Stalking Nabokov (18 page)

To write his papers on the Polyommatini, Nabokov had to clarify his sense of species, a seemingly natural notion—until nature confronts one with the complexities of the particular case. His agonized tussles with the problems of identity and relationship involved in speciation produced some of his most fascinating scientific writing, apparently prepared for a talk before the Cambridge Entomological Club and hitherto unpublished. Attacking the biological species concept then being advanced by ornithologist Ernst Mayr, also of the MCZ, he not only rejects it as more suitable for birds than butterflies, and rightly insists on the logical priority of distinguishing on morphological grounds exactly
which
population one is counting, but also goes so far as to suggest that the sense of specific distinction in Lycaenidae might need to be different from even that of other closely related families. Elsewhere, after suggesting some possible causes of divergence within the genus
Lycaeides
, he comments: “This scheme of course is not a phylogenetic tree but merely its shadow on a plane surface, since a sequence in time is not really deducible from a synchronous series.”
³¹
He could not foresee the theoretical advances leading to modern phylogenetic systematics or the multiplication of characteristics of Lepidoptera anatomy that researchers would learn to consider, or the power of computer-assisted cladistic analyses that could factor in all these diagnostic variables and make it possible to construct species lines reflecting or suggesting evolutionary descent, but he shows himself to be acutely aware of the issues and, of course, brilliantly up to the task of articulating them.
³²

(Stop Press: January 2011.) This month a paper was published online by Roger Vila and others, including Kurt Johnson, Zsolt Bálint, Dubi Benyamini, and Naomi Pierce, that grew out of Nabokov’s 1945 paper and demonstrates his astonishingly accurate and far-reaching insight.
³³
The driving force behind the research was Naomi Pierce, Hessel Professor of Biology at Harvard and curator of Lepidoptera at the MCZ. Pierce had assumed Nabokov was a competent but conservative and old-fashioned taxonomist when she began preparing an MCZ exhibition for his centenary in 1999, but she changed her mind when she read Kurt Johnson and Stephen Coates’s account of his 1945 paper in their
Nabokov’s Blues
.

On the strength of the meager number of specimens he had at his disposal at the MCZ under wartime conditions, Nabokov was able to work out taxonomic divisions that seemed radical at the time but would be completely vindicated decades later by Bálint, Johnson, et al. But still more startling, from the extremely limited evidence available to him Nabokov hypothesized that the Blues in the Americas evolved from ancestors arriving from Asia across the area now known as the Bering Strait (at times connected by a land bridge) in five successive waves: first, colonization by the ancestors of the Plebejinae (now
Polyommatus
) section, which produced the current neotropical taxa but then died out in North America; second, the ancestors of the
Icaricia-Plebulina
group; and then
Lycaiedes
,
Agriades
, and
Vacciniina
in that order (
N’sBs
378). Reading this, Naomi Pierce realized the hypothesis could be tested with the computational and molecular methods now available. She and her team drew together data from Old and New World Blues, especially DNA, and from host plants and climate records. The Harvard team had to develop a new technique, using the thermal tolerances of modern species to infer the thermal tolerances of their ancestors. They show five separate waves of colonization, corresponding with the cooling climate of Beringia over 9 million years: the oldest colonists were warm adapted, their later relatives increasingly cold adapted.

Nabokov’s hunch was exactly right: “Our results show that Nabokov’s inferences based on morphological characters (primarily of the male genitalia) were uncannily correct in delineating not only species relationships but also the historical ordering of these key five events in the evolution of New World blues” (Vila et al., 4). Kurt Johnson commented that the results confirm “that Nabokov’s contribution was significant, historic, and displayed remarkable, uncanny biological intuition.”
³⁴

Within butterflies, the Blues are “among the largest and most systematically challenging tribes within the family Lycaenidae (the blues, coppers and hairstreaks). . . . With more than 400 species, the cosmopolitan
Polyommatus
section (equivalent to ‘Plebejinae’ in older classifications) is the most diverse of these” (Vila et al., 1). All the more kudos to Nabokov, then, for not only sorting out taxonomic relationships correctly in such a complex group but for having developed a hypothesis that proved fertile sixty years later in driving a groundbreaking research project that uses methods (DNA sampling, computer-assisted cladistics) that neither he nor anyone else could have imagined in 1945. (End of Stop Press.)

