by Brian Boyd
In the 1970s, and in his own seventies, Nabokov still collected butterflies every summer, still hoped to complete Butterflies in Art, and still dreamed of writing a Speak on, Memory or Speak, America, which would devote a chapter to his researches at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Instead of continuing his autobiography, however, he ended his career with a savagely inverted fictional autobiography, Look at the Harlequins!, whose hero, a novelist called Vadim Vadymich, is a reduced shadow of himself:
I spent what remained of the summer exploring the incredibly lyrical Rocky Mountain states, getting drunk on whiffs of Oriental Russia in the sagebrush zone and on the Northern Russian fragrances so faithfully reproduced above timberline by certain small bogs along trickles of sky between the snowbank and the orchid. And yet—was that all? What form of mysterious pursuit caused me to get my feet wet like a child, to pant up a talus, to stare every dandelion in the face, to start at every colored mote passing just beyond my field of vision? What was the dream sensation of having come empty-handed—without what? A gun? A wand?
(LATH 155–56)
In 1975, at seventy-six, he was still working assiduously, starting at six o’clock every morning, to revamp the French translation of Ada, still chasing butterflies in the Alps. That summer, sapped of strength by the rush to transpose Ada, he had a serious fall down a steep slope at Davos. His butterfly net slipped still further, lodging on the branch of a fir, as he said, “like Ovid’s lyre” (SL 552).
That image seems a perfect emblem of the link between literature and Lepidoptera that lasted to the end. For after this fall, Nabokov was never the same. He spent much of the next two years in hospital, in the summer of 1976 reading with delight, when his delirium lifted, the new Doubleday Butterflies of North America and mentally rereading, as it were, the still unwritten text of his own next novel, The Original of Laura. But a year later, as another summer approached and he sank toward his death, Laura remained largely unwritten, and in his last recorded words, he told his son tearfully that he knew “a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again.”9
How fitting, then, that Dmitri Nabokov should have compensated for these twin plans his father’s death cut short by translating from Russian into English his father’s most intense amalgam of literature and Lepidoptera, his afterword to The Gift, itself cut short by his switch from Russian to English and from Europe to America at the midpoint of his life.
I have retold Nabokov’s life as a dance in which science suavely partners art. But it would be perfectly possible to read a thousand pages of his best fiction—The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita without its afterword, Pale Fire, and Transparent Things—and another five hundred pages of his short stories and not even realize he was a lepidopterist. What, then, can his passion for butterflies explain in his art? How did it reflect or affect his mind, his thinking, his writing?
From as far back as we can see, Nabokov had a love of both detail and design, of precise and unpredictable particulars and intricate, often concealed patterns. Aware of how little most people know about nature, of how much effort it took to master all he had learned about the butterflies of the world, and of how much more there always was to discover even about the Blues he specialized in, he disliked the impulse to impose easy meaning—a generalization, an allegorization, a handy quick-stick label—on a complex and recalcitrant reality. “As an artist and a scholar,” he once proclaimed, “I prefer the specific detail to the generalization, images to ideas, obscure facts to clear symbols, and the discovered wild fruit to the synthetic jam” (SO 7).10
But if he rejected anything that quashed the live independence of things, he nevertheless, like any scientist, delighted in the patterns that ordered their relationship. Pattern has its purely aesthetic side, of course, and Nabokov is celebrated for his mastery of phonic and fictive design. But understanding pattern also allows us some degree of control over the unruliness of life, and in Nabokov that urge to control was powerfully developed: witness his refusal to submit to interviews unless he could have questions in advance, write out his answers, and check the final text; his insistence that his characters were his “galley slaves” (SO 95); his famous comparison of the relationship between author and reader to that between chess problemist and problem solver (SM 290); and his command of form at all levels, from phrase to finished fiction. Not for him the world as a big, booming, buzzing confusion. The world is there to be teased out by the inquiring mind, as in his fiction it is there to be shaped by the imaginative one.
Nabokov nevertheless had a strong sense of the limits of human knowledge: He thought that no matter how much we can find out, there is always more behind things—beyond our human sense of space and time, beyond the limits of personality and mortality, beyond our ignorance of ultimate origins and ends—that consciousness as we know it seems unable to penetrate. He had a lifelong urge to probe “the beyond,” which Véra Nabokov has gone so far as to call—a slight overstatement in my judgment—“the main theme” of his work.11 This impulse may have derived from his mother’s unconventional religious sense, even before he could be aware of the antipositivism in the air in the Europe and especially in the Russia of his childhood (Bergson, Blok, Bely). But his passion for butterflies attests to and surely helped develop his respect for this world, no matter how strong his curiosity about what might lie beyond it. As he wrote rather gnomically in his last novel: “This was the simple solution, that the brook and the boughs and the beauty of the Beyond all began with the initial of Being” (LATH 16).
