In
1959, Nabokov lamented the fact that few of his Russian oeuvre--eight
novels--nor his stories and poems were accessible to his
English-speaking audience; "thus," he wrote, "every appraisal on the
strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus." Though it was
certainly not as important to him that his readership have a thorough
knowledge of his lepidopterological endeavors--professional papers on
butterflies and moths and recreational pursuits of winged beauty--recent
scientific studies and genre-crossing publications call our attention
to the fact that an appreciation of the level of Nabokov's understanding
of Lepidoptera can indeed sharpen a reader's view of his fiction,
poetry and essays.
In interviews, letters and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1967), Nabokov allowed lepidoptery and literature to vie for his passion. In 1962, he seemed to allow them equal footing: "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting" (Strong Opinions, p. 3). In 1966, butterflies seemed to gain an edge over books. He told Alfred Appel, "My passion for lepidopterological research, in the field, in the laboratory, in the library, is even more pleasurable than the study and practice of literature, which is saying a good deal" (Strong Opinions, pp. 78-9). He even went so far as to tell an interviewer, Herbert Gold, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology" (Strong Opinions, p. 100). Though an equal, if not greater, number of remarks can be culled proving just the opposite--that the pleasure of text far exceeded that of butterfly collecting--these remarks command our attention.
Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory that "[f]rom the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion." Butterfly collecting was a common hobby among the European upper classes, and his parents encouraged him, sharing their childhood reference books and dusty catches and teaching him to spread specimens. But with Nabokov it was not an idle pursuit. When he was 8 years old, he later recalled, "the longing to describe a new species" became a consuming passion.
Within
two years he had mastered the European Lepidoptera described in German
in the standard reference by Hofmann, plowing through the text word by
word with a German dictionary at his side. Over the next few years, he
assiduously read English and Russian entomological journals and dreamed
of new discoveries he might one day publish between their covers.
In interviews, letters and his memoir, Speak, Memory (1967), Nabokov allowed lepidoptery and literature to vie for his passion. In 1962, he seemed to allow them equal footing: "My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting" (Strong Opinions, p. 3). In 1966, butterflies seemed to gain an edge over books. He told Alfred Appel, "My passion for lepidopterological research, in the field, in the laboratory, in the library, is even more pleasurable than the study and practice of literature, which is saying a good deal" (Strong Opinions, pp. 78-9). He even went so far as to tell an interviewer, Herbert Gold, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology" (Strong Opinions, p. 100). Though an equal, if not greater, number of remarks can be culled proving just the opposite--that the pleasure of text far exceeded that of butterfly collecting--these remarks command our attention.
Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory that "[f]rom the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion." Butterfly collecting was a common hobby among the European upper classes, and his parents encouraged him, sharing their childhood reference books and dusty catches and teaching him to spread specimens. But with Nabokov it was not an idle pursuit. When he was 8 years old, he later recalled, "the longing to describe a new species" became a consuming passion.
 |
| NYPL, Berg Collection |
| Vladimir Nabokov at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1945. |
When
he was in his teens, his father, a prominent liberal politician and
champion of a constitutional democracy in Russia, was imprisoned for
three months for speaking out against the government oppression that
would later haunt many of his son's later writings. The trauma of the
event was assuaged, in part, by reports of the cabbage white butterflies
that the elder Nabokov spotted in the prison yard.
Soon after, Nabokov and his brother escaped the threat of the Red Army draft by settling, temporarily, in the Crimea, where they were joined by their parents and siblings. There Nabokov engaged in a serious pursuit of the local Lepidoptera, and at the age of 21, while at Cambridge, wrote up these results and published, in English, his first lepidopteral paper. "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera" appeared in The Entomologist in February 1920. Though Nabokov would soon change his area of academic concentration from zoology to literature, this paper inaugurated an auspicious series of professional publications in respected entomological journals.
In
the late 1920s and '30s, Nabokov and his new wife, Véra, and their son,
Dmitri, were for a time the center of the Russian émigré population in
Berlin.
