Borders and Butterflies in José Manuel Prieto’s Livadia/Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire

In Cuban novelist José Manuel Prieto’s ‘Russian Trilogy’, and in particular, in the novel Livadia/Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire (1997), the experience of crossing borders and the reflection on how to pass safely, and often secretly, is vital. The geographical borders that take center stage are those of the former Soviet Union of the 1990s and adjacent Northern and Eastern countries as well as the Black Sea. In a first step, this essay examines the portrayals of changing borders, changing concepts of the border as well as the protagonist’s main strategies of border-crossing in the novel. In a second step, it explores the impact of a seemingly lighthearted metaphor, that of the butterfly and in particular its wings, to elucidate what I see as Prieto’s protagonist’s innovative approach of reacting to the experience of the border and his previous hyper-individualist attitudes when facing it. This experience is intrinsically linked to the role of writing and reading. Both hold a transcending potential for the narrator, as it is through acts of reading and reiterated attempts at writing that he begins to engage in a process of care for himself and others and devise transformative forms of being with others, even virtually, when a spatial or temporal separation prevents real encounters. His pondering on his previous restless crisscrossing of national confines may thus help, in the most fortunate moments, transcend spatial and conceptual confines and broaden what he calls the notion of an “imaginación aduanal.”