Conclusive Evidence (Inscribed with original butterfly artwork). This item is unavailable.Conclusive Evidence (Inscribed with original butterfly artwork)

Signed and dated by the Vladimir Nabokov in 1952, beneath his detailed sketch of a butterfly in blue ink with pencil shading. The butterly was signed and drawn for his close friend from the early 1950s, the artist William James Jr. (1882 - 1961), who was the son of the philosopher William James (1842 - 1910) and the nephew of Henry James. A Near Fine copy in like dust jacket. Book with top edge of board sunned and a bit of edgewear to boards. With small bookplate of William James Jr. to upper free endpaper. Dust jacket with spine slightly faded, folds a bit sunned, and a couple shallow nicks to edges. Corner of front panel trimmed (not price-clipped). Better known under its later British title Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography was republished in revised forms after this first edition. This American title Conclusive Evidence proved less popular, though Nabokov observed he liked it for the two "v’s" in close succession, for Vladimir and Véra. Notably, this edition of Conclusive Evidence includes the first appearance in book form of Nabokov's essay "Butterflies," which was first published in The New Yorker in June 1948 (here published as chapter six). Though Nabokov despised the novelist Henry James, he long admired the philosopher William James, and connected with his son William James Jr. through a shared early fascination with moths and butterflies. In 1957, James copied out for Nabokov a childhood letter on hatching moths, to which Nabokov responded, "Véra and I, and Dmitri, enjoyed and re-enjoyed it. None of those soft monsters was endemic in Northern Russia, but I used to be given pupae of American and Asiatic Saturnids, and went through all the thrills and throes reflected so vividly in your dear old little letter" (Boyd and Pyle, p. 522). James also wrote to Nabokov upon receiving a similar copy of Pnin (1957): "[It] arrived this morning. I said to myself, ‘There couldn’t be a butterfly on the title page’ - but there he was, along with the affectionate inscription, small and exquisite (and of no known species - and all the better for that!) and I said to myself ‘Only you would remember to do that!’" (Boyd and Pyle, pp. 520-1). As research fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov told the Paris Review in 1967, "the pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all." Provenance: the collection of Chase N. Peterson MD (1929-2014), a Harvard dean of admissions who later settled in Salt Lake City, where Nabokov stayed to hunt butterflies in the 1940s. Near Fine in Near Fine dust jacket.…