by Brian Boyd
Nabokov ends his autobiography with the image of himself and his wife walking their son through a park in St. Nazaire, the port where they boarded the Champlain in May 1940 to escape to the United States. They know that Dmitri is about to glimpse the ship, to feel “the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee . . . [of] discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he had doddled about in his bath . . . to make out, among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen” (SM 309–10). Nabokov sets that ship and the America it implies in this key position at the book’s close as the solution of a much larger puzzle, his long experience of exile.
America solved another problem, realized another dream, in allowing him a chance to discover new species and to become not just an informed amateur but a scientist who could make a lasting contribution to lepidopterology. He began to write his autobiography in 1947, just after completing the first draft of his major lepidopterological monograph. No wonder he makes America shine through, ahead of time, here and there in Speak, Memory, never more riddlingly or triumphantly than at the end of his chapter on butterflies. In Europe, and in his first two entomological publications, he had been merely a talented collector. After arriving in New York, he turned into a scientist at the same time as—and partly because—he stopped writing in Russian.
In the fall of 1940, Nabokov approached the American Museum of Natural History and asked to be allowed to check the status of his Moulinet catches (almost everything else in his European collection, the third he had lost to history, he had been forced to leave behind in Paris as German tanks advanced). Although he was unfamiliar with microscopes and dissection, he learnt as he went along. Two years earlier, in Paris, he had written his first novel in English, setting much of it in the England he knew from Cambridge days. Then he had still hoped to find an academic or publishing job in Great Britain, but nothing turned up. Now in the United States he did not yet consider himself ready to begin writing fiction for an American audience, but he felt he had to renounce writing fiction in Russian if he was to develop as an American novelist. Meanwhile he spent the winter of 1940–41 preparing the lectures he would give at Stanford that summer and anywhere else that might hire him as a Russian lecturer. But he happily took time off to work for nothing at the AMNH. This resulted in another short paper in the issue of the Journal of the New York Entomological Society that published his description of the Moulinet butterfly, which he now named Lysandra cormion.
He had supported his family over his first winter in America partly by giving Russian tuition to several women associated with Columbia University. One, Dorothy Leuthold, offered to drive the Nabokovs across the continent to Stanford. Delighted, Nabokov collected all along the way. On June 7, 1941, he discovered a butterfly he recognized as new, and he would name it in Leuthold’s honor Neonympha dorothea (subsequent work has reclassified it as a subspecies, Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea, of a species that had not been known to extend from Mexico into the United States). Here, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon, he realized his dream of discovery even more vividly than he had in Moulinet.
After the summer, Nabokov returned east to a one-year engagement as visiting lecturer in comparative literature at Wellesley College, near Boston. From October 1941 he began to work, unpaid, setting in order the butterfly collections of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. By the middle of 1942 he had written his first major paper, on the genus Neonympha, and was appointed to a one-year position as research fellow at the MCZ, an appointment that would be extended, a year at a time, until he left Cambridge for Cornell in 1948.
During these six years he became the MCZ’s de facto curator of Lepidoptera and one of the authorities on South and especially North American polyommatine butterflies, the Blues. He wrote four key papers. In the fifteen-page “Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hüb[ner],” completed over the winter and spring of 1943, he established principles still used in analyzing the genitalia of the Blues. Between the fall of 1943 and the fall of 1944 he completed a thirty-fivepage paper on the morphology of the genus Lycaeides that drew on the collection he had built up at the MCZ, now the most representative series of American Lycaeides anywhere; here for the first time he developed the technique of describing wing markings by counting scale rows under the microscope. His sixty-page paper on the Blues of Central and South America, “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” (written 1944–45), constituted what taxonomists call a “first revision”—a comprehensive reconsideration—of what he called the subfamily Plebejinae and is now known as the tribe Polyommatini. His final and longest paper, the ninety-page monograph on the Nearctic members of the genus Lycaeides, took him from 1945 to 1948, since during this time he also wrote most of Bend Sinister and added a course in Russian literature to his two Russian-language courses at Wellesley. His paper, in the words of another entomologist, “entirely rearranged the classification of this genus.”5
The long paper on Neotropical Plebejinae stands out from the rest for several reasons. Nabokov often dreamed of chasing tropical butterflies, but he never had the opportunity. He did, on the other hand, collect zealously in North America. Why, then, did he choose to write a paper on South American Blues? For the simple reason that he had already mastered North American Blues and wished to compare the northern groups, as he now understood their relationships, with their southern counterparts. A colleague he greatly respected, Paul Grey, felt a similar impulse with fritillaries, and borrowed all of the AMNH’s specimens of South American fritillaries to see how they compared under the microscope with the North American species he knew so well. “He came to a grinding halt, however,” notes Kurt Johnson, “when he saw how complex the southern stuff was. Nabokov saw how complex the southern stuff was and chose to do a seminal (generic) nomenclature for it.”6
Nabokov’s work on North American Lycaeides transformed the understanding of a particularly difficult genus and has proved extremely durable, but there are many scientists who have undertaken such intrageneric revisions within the well-known Nearctic and Palearctic butterfly fauna. Nabokov’s work on South American Blues, though, constitutes the first revision of a whole tribe of butterflies. As such, it took him to the frontiers of lepidopterological knowledge and would prove “seminal” even if the seeds took another half-century to sprout in the recent work of Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Dubi Benyamini, and their colleagues.