Soon after, Nabokov and his brother escaped the threat of the Red Army draft by settling, temporarily, in the Crimea, where they were joined by their parents and siblings. There Nabokov engaged in a serious pursuit of the local Lepidoptera, and at the age of 21, while at Cambridge, wrote up these results and published, in English, his first lepidopteral paper. "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera" appeared in The Entomologist in February 1920. Though Nabokov would soon change his area of academic concentration from zoology to literature, this paper inaugurated an auspicious series of professional publications in respected entomological journals.
 | ||
| Nabokov on Entomological Exploration | |
| Throughout his life, Nabokov drew thousands of butterflies as part of his lepidopteral studies, and he often embellished dedication copies of his novels and his letters with charming renderings of his beloved papillons; and of course his literary works are replete with entomological allusions. | |
| "Few things indeed," wrote Nabokov in his autobiography, "have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration." | | |
| ||
Unofficially employed as a tutor of languages, tennis, boxing
and fencing, Nabokov was under constant threat of destitution but
enjoyed every opportunity for excursions to territories replete with
butterflies. In May 1940 they emigrated again, this time to the United
States, where they would make their home for the next 20 years. One of
Nabokov's first stops in New York was the American Museum of Natural
History; by the summer, he was collecting specimens on the museum's
behalf during his journey west to Stanford University, where he had a
summer post teaching Russian drama.
As the Nabokovs' itinerant
lifestyle was at odds with preserving a butterfly collection of their
own (childhood specimens had already been abandoned in Russia, and
prizes from the years in Berlin and months in Paris had been lost),
Nabokov willingly relinquished his finds to the care of the nearest and
most logical institutions. After a summer at Stanford University in
1940, Nabokov secured a post at Wellesley College that was repeatedly
renewed. For seven years he offered his services to the Museum of
Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard University, and after his first
year received an honorarium of $1,000 per annum as a research fellow and
de facto curator of Lepidoptera, a post he held until he left for
Cornell in 1948.
It is at Harvard that he performed his most substantial analysis, which allowed him to reclassify, based on detailed examinations of their genitalia, multiples of butterflies of the Latin American group commonly known as blues; 20 genera, species and subspecies now bear his name in testament to his revisions. Despite a growing teaching schedule at Wellesley and several writing projects under way, Nabokov devoted up to six hours a day to his work at the MCZ, most of these spent peering through a microscope, which caused lasting damage to his eyesight. His catches from 1943 and 1947 in Utah and Colorado, as well as other samples collected in various locations in Eastern states, are now permanently housed at the MCZ. And though his rash of published articles was over by the time he left Harvard, he never stopped collecting. His catches from the 1950s remain at Cornell, where he taught throughout that decade, and his European finds dating from the early 1960s, when he and Véra settled in Montreux, Switzerland, are housed in Lausanne.
If
Nabokov at one time believed he had sacrificed a lepidopterological
vocation for writing--which would support him when the vagaries of
revolution left his prominent, aristocratic family penniless--it is,
then, ironic that in 1945 he wrote to his sister that he was sliding
ever more surely from his literary career into his scientific one: "in a
certain sense," he told her parenthetically, "in The Gift [Dar, his greatest Russian novel], I 'foretold' my destiny--this retreat into entomology."
It is at Harvard that he performed his most substantial analysis, which allowed him to reclassify, based on detailed examinations of their genitalia, multiples of butterflies of the Latin American group commonly known as blues; 20 genera, species and subspecies now bear his name in testament to his revisions. Despite a growing teaching schedule at Wellesley and several writing projects under way, Nabokov devoted up to six hours a day to his work at the MCZ, most of these spent peering through a microscope, which caused lasting damage to his eyesight. His catches from 1943 and 1947 in Utah and Colorado, as well as other samples collected in various locations in Eastern states, are now permanently housed at the MCZ. And though his rash of published articles was over by the time he left Harvard, he never stopped collecting. His catches from the 1950s remain at Cornell, where he taught throughout that decade, and his European finds dating from the early 1960s, when he and Véra settled in Montreux, Switzerland, are housed in Lausanne.
 |
| NYPL, Berg Collection |
| Special pass for "Mr. V. Nobokov" to the American Museum of Natural History. Issued in New York City, January 1, 1941. |
Nabokov's
devotion to collecting and studying butterflies would yield, throughout
his career, but primarily in the 1940s, 22 scientific papers,
collector's notes and book reviews that were published primarily in Psyche but also in The Entomologist, The Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, The Lepidopterists' News and the New York Times Book Review.
