the Polyommatus Blue butterfly. The parallel pages include genealogy/phylogenetic development depicted in a complex multi-imaged tree, a crossword puzzle (a favourite Nabokov activity) opposite a decorative lattice flower-head butterfly environment, a coded chess game record (Rubinstein and Lasker) facing a microscopic photograph of a butterfly wing, and the two maps, one outlining Nabokov's flight from the revolution in Russia to Europe then America, the other showing the migration of the Polyommatus from Asia to South America 11 million years before; the butterfly-informed leaves throughout printed on the more fragile gossamer-style paper. Bergelt's attention to detail is such that even in the colophon it states that the book is not published by 'Gosizdat', the Soviet State publishing house, thus alluding to Nabokov's issues with censorship. Overall, an extraordinary combination of entomology, linguistics, typography, literature, design and illustration. [With:] Tatjana Bergelt: Image, Word, Book, 2024, pp. 104, an illustrated catalogue of essays on Bergelt's work, including one on Pas de Deux by Viola Shat.