Nabokov, Scientist

Natural History, July, 1999 by Brian Boyd, Kurt Johnson

On the occasion of Vladimir Nabokov's centenary, the writer's legacy in lepidopterology is being cerebrated and a new generation of entomologists is completing the studies he began.

One hundred years ago, on April 23, 1899, Vladimir Nabokov was born at his parents' home in the heart of Saint Petersburg's embassy row. Had there been no revolution, he later speculated, he might have become the curator of lepidoptera in some obscure Russian museum. But the revolution did come, and in 1917 Nabokov had to leave behind not only the estate he had inherited at age sixteen but also his treasured collections of butterflies and books. With his family, he fled west. For the next two decades--in England, Germany, and France--the stupendous wealth and ease of his early years would be replaced by impoverishment and uncertainty. It was during these precarious years that he wrote what many think is the greatest Russian novel of the century, The Gift. In 1940, escaping this time from advancing German tanks, Nabokov sailed to the United States. Here, switching to English, he wrote a succession of now classic works--novels like Lolita and Pale Fire, and his autobiography, Speak, Memory. During 1999 the writer is being celebrated around the world. But this year will also transform the image of Nabokov as lepidopterist.

Since first collecting butterflies at the age of seven, Nabokov had dreamed of discovering new species. One year into his American life, he fulfilled this dream on the rim of the Grand Canyon, with the butterfly he named Neonympha dorothea. He continued to collect all over the country, especially in the Rockies, where the flora and fauna reminded him of the countryside around Saint Petersburg. Soon Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena that his collecting had turned into a positive mania. During all these summer trips, endlessly moving from motel to motel, he was also netting details for the hilarious and haunting journey that Humbert and Lolita would make across the continent in his most famous novel, Lolita.

Yet Nabokov was more than a superb collector. Shortly after arriving in the United States, he volunteered as a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, where he learned to dissect butterflies. Then, for most of the 1940s, he served as de facto curator of lepidoptera at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and became the authority on the little-studied blue butterflies (Polyommatini) of North and South America. He was also a pioneer in the study of butterflies' microscopic anatomy, distinguishing otherwise almost identical blues by differences in their genital parts. Most taxonomists at the time still relied on wing-scale patterning to differentiate species, and anatomical examination was so little known that Nabokov had to invent names for previously unstudied structures as he went along. Found now in entomological glossaries, his terms for genital structures ranged from the demurely scientific ("rostellum" and "mentum") to the liltingly alliterative ("alula" and "bullula").

In 1945 Nabokov took the bold step of extending his research to the vast tropical regions of Latin America, where, for the most part, blues had not yet been studied, and he published a seminal classification for nearly all the blues then known from that region. This laid the groundwork for later research on the origin of the plants and animals of South America's colder regions--the higher reaches of the Andes Mountains and the southern reaches of Patagonia--whose plants and animals differ dramatically from their counterparts in the tropical lowlands.

The traditional view, persistent since the time of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, was that the Andean and Patagonian plants and animals had migrated from North America in a colder era, during an event called the Great American Interchange. Fossil records of some mammals suggest such an occurrence 2 to 3 million years ago. By the 1970s, when biologists had come to recognize that over the millennia the continents themselves had moved, additional possibilities presented themselves and entomologists wondered what Nabokov's blue butterflies of the Andes and Patagonia would reveal on the matter. Had these creatures, diminutive and often dull by tropical standards, invaded from the north? Or had they diverged slowly from tropical lowland ancestors as the Andes Mountains gradually uplifted? The boldest biogeographers suggested they might have evolved from an even more ancient fauna from the primordial southern supercontinent known as Gondwana.

New scientific research on Nabokov's blues began in earnest in the late 1980s. The results were surprising: his classification embraced a group of butterflies far more diverse than anyone had imagined. New species of South American and Antillean blues were named by the score. In tribute to the writer's pioneering research,, scientists named many of these species after characters in his life and works, an effort that eventually recruited prominent Nabokov scholars to suggest new names. Thus were born species names like vokoban (a reversal of "Nabokov"--he loved mirror images), vera, lolita, humbert, ada, and zembla.