Stalking Nabokov (17 page)

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 himself 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. V
LADIMIR
N
ABOKOV
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

Although Nabokov’s North American work was drawn on immediately, there was little further research for many years on Neotropical (Central and South American) Polyommatini. The recent collaborative studies of Kurt Johnson of the AMNH and Zsolt Bálint of the Hungarian Museum of Natural History amply testify to the high regard in which Nabokov’s single major paper on Neotropical Polyommatini is held. In the 1940s Nabokov was often thought to be a generic “splitter”—or, as Johnson explains from the standpoint of the present: “His good eye had brought him to a level of taxonomic sophistication beyond that of many of his contemporaries, but in a sense it also made it easier for his work to be overlooked or misunderstood by those who weren’t disposed to look quite as deeply.”
²⁶
He wrote his 1945 paper only a couple of years after two well-established AMNH lepidopterists, William Comstock and E. Irving Huntington, published
Lycaenidae of the Antilles.
“Unlike Nabokov two years later, Comstock and Huntington brought nothing new to the general taxonomy for the region; in the case of the Neotropic Blues, they deviated little from Draudt’s rudimentary arrangement from 1921.” Yet because of their established names, their work was considered authoritative for decades to come.
²⁷
As late as 1975 the distinguished lepidopterist Norman Riley, longtime editor of
The Entomologist
and keeper of the Department of Entomology at the British Museum, could follow the lead of Comstock and Huntington and sink the genus
Cyclargus
, which Nabokov had proposed in 1945, back to part of
Hemiargus
, because to his expert eye, wing patterns in both groups looked too much the same; others in turn followed Riley. But scientists have recently reinstated Nabokov’s
Cyclargus
after cladistic analysis of many anatomical features revealed that
Cyclargus
and
Hemiargus
are not even immediate sister genera, despite their apparent resemblance.
²⁸
The many new species and specimens Johnson and Bálint have recorded in Latin America, especially in the Andes, confirm all of Nabokov’s generic divisions (although not all of his names) and show that far from its being the case that he was an excessive splitter, there are, in fact, more lycaenid genera and many more species than even he could have suspected.

Johnson and Bálint announce that they “follow the methods of Nabokov (1945) (the first reviser of the Neotropical polyommatines), who underlined the taxonomic importance of the genitalic armatures in lycaenid systematics,”
²⁹
and Balint declares his paper “the cornerstone of modern knowledge concerning polyommatine butterflies occurring in Latin America.”
³⁰
In honor of Nabokov’s work as first reviser, they have named many new species after people, places and things in his life and art, lately in consultation with leading Nabokov scholars (for example:
Itylos luzhin
,
Pseudolucia vera
,
Nabokovia ada
,
Paralycaeides shade
,
Madeleinea vokoban
,
Polytheclus cincinnatus, Leptotes krug
), and plan to dedicate their forthcoming volume on the Blues in the
Atlas of Tropical Lepidoptera
to his memory. So much for the idea that Nabokov was a mere dilettante and no serious scientist.