With only something like two full working years at the microscope, Nabokov had become a major lepidopterist, and a first-rate one. “He was
the
authority on blues,” attests Johnson.
³⁵
If scientists are measured in part by their ability to inspire new generations of workers in their field, Nabokov’s achievement again seems remarkable. Never a professor of entomology, but only a research fellow in Lepidoptera, and then only from 1942 to 1948—a position without power, renewed only on a year-by-year basis, and competing for his time with his fiction, verse and criticism, and Russian language and literature classes—he nevertheless influenced Downey and Clench, two of the leading figures in the next generation of specialists in the Blues and, through Downey, Johnson, a leading figure in the generation after that.

Normally experts are more captious and begrudging of one another than outsiders. It seems telling that the sheer quality of Nabokov’s lepidopterology has been appreciated most by those working closest to his particular field. In tribute to his work, colleagues at other American museums began to name butterflies after him in the late 1940s, soon after his first major papers appeared, and he would have been thrilled by the recent spate of species names that celebrates his contribution to both literature and Lepidoptera.

He seems, in fact, to have had a curiously intense desire for—and an exaggerated sense of—the fame accruing to those whose names become part of the taxonomic record. From his childhood he had dreamed of discovering a new species, and when he thought he had, with his Moulinet discovery,
³⁶
he exulted in print:

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer—and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep).

and safe from creeping relatives and rust,

in the secluded stronghold where we keep

type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,

poems that take a thousand years to die

but ape the immortality of this

red label on a little butterfly.

(PP 155–56)

He was never anxious about literary fame, because he knew by the age of thirty that he had done enough to assure it, but he prized immortality as a lepidopterist precisely because it seemed so unattainable. Yet the mere naming of a single taxon hardly constitutes fame when there are, so far, about a million and a half known biological species, and current estimates suggest there may be ten—perhaps even fifty—times as many names still to bestow.
³⁷

Although in his adult years Nabokov’s collecting often led to or arose naturally from his papers and was always guided by an instinct for the scientifically revealing, it is Nabokov’s major papers of the 1940s, rather than any of his catches, that will ensure his niche in entomological history. But if within the science of Lepidoptera his collecting was of secondary importance, it was one of his most intense and lasting pleasures throughout his years in Russia, in a few short seasons in his émigré years, and again throughout his American and final European years. In his first seasons in America, he searched for butterflies and moths wherever he could. From the late 1940s, with a car of his own, he repeatedly chose the Rockies, partly because altitude increases the variety of butterfly species one is likely to encounter and partly because the alpine vegetation reminded him of old Russia. He particularly sought out localities likely to yield lycaenids, especially those he had described from museum specimens but not caught for himself, those for which only one sex had so far been found, or those that might reveal an intergrade between one subspecies and the next.

He had lost three collections in Europe, moved from house to house in America, and had no desire to keep his new collections himself. He gave them to the institutions with which he was associated, first the AMNH, then the MCZ, and finally Cornell. In Europe he continued to confine himself to collecting in montane areas, regularly in Switzerland, often in Italy (including Sicily), occasionally in France (including Corsica), once in Portugal. He would spend long stretches at a single mountain resort, a summer holiday for his wife and a writing retreat and a hunting ground for himself. Although he would catch anything uncommon, he still sought out lycaenids above all, managing, for instance, to net 90 percent of Swiss lycaenids from only five (the most alpine) of the twenty-two cantons. Knowing exactly what he wanted, he would collect long series only in genera where he knew species were difficult to distinguish except in the laboratory. He bequeathed his European collection to the Musée Cantonal de Zoologie in Lausanne.

