The children adored him. Uncle acquired his father's passion for collecting, his subtle brand of humor, his lavish attentiveness to guests. Uncle lived in the church wing, in what was called the Archbishop's Room. There, in spurts of nervous energy, he darted from project to project, littering his chaos with husks of sunflower seeds, which he was constantly eating. His collection of Little Russian butterflies was representative by 1898. He had the cabbages, the blues, the sulphurs, the wood nymphs, the checkerspots, and the fritillaries. He had the European swallowtail, which is smaller and chunkier than the American. He had four species of the genus Vanessa: the red admiral, the peacock, the tortoiseshell, and the painted lady. He had the eastern festoon, a small, intricately mottled Old World species with deeply scalloped brown lunules along the edges of its wings. He had several species of Parnassius, which Vladimir Nabokov has described as "strange butterflies of ancient lineage, with rustling, glazed, semitransparent wings, and catkin-like flossy abdomens." The ramifications of the genus Par~lassius would consume Uncle's attention until he died.

       Mopsy remembered the General as a wonderful father, who taught her to embroider and cross-stitch, encouraged her painting with little prizes, and supported everything she got interested in. Some of her earliest artistic efforts were menus he asked her to paint for dinner guests. She also remembered drawing something, maybe a bird, when she was two or three, and being taken bawling to her crib before she could finish it. She went through a period of drawing only noses. Then she discovered mouths. Her first full portrait was of a Chinese doll with beady black eyes. Uncle, who became a skillful draftsman when he was still a boy, was her main teacher. Miss Whishaw was a great help, too, and the house was filled with dozens of fine oils, which Vladimir Panayev had picked up when he was collecting art for the Hermitage. Crowding the walls in the sumptuous, close-packed decor that was typical of the period, they were a silent inspiration. A place of honor in the largest room, the blue drawing room, was given to a portrait of Catherine the Great by Dmitri Levitsky. Beside her was a portrait of Empress Anne by Louis Caravaque. Then, in three tiers, the family. The wall was lined with high-backed chairs that had massive mahogany arms. A chandelier of Venetian-glass morning glories hung down. On the other walls were landscapes by the Flemish masters T eniers and Jordaens, a Madonna by Memling, a flower painting by Mignon, a Venetian scene by Guardi. Among these works, Mopsy dreamed of becoming another Mme. Vigee-Lebrun, who had painted the aristocracies of Western Europe and Russia a century before.

       In the winter qf 1905, she made a snow statue of Marie Antoinette in the garden while Uncle made one of Voltaire beside it. They were so lifelike, down to the buttons on the philosopher's frock coat, that the night watchman was terrified when he happened on them, and knocked them down when he realized they were only snow. But Nika, to my family's lasting gratitude, had managed to photograph them. Noone makes such elegant snowmen anymore. The A vinoffs did not go to St. Petersburg that winter, because there was trouble in the capital -a small revolution. It was quickly crushed, but the ripples of discontent spread into the countryside. Several estates in Little Russia were burned, and their owners killed. A detachment of Cossacks was stationed at Shideyevo, and the winter passed quietly.

       Mopsy painted little portraits of her friends, and they received them as presents for their patience. Her best friend was Tanya Maksheyev, who lived on an estate a dozen miles away. In a picnic photograph, Tanya is a pretty, self-possessed fourteen-year-old in a sailor suit. Mopsy would pick her up in the karzinka, and she would visit for several days. They baked pastries and took them to Schekuchin's house, beyond the estate's brick factory. It was a beautiful walk, almost a mile along the marsh. Schekuchin was a cultivated man living in seclusion. His cottage was in a grove of old mulberry trees that were the size of oaks. He would serve them tea and jam, in his faded dressing gown. His parents had owned a big estate not far away, but they had disowned him after he fell in love with his mother's chambermaid and took her to Paris. Now he lived with his homely daughter and a large library, most of whose volumes were about homeopathic medicine. He was always persuading his daughter that she had some ailment, so he could try one of his cures on her.

       Tanya moved to France in 1912, and after the Revolution she and Mopsy lost touch. For sixty years, neither knew what had happened to the other. Tanya married a man named Vladimir Smirnoff, who had got out of Russia with little more than a document showing that he had once owned a famous vodka firm. He sold the rights to his name, and they lived on the proceeds until his death, in 1934. One day a few years ago, Tanya learned that Mopsy was living in America. They had a joyous reunion by letter. She was living in Marseilles. On her bed table, she wrote me, was her portrait by Mopsy, done when they were seventeen.

