Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Dieter indeed continued to revise and expand his checklist along lines I had suggested and others I had not dreamed of. What became A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths passed through numerous revisions during the 1990s, provoking continued and heated discussion between Dieter and me on Nabokov’s taxonomy and Nabokov’s Darwin. When Dieter published the final version, privately printed, like the rest, in 2001, it had swelled to over 400 pages and become an incomparable field guide to the butterflies and moths of Nabokov’s invented lands and worlds.

  I was very happy to describe Zimmer’s Guide with the kind of rapt awe that Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev expresses in describing his father’s Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire in “Father’s Butterflies.” But I also had to voice my disagreements with Dieter’s reading of Nabokov’s relation to twentieth-century taxonomic principles and to Darwin (see also chapter 8).

  To know more about where butterflies fit into Nabokov’s life than he disclosed in Speak, Memory, readers had to wait for Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). To know where Nabokov’s work on butterflies fit into science, they had to wait for Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates’s Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (1999). To know what Nabokov wrote about butterflies, and when and where, they had to wait for Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000).

  And to understand Nabokov’s butterflies, and where they fit into his work, they have had to wait for Dieter E. Zimmer’s stupendous labor of love, thirteen years in the making, A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001 (2001).

  The “2001” in the title differentiates this Guide from four previous published versions, “Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: An Annotated Multilingual Checklist” (1993) and two 1996 prototypes and a 1998 revamp of A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths. The 2001 model, while of course not definitive—nothing that treats a rich and rapidly changing body of scientific knowledge can claim this—easily outperforms its forebears (392 pages and 21 color plates to the 146 pages of the 1993 “Checklist”) and seems unlikely ever to be surpassed.

  In a review article in Nabokov Studies 2 (1995), I focused on Zimmer’s “Checklist,” hailing it as an immeasurable advance on everything else in the field to date but also noting omissions, limitations in presentation, and shortcomings in the discussion of Nabokov’s science and its context. Not only has Zimmer plugged the few omissions I mentioned, as well as innumerable others no one else had been aware of, he has also thought out carefully and discovered how to provide whatever non-lepidopterists might need to know about Nabokov’s butterflies. Even lepidopterists will learn much and find much they could not easily have checked.

  In 1995 I discussed the “Checklist” in a review article because it provided an occasion to draw the attention of Nabokovians, including Zimmer, to the work being done since the late 1980s by Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Gerardo Lamas, Dubi Benyamini, and their associates on the Latin American Blues of which Nabokov had been first reviser, and to the work done by Nabokov himself in his then unpublished writings at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Already that time when literary Nabokovians knew so little of their lepidopterological counterparts seems long ago. Since then, Kurt Johnson has written of Nabokov’s butterflies, with others or alone, in Nabokov Studies, in a stream of submissions to Nabokv-L, in Nabokov’s Blues and elsewhere, and in papers at both literary and scientific conferences, as well as in new technical papers where he and his colleagues have named new species in honor of Nabokovian people and places, in close cooperation with Nabokov scholars.

  Everyone who knows Nabokov knows of his passion for butterflies, and after the work of Johnson and others no one now has an excuse for thinking he was merely a passionate dilettante. He was a first-rate, although never a major, scientific lepidopterist. At the same time he was also too good a writer, too astute a student of human psychology, and too staunch a defender of individual difference to wish to impose his particular passion on readers of his fiction. For that reason, there are some otherwise gifted Nabokovians who have no interest in his lepidopterology.

  That is a mistake. Remaining aloof from the lepidopterological detail is as misguided and self-defeating as a Russian scholar’s ignoring the English literary contexts of Nabokov’s work, or an English critic’s ignoring his Russian context, Pushkin and all, or an English or Russian reader’s ignoring his French context. To be a serious Nabokovian—and that also means, of course, to enjoy the work to the full—you simply have to know the butterflies, and Zimmer’s Guide 2001 is the place where you will find what you need to know.