In his later years, Nabokov discussed only three potential lepidoptery books. His research is well documented for Butterflies of Europe and Butterflies in Art, though neither was published in his lifetime. A more personal history of his "adventures with leps" worldwide is not as well documented, though it appears that in 1964 he might have intended to publish his collected entomological papers. In that year he bound up and inscribed to Véra 12 of these papers, excised or offprinted, and included a typescript table of contents as well as continuous pagination and several emendations added by hand throughout. That he determined that a book-length publication would not come to fruition in his lifetime is suggested by his decision to include three of these articles, which he evaluated as having "sufficient literary interest," in Strong Opinions, his selection of essays, interviews and letters to editors, published in 1973. With this remark he also acknowledges the perpetual overlap between literature and science.
The past decade has seen a rediscovery of the vital implications of Nabokov's scientific pursuits to the entomological community in the classification of Latin American blues, and recently two volumes devoted to different aspects of his lepidoptery have been published to critical accolades. The resuscitation of Nabokov's findings, begun in 1993 by Dr. Emilio Balletto of Italy, Dr. Zsolt Balint of Hungary and Dr. Kurt Johnson of the United States, has been contextualized and presented for the lay reader by Johnson and Steve Coates in Nabokov's Blues (1999). These and other scientists who have pursued the paths mapped out by Nabokov in the 1940s
have christened more than two dozen butterflies with Nabokovian names
in tribute, incorporating characters and places such as Lolita, Humbert
and Charlotte Haze; Tamara and Mashenka; Luzhin and Zina; Ada and Ardis;
Shade, Kinbote and Zembla; Pnin; Sirin and Véra; and others.
In his later years, Nabokov discussed only three potential lepidoptery books. His research is well documented for Butterflies of Europe and Butterflies in Art, though neither was published in his lifetime. A more personal history of his "adventures with leps" worldwide is not as well documented, though it appears that in 1964 he might have intended to publish his collected entomological papers. In that year he bound up and inscribed to Véra 12 of these papers, excised or offprinted, and included a typescript table of contents as well as continuous pagination and several emendations added by hand throughout. That he determined that a book-length publication would not come to fruition in his lifetime is suggested by his decision to include three of these articles, which he evaluated as having "sufficient literary interest," in Strong Opinions, his selection of essays, interviews and letters to editors, published in 1973. With this remark he also acknowledges the perpetual overlap between literature and science.
The past decade has seen a rediscovery of the vital implications of Nabokov's scientific pursuits to the entomological community in the classification of Latin American blues, and recently two volumes devoted to different aspects of his lepidoptery have been published to critical accolades. The resuscitation of Nabokov's findings, begun in 1993 by Dr. Emilio Balletto of Italy, Dr. Zsolt Balint of Hungary and Dr. Kurt Johnson of the United States, has been contextualized and presented for the lay reader by Johnson and Steve Coates in Nabokov's Blues (1999). These and other scientists who have pursued the paths mapped out by Nabokov in the 1940s
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| Thinking Point | |
| Can you think of any writers who are--like Nabokov and his butterflies--inextricably and iconically linked with a particular image, idea or thing, as, for example, D.H. Lawrence is with the symbol of the rising phoenix. | |
| ||
Nabokov's
scientific papers, as well as writings on--or even mentions
of--butterflies in his letters, novels, poetry and journals--including
the description of a dream in which, while on a butterfly hunt he
discovers, to his bewilderment, that he has brought along a "huge spoon"
instead of a net--have been collected and introduced by Brian Boyd,
Robert Michael Pyle and Dmitri Nabokov in Nabokov's Butterflies (2000). This hefty volume illustrates nicely an important realization described in Speak, Memory:
"I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in
art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate
enchantment and deception."
Rodney Phillips, Sarah Funke