       In 1898, General Avinoff had received a brigade in Helsinki. (Finland had been annexed by Russia in 1809.) After three winters there, he took his last command, a division near Kiev. Uncle entered a Gymnasium in Kiev, and Mopsy took lessons in oils from a young art student who would let her use only two colors, burnt ochre and black. Though she was happier with watercolors, she worked hard at oil painting, because Mme. Vigee-Lebrun had painted in oils. In 1904, when the General retired, they went for the winter to St. Petersburg, where they had an apartment on the Liteiny Prospekt, and where Mopsy took lessons from the Polish portraitist Alfons Karpinsky. Several winters later, she went to the Encouragement des Arts and studied with the court painter Alfred Eberling, who was famous for his portrait of the ballerina Karsavina. He told her not to worry about the outline of the face but to concentrate on the shapes of its highljghts and shadows. One summer, in Florence, she took lessons in miniature painting.

       When Mopsy was twenty, she fell in love with her cousin Leo Panayev. They met in St. Petersburg. He was five years older and, like every officer in the Oktirsky Regiment, wore a gold earring in his left ear. After four days, he proposed. Mopsy was ecstatic, but Uncle and her mother, who recognized in him the fanatical piety for which the Panayevs were known, warned her not to be hasty. The romance lasted about a year. Finally, Uncle made her write a letter breaking it off. Mopsy was miserable, and Leo volunteered for duty in Mongolia. When war broke out in 1914, he and his two brothers rushed to the front. Fighting from their horses, like Knights of the Holy Grail, they were all killed in the first two months, and immediately became legends. The Czar posthumously awarded each of them the Cross of St. George. A book was written about them and distributed to the troops.
 

      IN 1908, Serge Avinoff, the General's only brother, died childless, leaving a real-estate fortune to Nika and Uncle. Uncle had graduated from the Imperial Law College in 1905 and was working as an assistant secretarygeneral in the Senate-an administrative body that functioned as a Cabinet-monitoring correspondence from suspected revolutionaries abroad. One letter he carefully steamed open was from a man in England named David Gruen, who later became David Ben-Gurion. Uncle's salary, even with the addition of a small allowance from his parents, who were richer in land and works of art than in cash, hadn't enabled him to progress very far with his butterfly collection. But now, with this inheritance, he could move into high gear. That summer, during the long vacation that the government took, he went to the Pamir Mountains with a young entomologist from St. Petersburg, Alexander Kirichenko, and on its alpine prairies and rock slides they netted thousands of specimens. Several were new to science. The prize catch was a splendid aberration in the genus 1'1 pollo
nius, with black ocelli, or eyespots, instead of the usual red ones. Most of the butter flies of European Russia had been classified, but in Central Asia there were-and still are-many discoveries to be made. It is not lust that the region is so remote and imperfectly explored but that in its isolated mountain valleys butterflies develop characteristics of their own; new forms are continuallyevolving.

       Between 1908 and 1914, Uncle sent out forty-two collecting expeditions across Asia. His agents were mostly students at the University of St. Petersburg. They brought him material from the Caucasus, from Armenia, from Persia, from the Hindu Kush, from Tien Shan, from Bhutan and Sikkim. In 1912, with Alexis Jacobson, an experienced entomologist, and Michael Mamayeff, an enthusiastic young sportsman, he traversed the western slopes of the Himalaya from India to Russian Turkestan. He was twenty-eight, and would be pondering the data and impressions from his trip for the rest of his life.