His love of Lepidoptera drew upon and sharpened further his love of the particular and the habits of detailed observation that gave him such fictional command over the physical world—biologically (birds, flowers, trees), geographically (localities, landscapes, ecologies), socially (manorial Russia, boardinghouse Berlin, motel America), and bodily (gesture, anatomy, sensation). He thought that only the ridiculously unobservant could be pessimists in a world as full of surprising specificity as ours, and he arranged his own art accordingly.
Still deeper than the pleasures of immediate observation were the delights of discovery. As a child exploring on his own his parents’ butterfly books, he preferred the small type to the main text, the obscure to the obvious, the thrill of finding for himself what was not common knowledge. That impulse became a positive addiction when he peered into the microscope in Harvard’s laboratories in the 1940s or prowled the stacks of its libraries while compiling his Onegin commentary in the 1950s. His fiction had always invited readers to discover things for themselves, but from the time he began Bend Sinister in 1941, he encouraged his readers more and more to become researchers in increasingly intricate labyrinths of internal and external references and relationships.
Nabokov’s science gave him a sense of the endless elusiveness of reality that should not be confused with modern or postmodern epistemological nihilism. Dissecting and deciphering the genitalic structure of lycaenids, or counting scale rows on their wings, he realized that the further we inquire, the more we can discover, yet the more we find that we do not know, not because truth is an illusion or a matter of mere convention but because the world is infinitely detailed, complex and deceptive, “an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms” (SO 11).
He found this not frustrating but challenging, not niggardly of nature, in hoarding its secrets, but fantastically generous, in burying such an endless series of treasures for the human mind to unearth. This sense of design deeply embedded in nature’s detail, of a playful deceptiveness behind things, of some kind of conscious cosmic hide-and-seek is fundamental to Nabokov, though hardly unique to him. Almost 3,000 years ago, the Bible declared, “It is the glory of God to hide a thing, but the glory of kings to search things out” (Proverbs 5:2); at the dawn of modern science, Francis Bacon liked to repeat and refashion the phrase; and in Bend Sinister Nabokov hi
mself playfully half-reveals and half-conceals both sources for us to rediscover as he cites, “not for the first time,” “the glory of God is to hide a thing, and the glory of man is to find it” (BS 106).
Throughout his later fiction Nabokov shapes his own worlds to match the munificence he senses behind our world’s complexity. But although this feeling arose in good measure out of his science, he could not express it there. Only in mimicry did he suspect that the design behind things was apparent enough and explicit enough to be treated as science. No wonder, as he writes in his autobiography, “the mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me” (124); no wonder he has Konstantin Godunov in The Gift expound to his son “about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise, which was not explainable by the struggle for existence . . . and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man” (122). Although he reported in the fall of 1941 that he was “writing a rather ambitious work on mimetic phenomena,” and although he leaped at the chance to write a whole book on the subject a decade later, the first does not survive and the second was never written. It seems likely that, had he begun serious work on mimicry, he would have found sufficient evidence of purely physical explanations to be forced to abandon his dearly held metaphysical speculations.
Just as Nabokov suspected there was some conscious design behind the world, he also thought it likely that there was some transformation of human consciousness beyond death. Insect metamorphosis hardly provided a model, yet it seems strikingly apt that the journal in which his lepidopterological writings appeared most frequently, Psyche, was named after the Greek word for “butterfly, moth, soul.” Nabokov adverted often to the immemorial association between overcoming gravity and transcending death, and the change of form from a caterpillar’s earth-bound beginnings to winged freedom and beauty at least offered an appealing image of the soul’s expansion beyond death. He could use it half-playfully (“we are the caterpillars of angels,” he wrote in a 1923 poem). He could rudely reject it as a symbol: when a Russian Orthodox archbishop suggested that his interest in butterflies might be linked with the highest state of the soul, he retorted that a butterfly is not at all a half-angelic being and “will settle even on corpses.”12 But in a series of stories, although increasingly more obliquely—in “Christmas,” “The Aurelian,” Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, and Pale Fire—Nabokov repeatedly links butterflies with the transcending of death.13
Although the possibility of a metamorphosis beyond death had everything to do with Nabokov’s art, it bore little relation to his science. What was, and is, his position as a scientist? Nabokov had a reputation for arrogance. In literature he was supremely sure of himself and greatly enjoyed the shock value of his strong opinions about other writers. But as a lepidopterist he was different, if hardly diffident.
As a boy, he mastered butterflies and moths early and developed a complementary interest in beetles, the most diverse animal order of all. But at Cambridge he had only brief exposure to zoology and none at all to entomology, and he remained little more than an ardent and ambitious collector, an encyclopedic amateur, until his arrival in the United States. There he had much to learn even from veteran collectors like Don Eff and Don Stallings, from the most efficient way of killing his catch (pinching the thorax immediately, rather than putting the butterfly in a carbona-soaked jar) to the most efficient way of finding it.