Exhibitions of his butterfly collections have been held in Milan and Lausanne and at Harvard and Cornell. Had Nabokov not been famous as a novelist, these commemorations would never have taken place. But had he not become a writer, he repeatedly said—had he not been able, for instance, to escape from Soviet Russia—he would have spent his life as a lepidopterist. As it was, other professionals have rated as extraordinary his achievement in the small time he was working professionally in the field.

As a lepidopterist he had hoped to do much that he never achieved: neither the expedition to Central Asia he envisaged in his teens nor, fifty years later, the forays to Peru, Iran, or Israel “before I pupate”; neither the
Butterflies of North America
nor the book on mimicry that he contemplated in the United States; neither the
Butterflies of Europe
nor the
Butterflies in Art
that he began in Europe came to fruition. But in his seventies, he replied to an interviewer’s question: “My life thus far has surpassed splendidly the ambitions of my boyhood and youth. . . . At the age of twelve my fondest dream was a visit to the Karakorum range in search of butterflies. Twentyfive years later I successfully sent myself, in the part of my hero’s father (see my novel
The Gift
) to explore, net in hand, the mountains of Central Asia. At fifteen I visualized myself as a world-famous author of seventy with a mane of wavy white hair. Today I am practically bald” (
SO
177–78). Literature may have prevented him realizing some of his dreams as a lepidopterist, but it also provided a way of realizing others far more fully than he could ever have imagined as a child.

It is one thing to know of Nabokov as a lepidopterist from his superbly poetic evocation of his passion in
Speak, Memory
. It is another thing entirely to see the results of his research, so rigorous and so painstaking, vivid proof of a whole side of his life and a whole sphere of knowledge remote from most of us but home to him. He knows our world; he can even describe parts of it better than those who have lived there all their lives. But most of us exploring this part of
his
world will find it another planet and find that we can never directly breathe its air or palpate its soil. And even the lepidopterists who know Nabokov’s articles of the 1940s have been unaware of the prodigious amount of work he expended on the much larger scale of his
Butterflies of Europe
.

The entire selection of Nabokov’s lepidopterological writings, published and unpublished, scientific and literary, polished and provisional, can be read as a singular case study in specialization and diversity, in development and metamorphosis. The chronological sequence, from a letter written by Nabokov’s father two years after the boy discovered butterflies to a memoir by Dmitri Nabokov two years after his father’s death, lets us track the development of the writer’s art, the evolution of the naturalist’s science, and the interplay between the two. The shifts of scale, from microscopic samples to entire organisms, from a line or two to fifty pages of continuous text, also serve their purpose. Removed from their old haunts, the scores of short excerpts refocus the part and refresh the whole. Whenever a butterfly plucked from its natural habitat in a particular novel demands attention, identification, and explanation, the anthologist’s net suddenly becomes the reader’s lens.

Not only in date and scope but in genre, too, no other volume of Nabokov’s writing encompasses as much variety as
Nabokov’s Butterflies
, from novels, stories, poems, a screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lectures, and articles to annotations, reviews, interviews, letters, drafts, notes, diaries, drawings. The very restrictedness of subject matter throws into striking relief the range of Nabokov’s styles, strategies, contexts, and mental modes: troubled reflection, painstaking description, lovingly fanciful sketches, comradely exchanges: the surreally false flatness of the world of
Invitation to a Beheading
, the majestic exoticism of
The Gift
, the lyric evocativeness of
Speak, Memory
, the haunting charms of
Pale Fire
, the dizzy density of
Ada
. And when we remember that outside his scientific work Nabokov limits severely what he allows himself to write about butterflies, it seems staggering that he can ring so many changes on this one theme—exactly what he might have said about “that other V.N., Visible Nature” (
SO
153).