Stalking Nabokov (19 page)
Review of Dieter E. Zimmer,
A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths, 2001
In 1994 I wrote a review-article on Dieter E. Zimmer’s 150-page section, “Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: An Annotated Multilingual Checklist,” in Michel Satoris’s
Les Papillons de Nabokov
(1993), which accompanied an exhibition at the Lausanne Canton Museum, to which Nabokov had bequeathed all the butterflies he had caught in his final European period, from 1959 until his death in 1977.
Dieter E. Zimmer has been translating, editing, and annotating Nabokov since 1959, especially as general editor of the collected works in German (twenty-five volumes to date) and as documenter of Nabokov’s Berlin, of his imagined trip in
The Gift
to Central Asia, and of the impact of
Lolita
. By 1994 Dieter and I had been in touch by mail for years. I praised his checklist as “fertile and full of fact” and wrote of him now, after naming his other roles, as “the first thorough explicator of Nabokov’s second major career. What makes Zimmer’s work all the more remarkable is that it has all been accomplished for the sheer love of his subject. A distinguished essayist and journalist, a literary editor at
Die Zeit
, he has earned no promotions, no research grants, no sabbaticals for his devotion to Nabokov’s work.” But I also pointed out what I thought were shortcomings. I concluded, though, that if his labor of love was not yet an exhaustive checklist, “if it seems sometimes provisional, that is because he has attempted to provide so much. No one else has had the imagination or the energy even to try. Let us hope—it is too much to ask, but let us hope—that he now has the energy to be his own First Reviser.”
Dieter indeed continued to revise and expand his checklist along lines I had suggested and others I had not dreamed of. What became
A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths
passed through numerous revisions during the 1990s, provoking continued and heated discussion between Dieter and me on Nabokov’s taxonomy and Nabokov’s Darwin. When Dieter published the final version, privately printed, like the rest, in 2001, it had swelled to over 400 pages and become an incomparable field guide to the butterflies and moths of Nabokov’s invented lands and worlds.
I was very happy to describe Zimmer’s
Guide
with the kind of rapt awe that Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev expresses in describing his father’s
Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire
in “Father’s Butterflies.” But I also had to voice my disagreements with Dieter’s reading of Nabokov’s relation to twentieth-century taxonomic principles and to Darwin (see also
chapter 8
).
To know more about where butterflies fit into Nabokov’s life than he disclosed in
Speak, Memory
, readers had to wait for
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
(1990) and
Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years
(1991). To know where Nabokov’s work on butterflies fit into science, they had to wait for Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates’s
Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
(1999). To know what Nabokov wrote about butterflies, and when and where, they had to wait for
Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings
(2000).
And to
understand
Nabokov’s butterflies, and where they fit into his work, they have had to wait for Dieter E. Zimmer’s stupendous labor of love, thirteen years in the making,
A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths 2001
(2001).
The “2001” in the title differentiates this
Guide
from four previous published versions, “Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: An Annotated Multilingual Checklist” (1993) and two 1996 prototypes and a 1998 revamp of
A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths
. The 2001 model, while of course not definitive—nothing that treats a rich and rapidly changing body of scientific knowledge can claim this—easily outperforms its forebears (392 pages and 21 color plates to the 146 pages of the 1993 “Checklist”) and seems unlikely ever to be surpassed.
In a review article in
Nabokov Studies
2 (1995), I focused on Zimmer’s “Checklist,” hailing it as an immeasurable advance on everything else in the field to date but also noting omissions, limitations in presentation, and shortcomings in the discussion of Nabokov’s science and its context. Not only has Zimmer plugged the few omissions I mentioned, as well as innumerable others no one else had been aware of, he has also thought out carefully and discovered how to provide whatever non-lepidopterists might need to know about Nabokov’s butterflies. Even lepidopterists will learn much and find much they could not easily have checked.
In 1995 I discussed the “Checklist” in a review article because it provided an occasion to draw the attention of Nabokovians, including Zimmer, to the work being done since the late 1980s by Zsolt Bálint, Kurt Johnson, Gerardo Lamas, Dubi Benyamini, and their associates on the Latin American Blues of which Nabokov had been first reviser, and to the work done by Nabokov himself in his then unpublished writings at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Already that time when literary Nabokovians knew so little of their lepidopterological counterparts seems long ago. Since then, Kurt Johnson has written of Nabokov’s butterflies, with others or alone, in
Nabokov Studies
, in a stream of submissions to Nabokv-L, in
Nabokov’s Blues
and elsewhere, and in papers at both literary and scientific conferences, as well as in new technical papers where he and his colleagues have named new species in honor of Nabokovian people and places, in close cooperation with Nabokov scholars.
Everyone who knows Nabokov knows of his passion for butterflies, and after the work of Johnson and others no one now has an excuse for thinking he was merely a passionate dilettante. He was a first-rate, although never a major, scientific lepidopterist. At the same time he was also too good a writer, too astute a student of human psychology, and too staunch a defender of individual difference to wish to impose his particular passion on readers of his fiction. For that reason, there are some otherwise gifted Nabokovians who have no interest in his lepidopterology.
That is a mistake. Remaining aloof from the lepidopterological detail is as misguided and self-defeating as a Russian scholar’s ignoring the English literary contexts of Nabokov’s work, or an English critic’s ignoring his Russian context, Pushkin and all, or an English or Russian reader’s ignoring his French context. To be a serious Nabokovian—and that also means, of course, to enjoy the work to the full—you simply have to know the butterflies, and Zimmer’s
Guide 2001
is the place where you will find what you need to know.