Nabokov worked as a laboratory scientist in the 1940s in a way he would never do again. Why did he feel driven to spend up to fourteen hours a day at the microscope? Chiefly because he could not stop. He found it bliss to be able to make far-reaching discoveries that he had in one sense long dreamed about and in another hardly anticipated since his earlier work had been so confined to collecting. He was piecing together a whole new world. Those who have worked at the microscope with butterfly genitalia are inclined to say, “Show me a butterfly and I can’t tell you what it is, but show me the genitalia and I’ll identify anything you have.” Nabokov learnt to enjoy the deceptiveness and the difficulty of genitalic identification almost as much as the thrill of exploration and the triumph of discovery.
He also had few demands from the job that provided his basic income, teaching Russian language at Wellesley, until the fall term of 1946 when he was able to add his first literature course. For once his science could advance because his art retreated. Although he began writing Bend Sinister, his first American novel, in 1941, he found it agony to renounce his Russian prose. Rather than suffer the throes of writing a full-length work of fiction in a language other than Russian—although he was also writing stories and a critical book on Gogol in English—he could return to entomology, where his working language had always been English and his sense of mastery, far from being diminished, was now vastly expanded.
At the end of
Bend Sinister he pictures himself as both author of the novel we are reading and as lepidopterist. “Twang,” the book ends, “A good night for mothing,” as another moth hits the wire screen over his window and he closes down his hero’s painful life. In the season the novel was published, its author, now an Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker regular, was photographed by Time and Vogue at his desk in room 402 of the MCZ. That year, 1947, he began to write his autobiography and to build into it an explicit celebration of his life as a lepidopterist and its pattern of a dream fulfilled, if not in the Europe where the story began then in the America that Speak, Memory foreshadows.
Although he had been eager to explore the fauna of as many states as he could from the moment he arrived in the United States, Nabokov had no car and little money during his first eight years in the country and had to depend on the offers of others. His friend Mikhail Karpovich of Harvard invited him to his summer home in Vermont in 1940 and 1942; Dorothy Leuthold drove him across the country in 1941; a whistle-stop lecture tour by train in late 1942 took him through much of the South; James Laughlin, his publisher, let him have low-cost accommodation at his alpine lodge above Sandy, Utah, in 1943, where he caught a number of previously unknown species of moths for his colleague James McDunnough, who in gratitude named one of them Eupithecia nabokovi. Not until 1947 did the advance for Bend Sinister again provide enough money to allow the family to travel west by train, to Estes Park, Colorado, where they were able to stay until September only because of the New Yorker’s enthusiastic response to the first installment of Nabokov’s autobiography.
That year things began to change. Late in the fall he was offered a permanent position at Cornell. After taking it up for the fall term of 1948, he would now have no leisure for serious entomological work but would need, and could afford, a car. Never a driver himself, he was chauffeured west by Véra every summer between 1949 and 1959 except for the three years (1950, 1955, 1957) when work pressure ruled it out. The motels they stayed at would provide material for Lolita, which he began writing in 1950, and his success at discovering the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens above Telluride, Colorado, in the summer of 1951, led him to commemorate the locale in the celebrated “final” scene in the novel, Humbert’s vision from a mountain road of the mining town below, its tranquility broken only by the sounds of children at play.7
Even before Lolita made him famous, the image of Nabokov as lepidopterist was becoming well known. His autobiography, with its evocation of the onset of his “obsession,” was extremely popular in its New Yorker instar, and when Pnin began to appear there, too, in serial form, he had a character point out a score of small blue butterflies—actually the rare northeastern subspecies of Lycaeides melissa, identified and named samuelis by Nabokov from museum specimens and encountered by him in the wild in upstate New York in June 1950—and remark “Pity Vladimir Vladimirovich is not here. He would have told us all about these enchanting insects.” Nabokov wrily has Pnin reply: “I have always had the impression that his entomology was merely a pose.”8
In the wake of his autobiography, Life approached Nabokov for a photo essay on his butterfly hunting; he was asked to review butterfly books for the New York Times as well as to send along what he could to the much more modest Lepidopterists’ News; he was even approached by Edmund Wilson’s daughter, Rosalind, to write a book on mimicry for Houghton Mifflin. In all cases he was happy to oblige, although in the first and last instances the very scale of his enthusiasm frightened the proposals away. But apart from the short pieces in the Times and the News he published nothing more on butterflies throughout the 1950s. His research interests had shifted to his enormous project of translating and annotating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Arising out of the needs of his Russian literature students, and serving also as a means of establishing his academic credentials, this project, like his butterfly work in the 1940s, drew him deeper and deeper as the sheer excitement of discovery intensified. The whole effort took seven years (1950–57) and produced four five-hundred-page volumes before he was through.
