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Lepidopterological Papers, 1941-53 "From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion," Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory. 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 eight 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 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 dreamt of new discoveries he might one day publish between their covers. When he was in his teens, his father was imprisoned for a three-month term, and sent him word of the butterflies and moths he spotted in the prison yard. At the age of twenty-one, while at Cambridge, he published his first lepidopteral paper in English; "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera," discussing his hunts during his first stage of exile, appeared in The Entomologist in February 1920. Over the next fifty years, twenty-two of his scientific papers, collector's notes, and book reviews graced the pages of The Entomologist, the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, The Lepidopterists' News, and The New York Times Book Review. The largest concentration was published during the 1940s in Psyche - A Journal of Entomology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was at work at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Considering three of his lepidopteral works as having "sufficient literary interest," he included them in Strong Opinions (1973). Even as an unofficially employed émigré living in Berlin under the constant threat of destitution in the 1930s, Nabokov took every opportunity for excursions to territories replete with butterflies. By the winter of 1940 he was occupied by research at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and that summer - en route to his short-term Stanford position - he collected species on the museum's behalf. With the move to Wellesley for the 1941-42 academic year, he volunteered to put some much-needed order into the specimens at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and became its de facto curator of Lepidoptera. The next year the museum offered him an official research fellowship in entomology with an annual salary of $1,000, which would be renewed each year until he left for Cornell in 1948. During his twenty years in the United States, summers were spent, almost without exception, on butterfly excursions around the country. Nabokov had long had in mind two butterfly books: Butterflies of Europe and Butterflies in Art. As early as 1955 he was planning a third, more personal anthology. A "perfect blend of science, art and entertainment," it would contain his "adventures with leps in various countries, especially in the Rocky Mountains states, the discovery of new species, and the description of some fantastic cases of adaptation." Though the financial security and leisure time supplied by Lolita's success afforded him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe's museums, mountains, and countrysides, none of these projects was realized in his lifetime, though two publications devoted to his lepidoptera are slated for publication in 1999.
Special pass for "Mr. V. Nabokov" to the American Museum
of Natural History Vladimir Nabokov at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1945 Harvard College Museum of Comparative Zoology Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov W. J. Holland Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Specimens of Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov, commonly called
the "Karner Blue" Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov's last butterfly net, 1970s |
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The New York Public Library