VANESSA ATALANTA: BUTTERFLY OF DOOM The Vanessa atalanta butterfly is John Shade’s name for his personal muse. The butterfly also has associations in Pale Fire ’s text, with Sybil primarily, but also Disa, Kinbote and even Gradus. If we accept Brian Boyd’s theory, at a deeper extra-text level the butterfly has associations with Hazel as well (B. Boyd , Nabokov’s Pale Fire ) . Boyd looks at Pale Fire from three “thetic” levels of interpretation: the text/plot level (thetic), the story behind (antithetic) and the re-reading/discovery level (synthetic). The higher synthetic level is where he hypothesizes the transmigration of Hazel’s spirit-as-muse into the Vanessa atalanta. Like Nabokov’s “fairy chess” where moves can take place off the board, solutions can be found outside the text on the synthetic level. A closer look at the “Vanessa” itself on this synthetic level reveals its crucial relationship to Hazel (which I see a bit differently from Boyd), as well as to all the associated characters. Why did Nabokov choose this particular butterfly as emblematic of all the above characters? His personal butterfly/muse was the Parnassus Mnemosyne, a particularly apt choice for a poet, as it relates to the abode of, and mother of, the muses. The Vanessa atalanta, as John Shade’s muse, relates to several dove-tailing themes in Pale Fire: the theme of mirror images and the theme of marriage. These themes in turn point to the greater themes of Art and transcendence, and ultimately to the transcendence of Art. The stories and associations of the butterfly’s two eponymous women, “Vanessa” from Jonathan Swift’s Vanessa and Cadenus and Atalanta, from the Greek myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes, and how they express these themes, can be understood by looking at their relationship to mythology, alchemy and the theories of Carl Jung. It may seem surprising to suggest that the man known to call psychiatrists “fakes” and “frauds,” who disliked symbols, allegory and sexual theory, used Carl Jung’s ideas as a pervasive, albeit hidden, substrate in his own work. However, Pale Fire is a masterful pastiche of parody and appropriation of the great, the near great and the not-so- great. Where Jung falls within that remains unknown, as Nabokov was silent on the man himself. I intend to demonstrate that looking at the Vanessa atalanta through Jung’s theories reveals satisfying solutions to the themes of Pale Fire , as well as convincing suggestions that this was done purposefully. Carl Jung was largely responsible for resurrecting interest in alchemy with his insights into the psychological nature of the alchemists’ endeavors. He saw in the work of alchemy that the sought-after goal of 1