  The Guide 2001 contains

  (1) an introduction to Lepidoptera, to taxonomy and systematics, to mimicry, to evolution, and to Nabokov’s attitudes to all of these;

  (2) catalogues of the taxa named by and for Nabokov, with detailed discussions and explanations;

  (3) a 190-page alphabetical catalogue of all the butterflies mentioned by Nabokov in his published work and occasional unpublished pieces. This, the invaluable core of the volume, identifies butterflies whether or not Nabokov named them directly or only implied their identity; provides an immense amount of vivid natural and scientific history about hundreds of species and genera; astutely discusses, where appropriate, Nabokov’s artistic purposes in using these taxa in this or that work; supplies translators with the equivalent popular names in other major European languages and provides stress accents to assist readers in pronunciation; establishes the current scientific names of each taxon named, which can and frequently do change, for general (and extremely interesting) reasons that Zimmer discusses under (1) and for specific reasons that he explains in each case;

  (4) a sequential list of all the butterflies in Nabokov’s work, chronologically by book and then by page, with cross-references to (3);

  (5) a copiously detailed biographical index of lepidopterists with Nabokov connections;

  (6) an annotated bibliography of Nabokov’s scientific papers and the interviews where he refers to butterflies;

  (7) a species list, allowing a cross-reference to the catalogue (where many of the generic names under which the butterflies are listed have been revised since Nabokov’s day);

  (8) twenty-one color plates of illustrations.

  Zimmer’s long introductory essay is a mine of information for those who know little about taxonomy, a scientific subdiscipline with ramifications not only in biology and evolutionary theory but also in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Despite a few bumps in the English, the introduction is as well written as we would expect of one of Germany’s foremost postwar essayists and reveals a zeal for connecting art and science that has long infused his columns in Die Zeit. Zimmer’s contrast of Nabokov’s precise use of natural detail with the sloppy symbolism of a Herman Hesse poem that most readers might have thought lepidopterologically sophisticated demonstrates stunningly how Nabokov has raised literature’s standards of honesty to nature.

  My strongest criticism of the 1993 “Checklist” was its treatment of Nabokov’s attitude to the species concept and evolution, where Zimmer argued that Nabokov was behind the times scientifically. The Guide 2001 has a much more nuanced and fairer evaluation, although it could still be clearer. The history of the species concept in the twentieth century is far more complex than Zimmer seems aware of even now, the biological species concept that Mayr advanced in the 1940s being only one of a succession of such concepts. Nabokov’s various attempts to work out a species concept for himself, moreover, is in some ways closer not to what Zimmer once thought a pre-evolutionary morphological concept but to Hugh Paterson’s recognition concept of species of the 1980s.

  Zimmer does not distinguish sufficiently sharply among Nabokov’s attitude to the species concept, his taxonomic practice, his attitude to evolution, and his attitude to Darwinian natural selection as the principal mechanism of evolution. Nabokov’s taxonomy not o
nly “did not lag behind the times” (43) but was ahead of the standard lepidopterological practice of his day in its insistence on microscopic examination and the insufficiency of external characteristics, on the need for large samples where possible, on the role of female as well as male features, and on the aim of phylogenetic reconstruction. After leaving the laboratory, Nabokov unsurprisingly fell gradually behind in his knowledge of the newest techniques for taxonomic determination, but this occurred only after he had stopped writing scientific papers. Writing in 1939, he showed Konstantin Godunov-Cherdynstev in 1917 as hostile to genitalic dissection, but by 1943, after two years at the microscope, he was himself extending the scope of genitalic and alar description, and there is no reason to think that had he returned to the laboratory in the 1950s or later that he would not again have welcomed and extended new taxonomic tools.