In the laboratory, he had everything to learn, but he learned it quickly. He worked happily with other lepidopterists, especially William Comstock and Cyril dos Passos, and was eager to share information and propose collaboration. In his work on Eugene Onegin he insisted on his own findings and poured scorn on his rivals; in his entomology, although still frank in disagreement, he could be generous in praise, even of those who had completed projects he would dearly have liked to undertake himself (see his reviews of Klots’s Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America and Higgins and Riley’s Field Guide to the Butterflies of Britain and Europe, and his acclaim, in the year before his death, for Doubleday’s Butterflies of North America, illustrated and edited by William Howe).14
Nabokov’s laboratory work focused almost entirely on the American representatives of one tribe, the Polyommatini, or Blues (in his day, classified as the subfamily Plebejinae) of the Lycaenidae, the largest of butterfly families, which includes Coppers and Hairstreaks as well as Blues. Although his output as a lepidopterist is small in comparison with that of scientists who spend a lifetime in the laboratory and the field, it is of lasting importance and worth within its domain.
His methods were advanced for his time: more than most, he insisted on dissection rather than on superficial characteristics, and in a group as notoriously difficult as the Polyommatini this stance was particularly well justified. His own findings at the microscope confirmed for him the modern recognition that the genitalia “differed in shape from species to species” and so “offered tremendous utility for taxonomy.”15 Writing his “Second Addendum” to The Gift in 1938, before he had worked in a laboratory himself, he had seemed to share Count Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s dismissal of those the Count
subtly berated … [as] “genitalists”: it was just the time when it became fashionable to accept as an unerring and adequate sign of species differentiation distinctions in the chitinoid structure of the male organ, which represented, as it were, the “skeleton” of a species, a kind of “vertebra.” “How simply various discussions would be resolved” [the Count] wrote, “if those who concentrated on splitting similar species according to this one criterion, whose absolute stability has, moreover, never been proven, turned their attention, in the first place, to the entire radiation of doubtful forms in their overall Palearctic aspect instead of concentrating on a handful of long- suffering French départements.”
Five years later, working with as wide a range of samples as he could obtain, and at an entirely new level of detail, Nabokov himself had become one of the most advanced of “genitalists.” Where others tended to consider “only the general features of the clasping parts of the male organ,” he emphasized “the multiple differences in all the parts of the genital anatomy, in females as well as males. And by being extremely specific about the shapes of the various structures along the contour of the male clasper, as well as many other organs, Nabokov introduced many new structures into the study of Blues.”16 He named new micro-organs, developed new techniques to analyze the genitalia, and offered new interpretations of the diagnostic value of their structure. He was “among the first researchers to picture more than a single genital illustration for each species,” his “multiple illustrations buttressing his hypotheses concerning ranges of variation in one species and the hiatuses, or breaks, in those characters that distinguished different species.”17
Since he also analyzed wing markings more minutely than anybody else had done in any group of butterflies, even counting the numbers of scale rows, “it was clear that no one else was applying such detailed analysis to Blue butterflies in the 1940s.”18 Although he was working in and just after the Second World War and had fewer specimens, less advanced equipment and techniques, and fewer diagnostic characters than would be available to modern researchers, he had a superb eye for relationships, and his classifications have stood the test of time.
His work in clarifying Nearctic (North American) Polyommatini was immediately appreciated by lepidopterists of the caliber of Don Stallings (“We name this distinctive race after V. Nabokov who is contributing so much to our American literature on Lepidoptera”),19 Alexander Klots (“The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus”),20 Cyril dos Passos (“I have followed . . . Prof. VLADIMIR NABOKOV in the PLEBEJINAE to the extent that he has revised the genera and species”),21 and John Downey.
As a student working in a summer job in Utah in 1943, Downey, already a keen lepidopterist, chanced to meet Nabokov with his net and was taken by him to the haunt of the curious subspecies
L. melissa annetta. He later stressed that Nabokov “strongly influenced me to take up the study of the ‘blues’ and their relatives.”22 By the late 1960s, Downey had become the authority in the Blues and found Nabokov’s research indispensable: “Nabokov had put the study of North American Blues on a strong taxonomic footing, and the work he had produced had created a context for researching the evolution of this group in the complex environs characterizing the Rocky Mountains and Great Basin regions.”23 Downey’s former graduate student Kurt Johnson recalls Downey in 1968 discussing the section on the Blues he was writing for Howe’s Butterflies of North America (which Nabokov would read and reread with great pleasure in his hospital bed, in the interstices between delirium, during his last full summer). They were considering the problem of whether Everes comyntas (the eastern tailed Blue) and Everes amyntula (the western tailed Blue) were separate species. Johnson suggested writing to Harry Clench, the associate curator of entomology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. Clench, who by this time had become a hairstreak authority and a specialist in the Blues, had been Nabokov’s benchmate at the MCZ as a student in the early 1940s and was influenced by his colleague’s example in choosing his areas of specialization.24 Downey snapped: “Clench doesn’t know. If anybody knows, Nabokov would know!” Although Clench named a large number of new species and, as Johnson later judged, had come to fancy himself the authority on the Blues, he thought that little more needed to be done and therefore did not dissect much. Nabokov, by contrast, in Johnson’s estimate, was a meticulous morphologist whose detailed work on wing patterns and genitalic structure showed a rigor and range Clench lacked despite being a professional with graduate training in zoology.25