Stalking Nabokov, Brian Boyd, c. 2011

Stalking Nabokov, Brian Boyd, c. 2011. 813BOY.

Chapter 8: Nabokov, LIterature, Lepidoptera.

• long essay on Nabokov's research as a lepidopterist
• permanent professor at Cornell University

From The Crimson:

Specimens of each of the butterflies mentioned in “Lolita” are now pinned in a tray in a cabinet in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), as are all of the butterflies Nabokov ever mentions in his novels.

The cabinet is filled floor to ceiling with trays of hundreds of specimens ranging from sea green Luna moths the size of one’s hand to the petite Polyommatus blues. Each tray is dedicated to one of Nabokov’s works and houses every specimen that the work references. The butterflies flutter through his novels, but now they are inert, the objects of scientific study.

Nabokov, known mostly for his literature, worked for six years as curator of the butterfly—or Lepidoptera—wing of the MCZ. There he developed a theory regarding the migration of the Polyommatus blue butterflies. Although his taxonomic research was largely forgotten in the decades after his departure from Harvard, Naomi E. Pierce, a biology professor in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department, has renewed the attention paid to Nabokov’s work in Lepidoptera, authoring a new much-talked-about study that legitimates the novelist’s scientific pursuits.

Nabokov was both a writer and a scientist, and a look into his time at Harvard reveals the precarious balance he tried to strike between Lepidoptera and literature, as well as the marked tension he had with a university that is now profoundly affected by his work.

Brian Boyd, p. 40:

During the 1940s, while on a research fellowship at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, Nabokov made himself the authority on American Blue butterflies. After completing his major monograph and no long needing the stack of index cards he had assembled on the Blues, he sent them on to Downy. 

In fact, his kindness helped Downy settle on his field oof specialization: Downey became the American authority on the Blues in the generation after Nabokov, and his student, Kurt Johnson, has now become the American authority no the Blues for a third generation.

With colleagues on three other continents, especially Zsolt Bálint of Hungary and Dubi Benyamini of Chili, he honors Nabokov's pioneer work on the Latin American Blues by naming newly discoved species after his fiction: humbert and lolita, luzhin and pnin, kinbote and shade, ada and hazalea, and many, many more.