  Nabokov fully accepted evolution and enjoyed the challenge of trying to work out phylogenetic relationships within the Blues through the evolution of both genitalia and wing markings. But what certainly did place him at odds with the direction of twentieth-century biology was his attitude to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the core explanation for the mechanism of evolution. On the one hand, one could argue that even here Nabokov, when seen in the context of his times, was not that out of step with the pace of evolutionary theory. The new synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian particulate genetics was being worked out in the late 1930s and the 1940s and was finally consolidated only in the 1950s, after Nabokov left the laboratory.

  On the other hand, despite his antipathy to formal religion and his sense that “God” was a hopelessly anthropomorphic term, Nabokov was committed to what had seemed for millennia the natural explanation for the origins of life, a top-down, mind-first explanation. Although he accepted evolution as a principle and Darwin as a scientist of genius, he strongly resisted the intellectual revolution of Darwinian natural selection and its bottom-up principles.

  One of his main props for still retaining, a century after Darwin, his deep conviction that there was some form of Mind or Design behind life was the case of mimicry. He was convinced mimicry could not be accounted for by its protective role because it exceeded predators’ powers of perception and seemed almost designed by some waggish artist for human discovery. But research from the 1950s to the present on many facets of the subject and in many species has presented conclusive evidence for the protective advantages of mimicry, the extraordinary perceptual discrimination of predators, and the power of natural selection to account completely for even the most complex instances of mimicry. What Nabokov’s attitude to these findings would have been—fascination, resistance, admission that his favorite prop for a mind-first version of evolution had been knocked away?—remains impossible to know. I suspect he was too emotionally attached to a top-down explanation for existence to have accepted Darwinism, although he would probably have accepted many of the local advances in Darwinian theory and especially the clarifications of the power of natural selection in mimicry.

  Zimmer treats these complicated matters in depth, perhaps a little too much depth, even, for an introduction to his Guide. I, too, have treated them here in too much depth. For although this is the most complex and controversial aspect of Nabokov’s work as a scientist, and closest to the metaphysical issues in his art, Zimmer is nevertheless right that both Nabokov’s science and his art depend above all on an inspired command of detail. And that detail is where Zimmer also excels, in the catalogues that are the chief and lasting treasure of his Guide.

  David Sexton, reviewing Nabokov’s Butterflies, ended with the comment that whatever your starting point, you would think more of Nabokov after reading the book.1 The same could be said of Zimmer’s Guide. You will also think more of Zimmer, even if you already know how selflessly he has worked for Nabokov since 1959, translating volume after volume into German, compiling the first Nabokov bibliography, editing and annotating the twenty-plus volumes of the Rowohlt edition of the collected works, contributing to the Nabokov website Zembla, and putting the final touches to a book on Nabokov’s Berlin.

  Anyone who teaches Nabokov, and especially anyone who supervises or hopes to supervise graduate students working on him, should ensure that they have their own copy of A Guide to the Butterflies and Moths 2001 and that they order another copy for their university library. Those who missed out on Michael Juliar’s Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography for themselves and their library and now find it quite unavailable should not make the same mistake again.

  Nabokov the commentator on Eugene Onegin, as well as Nabokov the researcher of “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” and Nabokov the author of The Gift, “A Discovery,” and Pale Fire, would have welcomed and applauded Zimmer’s invaluable Guide 2001. And Nabokov the lifelong lover of Lepidoptera would have had to blink back or wipe away tears of gratitude.

  NABOKOV AS PSYCHOLOGIST

  10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play

  When my friends in the very active Nabokov Society of Japan, Tadashi Wakashima, Akiko Nakata, and Shoko Miura, organized an international Nabokov conference in Kyoto in 2010, partly as a result of my cajoling—and my offering to organize a return conference in Auckland in 2012—they asked me to present a plenary paper. I had been reading a great deal of psychology over the previous decade and thought that this, as much as my reading in evolution (which dominates chapter 11, shapes chapter 23, and inflects chapters 8, 14 and 24), could offer me a fresh perspective on Nabokov. He is a formidable psychologist, but apart from studies of his relationship to Freud, far too little research has been done in this area. And, as I argue, psychology has grown to the point where it can now focus on much about human minds and behavior of central concern to literature. Nabokov’s psychology, like his ethics and metaphysics, is another of those dimensions of his work that I think we cannot separate from his work as literature.

  Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” Alain Robbe-Grillet’s claims that his novels eliminated psychology: “The shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology—psychology at its best” (SO 80). Later asked, “Are you a psychological novelist?” he replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists” (SO 174). Since he evidently did not consider himself a novelist of no worth, we can infer he saw himself as a psychological novelist.

  Psychology fills vastly wider channels now than when Nabokov, in the mid-twentieth century, refused to sail between the Scylla of behaviorism and the Charybdis of Freud. It deals with what matters to writers, readers, and others: with memory and imagination, emotion and thought, art and our attunement to one another, and it does so in wider time frames and with tighter spatial focus than even Nabokov could imagine. It therefore seems high time to revise or refresh our sense of Nabokov by considering him as a serious (and, of course, playful) psychologist and to see what literature and psychology can now offer each other.

  I offer no definitive chart of the terrain, just prompts to exploration. We could move in many directions, a fact itself a tribute to Nabokov’s range and strengths as a psychologist: the writer as a reader of others and himself; as an observer and introspector; in relation to the psychology he knew from fiction (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce), nonfiction, and professional psychology (William James, Freud, Havelock Ellis); as a psychological theorist, in his fiction and nonfiction; and as a psychological “experimenter” in his fiction, running thought experiments on the characters he creates and on the effects he produces in readers. We could consider him in relation to the different branches of psychology, in his own time and now: abnormal, clinical, comparative, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, individual, personality, positive, social; in relation to different functions of mind, whose limits he happily tests (attention, perception, emotion, memory, imagination, and pure cognition: knowing, understanding, inferring, discovering, solving, inventing); in relation to different states
of consciousness (waking, sleeping, dreaming, delirium, reverie, inspiration, near-death experience, death experience). And we could consider what recent psychology explains in ways that Nabokov foresaw or all but ruled impossible to explain.

  He used to tell his students: “The whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life….the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye” (LRL 164–65). As a young boy he desperately wanted to discover new species of butterflies, and he became no less avid as a writer for new finds in literature: not only in words, details, and images, in structures and tactics, but also in psychology.

  He declared that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (LRL ii), and he liked to criticize, utterly undaunted by reputation. He especially liked to correct competitors. He was fascinated by psychological extremes, as his fiction testifies, but he deplored Dostoevsky’s “monotonous dealings with persons suffering from pre-Freudian complexes” (LRL 104). He admired Tolstoy’s psychological insight and his gift of rendering experience through his characters, but while he availed himself of Tolstoy’s techniques for scenic immersion, he sought to stress also, almost always, the capacity of our minds to transcend the scenes in which we find ourselves. Nabokov admired Proust’s capacity to move outside the moment, especially in untrammeled recollection, but he allotted more space to the constraints of the ongoing scene than Proust. In The Gift he gives Fyodor some of Proust’s frustration with the present, but he also locates the amplitude and fulfillment even here, for those who care to look. And where Proust emphasizes spontaneous, involuntary memory in restoring our links with our past, Nabokov stresses memory as directed by conscious search. He revered Joyce’s verbal accuracy, his precisions and nuances, but he also considered that his stream-of-consciousness technique gave “too much verbal body to thoughts” (SO 30). The medium of thought for Nabokov was not primarily linguistic: “We think not in words but in shadows of words” (SO 30). Thought was for him also multisensory and, at its best, multilevel. As cognitive psychologists would now say, using a computing analogy foreign to Nabokov, consciousness is parallel (indeed, “massively parallel”), rather than serial, so cannot translate readily into the emphatically serial mode that a single channel of purely verbal stream-of-consciousness can provide.