When Lolita caught the attention of America in 1958, Nabokov had just finished his work on Eugene Onegin and now had the first opportunity in many seasons to spread the thousands of butterflies he had caught in his summer hunts since 1952. As he did so, he hit on the idea for a new story, “The Admirable Anglewing,” his first purely entomological tale since “The Aurelian” in 1930 and the last short story he ever worked on. Although abandoned at the pupal stage, despite several years of on-and-off work, it was published for the first time in Nabokov’s Butterflies and offers remarkable glimpses of Nabokov at both writing desk and laboratory bench.
Lolita allowed Nabokov to take leave from Cornell early in 1959, a leave that soon solidified into retirement. The novel’s triumph also prompted Doubleday to issue his Poems, with a butterfly on the cover and title page in honor of both the poem “A Discovery” and his image as lepidopterist, more widespread than ever now that his afterword to Lolita (“Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting . . .”) appeared in every copy of the novel. He was horrified at the designer’s sketches, “as meaningless in the present case as would be a picture of a tuna fish on the jacket of Moby Dick” (SL 285). When he travelled west for the summer, reporter Robert H. Boyle was sent by Time-Life to cover Nabokov the lepidopterist for Sports Illustrated. His write-up provides the best minute-by-minute account we have of Nabokov the man and certainly of Nabokov the collector.
In the fall of 1959, Nabokov left with his wife for what they thought would be a short visit to Europe, primarily to be nearer their son, Dmitri, who was training as an opera singer in Milan. As it happened, apart from seven unexpected months in Hollywood in 1960 to write the Lolita screenplay and, of course, to re-sample Californian butterflies, they would never again live in the United States. After two decades away, Nabokov found Europe unappealing and overrun with cars, but once he had his first successful butterfly hunting there (he spent four hours chasing Callophrys avis Chapman in the south of France on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History), and especially once he had his first taste of collecting in the High Alps in 1962, he settled comfortably back into a part of the world that he had never felt to be a proper home during the émigré years, when he could so rarely afford to pursue his passion.
In early 1948, just as he was putting the last touches to his longest lepidopterological monograph, Nabokov had suggested to Cyril dos Passos and Paul Grey that the three of them write a guide to the butterflies of North America. With his teaching at Cornell about to start and the Onegin project it spawned not far off, Nabokov would in fact have almost no time to pursue Lepidoptera research for the next fifteen years, let alone something on this scale. But in the early 1960s, after finishing Pale Fire, Nabokov found that his next novel—still tentatively entitled The Texture of Time and a long way from the Ada it would become—posed problems he could not yet solve. With no financial worries, no teaching duties, and for once no pressure from his muse, he was free to think of other projects.
His English publisher, George Weidenfeld, whose publishing firm had been virtually made by the staggering success of Lolita, agreed at the end of 1962 to publish his complete catalogue of the Butterflies of Europe, covering all species and significant subspecies. From late 1963 through to late 1964, Nabokov worked hard on what would have been his lepidopterological magnum opus. Like Eugene Onegin, it continued to expand as he worked on it, to the point where Weidenfeld became daunted by its size and could not guarantee publication even if it became a multinational, multilingual venture. Unable to settle to a new novel while the uncertainty persisted, Nabokov regretfully called off the project late in 1965. Had he been able to complete it, it would have been a work of natural history without parallel in the way it fused art and science in both its layout and its text. Left unfinished, and now obsolete, it can never be published in the form Nabokov envisaged, but his plans and the samples of the text included in Nabokov’s Butterflies offer so
me hint of its magic.
As the Butterflies of Europe moved back, Ada could advance. A first flash of inspiration in December 1965, apparently unconnected to the Texture of Time project, and another in February 1966, which established the connection, soon had Nabokov writing at a rapid rate. Occupying a place within his English works like that of The Gift within his Russian oeuvre, Ada was long in gestation, large in scale, and voracious in curiosity, except that this time, everything was lighter, more playful, more disruptive. In The Gift Nabokov represented his sense of dislocation between Russia and Berlin almost literally, with meticulous realism; in Ada the dislocation of two worlds, Europe and America, becomes the disjunction between Terra and Antiterra, marked by disconcertingly or delightfully detailed distortions of our everyday world. As if he had reflected in the crazy mirror of the imagination his short-lived hopes of coauthoring a Butterflies of North America and his recent plans for the Butterflies of Europe, Nabokov places Ada on an Old World estate somewhere in New England and then makes her a precocious naturalist, an ardent lepidopterist, whose world of Antiterra he stocks with invented but possible species belonging to real genera.
By the mid-1960s, Nabokov had begun to contemplate another project, Butterflies in Art. Ever since 1942, when Florence Read, president of Spelman College in Atlanta, had given him a reproduction of a Theban wall fresco in honor of his love of butterflies, he had considered one day using the representation of butterflies in art to test whether evolutionary changes had been recorded within the span of human history. In his travels around Italy and its museums in the early 1960s, the idea had returned, and in 1965 he began a more systematic search. Although he deeply cherished as an ideal the fusing of art and science, this project, too, failed to materialize, even if he never quite abandoned it. But it, too, permeated Ada, where Nabokov straddles the boundaries of art and life, art and nature, by making Ada a flower painter and Lucette a student of art history who stumbles on some of her own creator’s discoveries about butterflies in art.