attraction for everyone who has learned to know it well. It is hard to get there, but it is even harder to leave it behind.
Malaise was the proof. For another eight years, until 1930, he simply disappeared without a trace for long periods. No one knew where he was or what he did. Back home in Stockholm, among his friends in the Entomological Society, rumours eventually began to circulate that he was the manager of a Soviet sable farm. And what about his relationships with women? Still today, no one can say with certainty how many times he was married, or why.
Dagny Bergman also wrote a book about her youthful adventure, in many ways more charming and with greater immediacy than the book her husband managed (or wanted) to produce, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t the time to write it until their children had left home, towards the end of the 1940s. “For days on end, Malaise’s insect net fluttered across bushes and thickets,” she writes in one place, but otherwise he is often missing from her book too, absent on some vague errand. His name hardly comes up. At the same time, it is she, perhaps, more than any of the other friends on the Kamchatka expedition who comes closest to solving the riddle of René Malaise.
One meets people with the strangest fates in Kamchatka, wind-driven people who have fallen out with society and been forced to disappear, unhappy people who have lost their loved ones in revolution and war, people who have managed to hold themselves erect despite trials of every kind.
…
“What’s your interest in Malaise?”
The question always took me by surprise. My answer was along the same lines—evasive. I had begun to collect what little is known about René Malaise. Bought his books, poked through archives, though without finding much. All of the older entomologists I’m acquainted with had of course met him, perhaps heard his hair-raising stories from the ’20s, but none had known him well. I got nothing but banalities, a picture of a happy gadabout who knew sawflies and invented a trap, a man with an adventurous past who later became an odd duck, an original whom no one took seriously, who made enemies and finally got lost among the legends. What did I want with him?
Every time I thought I was beginning to understand him, he glided away and vanished into some new kind of craziness, and so every time I let him go and turned to other things. Not because I’d stopped wondering about his fate, but more because his fundamentally expansive, uncontrollable temperament made me uneasy. There was something about him that was boundless.
Chapter 7
Narcissiana
The German-American psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger has pointed out that many collectors collect to escape the dreadful depressions that constantly pursue them. He takes up the question in his study of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), one of the greatest of the truly obsessive collectors, and I’m happy to grant his point, at least if we’re talking about art or books or other objects that change hands in the marketplace and are more or less difficult to find. People who collect everything, as long as it’s curious enough, are especially likely to be engaged in a form of fetishism that does indeed allay anxiety.
I know, for I was once on the verge of buying a house in Ydre solely because a dilapidated outhouse on the property was said to have belonged to the once famous poet and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846).
Natural objects, on the other hand, are not fetishes in the same way. One reason is that they can seldom be purchased for money. In addition, they almost always lack cultural provenance. Any beetle whatsoever that was caught, pinned and classified by, say, Charles Darwin, would be a wonderful fetish with which to cure a depression, but such things are impossible to come by. It’s true that I own a stuffed peacock whose history is known, including a list of everyone who’s owned it since it died in the
Malaise was the proof. For another eight years, until 1930, he simply disappeared without a trace for long periods. No one knew where he was or what he did. Back home in Stockholm, among his friends in the Entomological Society, rumours eventually began to circulate that he was the manager of a Soviet sable farm. And what about his relationships with women? Still today, no one can say with certainty how many times he was married, or why.
Dagny Bergman also wrote a book about her youthful adventure, in many ways more charming and with greater immediacy than the book her husband managed (or wanted) to produce, in spite of the fact that she hadn’t the time to write it until their children had left home, towards the end of the 1940s. “For days on end, Malaise’s insect net fluttered across bushes and thickets,” she writes in one place, but otherwise he is often missing from her book too, absent on some vague errand. His name hardly comes up. At the same time, it is she, perhaps, more than any of the other friends on the Kamchatka expedition who comes closest to solving the riddle of René Malaise.
One meets people with the strangest fates in Kamchatka, wind-driven people who have fallen out with society and been forced to disappear, unhappy people who have lost their loved ones in revolution and war, people who have managed to hold themselves erect despite trials of every kind.
…
“What’s your interest in Malaise?”
The question always took me by surprise. My answer was along the same lines—evasive. I had begun to collect what little is known about René Malaise. Bought his books, poked through archives, though without finding much. All of the older entomologists I’m acquainted with had of course met him, perhaps heard his hair-raising stories from the ’20s, but none had known him well. I got nothing but banalities, a picture of a happy gadabout who knew sawflies and invented a trap, a man with an adventurous past who later became an odd duck, an original whom no one took seriously, who made enemies and finally got lost among the legends. What did I want with him?
Every time I thought I was beginning to understand him, he glided away and vanished into some new kind of craziness, and so every time I let him go and turned to other things. Not because I’d stopped wondering about his fate, but more because his fundamentally expansive, uncontrollable temperament made me uneasy. There was something about him that was boundless.
Chapter 7
Narcissiana
The German-American psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger has pointed out that many collectors collect to escape the dreadful depressions that constantly pursue them. He takes up the question in his study of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), one of the greatest of the truly obsessive collectors, and I’m happy to grant his point, at least if we’re talking about art or books or other objects that change hands in the marketplace and are more or less difficult to find. People who collect everything, as long as it’s curious enough, are especially likely to be engaged in a form of fetishism that does indeed allay anxiety.
I know, for I was once on the verge of buying a house in Ydre solely because a dilapidated outhouse on the property was said to have belonged to the once famous poet and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846).
Natural objects, on the other hand, are not fetishes in the same way. One reason is that they can seldom be purchased for money. In addition, they almost always lack cultural provenance. Any beetle whatsoever that was caught, pinned and classified by, say, Charles Darwin, would be a wonderful fetish with which to cure a depression, but such things are impossible to come by. It’s true that I own a stuffed peacock whose history is known, including a list of everyone who’s owned it since it died in the
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