       Mamayeff and he arrived by steamer in Ceylon (as he recounted in the Pittsburgh Record nineteen years later) and passed through the grand old cities of India-Madras, Agra, Delhi, Benares. They saw the mighty wall of the Himalaya from Darjeeling. Permits were procured from the government of the Viceroy for them to collect in remote parts of Kashmir. In Rawalpindi, they met Jacobson and, with seventy coolies, proceeded in primitive vehicles called dongas to Srinagar. From Srinagar, a family took them in their houseboat on the river Jhelum to Ganderbal, where they hired horses and started the ascent into the Himalaya. Foothills smothered with irises gave way to a balmy zone of fir trees. In a high valley where they camped for several days, they met another party of travellers- Mr. and Mrs. Bullock Workman, of Philadelphia, who were on their way to explore the glaciers of the Karakoram. Wading through deep snow in the Zoji-la Pass, they entered Ladakh. For several days, they rode through a desolate, treeless moonscape. One evening, Uncle caught a field mouse and dropped it into a special jar that had been given to him by Lord Rothschild. The year before, he had visited Tring Park, Lord Rothschild's zoological museum in Hertfordshire. The flea collection there was unrivalled. Many of the specimens were mounted under individual magnifying glasses. Of the thousand or so known species, Rothschild lacked only a few. One was said to parasitize a rare Tibetan field mouse. Hearing that Uncle was going to the Himalaya, Lord Rothschild
asked him to try to get it for him. Having ascertained that this was the right mouse, Uncle dropped it into the jar, which was filled with kerosene, and waited hopefully for the flea to float to the surface, but none appeared. "I got the carrier, but it was clean," he reported to Lord Rothschild. "I couldn't get the infestation."

       Uncle made many sketches of the barren land and the lamaseries that clung to the cliffs like colonies of coral. In Leh, the capital of Ladakh, a Moravian missionary took Uncle, Jacobson, and Mamayeff to meet the country's ex-king, who had recently been deposed by the Maharajah of Kashmir and was living as a private citizen in the city where his ancestors had ruled for centuries. His left eye was crossed-he had trained it since childhood to focus on his nosebecause the king of Ladakh was considered too exalted a being to look on ordinary people with both eyes. Uncle made a paintilliste portrait of him with a stipple pen. The king gave Uncle a beautiful jade cup, and Uncle reciprocated with his flashlight, which the king accepted as something bordering on the miraculous. Leaving Leh before the batteries gave out, the explorers trekked into Rupshu, a high tableland southeast of Ladakh and on the Tibetan frontier. Rupshu proved to be an El Dorado for butterflies. Uncle netted several new species and subspecies, including a Parnassius that no one had ever seen before. He named it Parnassius maharaja. They saw kiangs-wild asses. About the only people they met were travelling shepherds. The sheep carried specially constructed bags of salt, which had come from several highly saline lakes in the vicinity, and were headed for Tibet, where salt was like money. From Rupshu, Uncle's party headed north on yaks, which they traded for twenty-two horses, and they rode the horses through a succession of passes into Chinese Turkestan. As they neared the top of the Karakoram Pass, at eighteen thousand feet, they passed many horse and camel skeletons, and stopped often to save their mounts from a similar fate. Even at that high elevation, there were butterflies, and Uncle and Jacobson, though their lungs were ready to burst, ran down a few that were extremely desirable.

       There was an awkward moment at the border when the Chinese authorities asked to see the visas required for entering the country. By showing them all sorts of irrelevant documents, Uncle managed to convince them that they were on a mission of such importance that it would be undignified for them even to show their passports. His performance was so impressive that when they got to Kashgar the governor-general of the district was waiting for them with a sixty-course dinner. Most of the branches on the tree of life were represented in this banquet. There were even some wormlike invertebrates, dipped in a bright-indigo sauce. When it was over, Uncle asked the governor if he might take his picture.

       "I am afraid I am so ugly that the lenses of your camera will crack," the man replied.
       "On the contrary," Uncle assured him. "I shall make a thousand copies and paste them allover my room."
       The governor blushed, and asked Uncle how old he was.
       Uncle knew how age is revered in the Orient. "A sparrow like myself is in his teens," he said, "but you must be well over a hundred."
       The governor searched for a self effacing comeback. "My head may be bald," he stammered, "but it is completely empty."
       "Nothing of the sort," Uncle protested. "It is only transparent, like a beautiful crystal."
       Thoroughly charmed, the governor made Uncle a mandarin, third class. This title enabled them to pass safely through the torrid basin of the Tarim, where strangers were regarded with suspicion, and reach the eastern edge of the Pamirs, where they entered Russian Turkestan. From Osh, the intrepid explorers caught a train to Tashkent, where years before, when he was a boy, Uncle's association with Central Asia had begun.
 

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