The
Guide 2001
contains
(1) an introduction to Lepidoptera, to taxonomy and systematics, to mimicry, to evolution, and to Nabokov’s attitudes to all of these;
(2) catalogues of the taxa named by and for Nabokov, with detailed discussions and explanations;
(3) a 190-page alphabetical catalogue of all the butterflies mentioned by Nabokov in his published work and occasional unpublished pieces. This, the invaluable core of the volume, identifies butterflies whether or not Nabokov named them directly or only implied their identity; provides an immense amount of vivid natural and scientific history about hundreds of species and genera; astutely discusses, where appropriate, Nabokov’s artistic purposes in using these taxa in this or that work; supplies translators with the equivalent popular names in other major European languages and provides stress accents to assist readers in pronunciation; establishes the current scientific names of each taxon named, which can and frequently do change, for general (and extremely interesting) reasons that Zimmer discusses under (1) and for specific reasons that he explains in each case;
(4) a sequential list of all the butterflies in Nabokov’s work, chronologically by book and then by page, with cross-references to (3);
(5) a copiously detailed biographical index of lepidopterists with Nabokov connections;
(6) an annotated bibliography of Nabokov’s scientific papers and the interviews where he refers to butterflies;
(7) a species list, allowing a cross-reference to the catalogue (where many of the generic names under which the butterflies are listed have been revised since Nabokov’s day);
(8) twenty-one color plates of illustrations.
Zimmer’s long introductory essay is a mine of information for those who know little about taxonomy, a scientific subdiscipline with ramifications not only in biology and evolutionary theory but also in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Despite a few bumps in the English, the introduction is as well written as we would expect of one of Germany’s foremost postwar essayists and reveals a zeal for connecting art and science that has long infused his columns in
Die Zeit
. Zimmer’s contrast of Nabokov’s precise use of natural detail with the sloppy symbolism of a Herman Hesse poem that most readers might have thought lepidopterologically sophisticated demonstrates stunningly how Nabokov has raised literature’s standards of honesty to nature.
My strongest criticism of the 1993 “Checklist” was its treatment of Nabokov’s attitude to the species concept and evolution, where Zimmer argued that Nabokov was behind the times scientifically. The
Guide 2001
has a much more nuanced and fairer evaluation, although it could still be clearer. The history of the species concept in the twentieth century is far more complex than Zimmer seems aware of even now, the biological species concept that Mayr advanced in the 1940s being only one of a succession of such concepts. Nabokov’s various attempts to work out a species concept for himself, moreover, is in some ways closer not to what Zimmer once thought a pre-evolutionary morphological concept but to Hugh Paterson’s recognition concept of species of the 1980s.
Zimmer does not distinguish sufficiently sharply among Nabokov’s attitude to the species concept, his taxonomic practice, his attitude to evolution, and his attitude to Darwinian natural selection as the principal mechanism of evolution. Nabokov’s taxonomy not only “did not lag behind the times” (43) but was ahead of the standard lepidopterological practice of his day in its insistence on microscopic examination and the insufficiency of external characteristics, on the need for large samples where possible, on the role of female as well as male features, and on the aim of phylogenetic reconstruction. After leaving the laboratory, Nabokov unsurprisingly fell gradually behind in his knowledge of the newest techniques for taxonomic determination, but this occurred only
after
he had stopped writing scientific papers. Writing in 1939, he showed Konstantin Godunov-Cherdynstev in 1917 as hostile to genitalic dissection, but by 1943, after two years at the microscope, he was himself extending the scope of genitalic and alar description, and there is no reason to think that had he returned to the laboratory in the 1950s or later that he would not again have welcomed and extended new taxonomic tools.
Nabokov fully accepted evolution and enjoyed the challenge of trying to work out phylogenetic relationships within the Blues through the evolution of both genitalia and wing markings. But what certainly did place him at odds with the direction of twentieth-century biology was his attitude to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the core explanation for the mechanism of evolution. On the one hand, one could argue that even here Nabokov, when seen in the context of his times, was not that out of step with the pace of evolutionary theory. The new synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian particulate genetics was being worked out in the late 1930s and the 1940s and was finally consolidated only in the 1950s, after Nabokov left the laboratory.
On the other hand, despite his antipathy to formal religion and his sense that “God” was a hopelessly anthropomorphic term, Nabokov was committed to what had seemed for millennia the natural explanation for the origins of life, a top-down, mind-first explanation. Although he accepted evolution as a principle and Darwin as a scientist of genius, he strongly resisted the intellectual revolution of Darwinian natural selection and its bottom-up principles.
One of his main props for still retaining, a century after Darwin, his deep conviction that there was some form of Mind or Design behind life was the case of mimicry. He was convinced mimicry could not be accounted for by its protective role because it exceeded predators’ powers of perception and seemed almost designed by some waggish artist for human discovery. But research from the 1950s to the present on many facets of the subject and in many species has presented conclusive evidence for the protective advantages of mimicry, the extraordinary perceptual discrimination of predators, and the power of natural selection to account completely for even the most complex instances of mimicry. What Nabokov’s attitude to these findings would have been—fascination, resistance, admission that his favorite prop for a mind-first version of evolution had been knocked away?—remains impossible to know. I suspect he was too emotionally attached to a top-down explanation for existence to have accepted Darwinism, although he would probably have accepted many of the local advances in Darwinian theory and especially the clarifications of the power of natural selection in mimicry.
Zimmer treats these complicated matters in depth, perhaps a little too much depth, even, for an introduction to his
Guide
. I, too, have treated them here in too much depth. For although this is the most complex and controversial aspect of Nabokov’s work as a scientist, and closest to the metaphysical issues in his art, Zimmer is nevertheless right that both Nabokov’s science and his art depend above all on an inspired command of detail. And that detail is where Zimmer also excels, in the catalogues that are the chief and lasting treasure of his
Guide
.
