Nabokov had passion for language -- and butterflies

Russian-born writer Vladimir Nabokov's passion for butterflies is outlined in "Nabokov's Butterflies," a collection of previously unpublished and uncollected writings

In this story: 'Splendid but nonexistent butterflies' 'Immensely touching' RELATED STORIES, SITES

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- His novels, memoirs and poetry are as delicate and intricate as a butterfly's wings, so it should come as no surprise that Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, the author of "Lolita," was an avid lepidopterist.

A love of nature is evident throughout Nabokov's novels, particularly those with Russian emigres reminiscing about their homeland such as "Mary" or in the memoir "Speak, Memory," and the love of butterflies works its way into his writing through both outright and subtle references.

This passion is charted in the recently published "Nabokov's Butterflies" (Beacon Press), a collection of previously unpublished and uncollected writings. It's apparent that Nabokov, a Russian-born writer who caught his first butterfly at age 7, was not just a casual observer of butterflies.

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It was a passion nursed from an early age by a family with a great appreciation for nature and one that continued even as Nabokov's literary career blossomed.

His mother "was an ardent entomologist. She was truly impassioned (about the study of insects) and she transmitted a lot of that to Vladimir in the summers in the middle of an immense natural preserve, which was the country estate," Nabokov's son Dmitri told Reuters in an interview.

Vladimir Nabokov himself wrote in "Speak, Memory": "Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration."

As a child he escaped through his window with net and specimen jar; as an adult, he drew thousands of butterflies for his scientific papers and his catalogue of European butterflies.

According to "Nabokov's Butterflies," he contributed to the scientific study of butterflies by measuring patterns of scales by counting, numbering, and quantitatively comparing rows. This mapping of butterfly wings helped the famed writer distinguish between butterfly colonies and track their evolution.

But not all of Nabokov's butterfly drawings were purely scientific. "For me and for mother and for a few select people he would dedicate his books and he would draw splendid, plausible, but nonexistent butterflies," said Dmitri Nabokov, who served as translator for "Nabokov's Butterflies."

Forced to flee Russia after the 1917 revolution, Nabokov was educated at England's Cambridge University and lived in Berlin, where he met his wife Vera and wrote novels in Russian. They eventually moved to France and, in 1940, the United States.

A year after their arrival, the Nabokovs undertook their first butterfly-hunting trip across the country.

"The first trip was with a student of my father's, a very nice American lady who lived in New York, in her brand new Pontiac, which we called Poinka," Dmitri recalled. "It was before my mother and I learned to drive."

In Stacy Schiff's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography "Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)," the competition between husband and wife to net butterflies is characterized as a heated one. But that was not so, recalled Dmitri, saying Schiff must have missed some nuances of the rapport between his parents.

He said the competition was more of a "friendly joint participation in the hunt. She loved going walking with him and helping him find butterflies. She learned quite a bit from him, as did I. It was a joyous competitiveness."

Dmitri, born in Berlin in 1934, recalled that his father took him on walks in parks there and in the mountains of France, where he taught his son about butterflies and an appreciation for nature. "I was very interested and he taught me the rudiments. I am not a lepidopterist, but I think the rudiments are fascinating and they certainly have helped me very much, especially with the translating."

Dmitri has translated not only this latest work about Nabokov and his butterflies but also those of his father's novels, poems and plays that were written in Russian.

While he was not as fully involved with butterfly collecting as his father, he recalled the pleasure of seeing butterfly specimens that had been donated by the Harvard Museum to a museum devoted to Nabokov in St. Petersburg, Russia.

He recalled visiting the museum and seeing cases containing the specimens that credited two butterfly nets, those of "V. and D. Nabokov, which I found immensely touching."

It was in the mountains of Switzerland, where the writer and his wife spent their final years, that Dmitri and his father enjoyed a conversation near the site of an eddy of butterflies.

"It was one of those frank dialogues which usually appear only in only bad novels. He opened up to me -- he was always open to me, but particularly on that occasion -- he said he truly achieved what he always wanted in life and that his heart was like an undeveloped film of which he had managed to develop almost all and much else," the son said.

He said his father's butterfly studies have become more widely appreciated. "When he became acting curator of lepidopterology in Harvard, he had a laboratory in which he had implements and collections to work with and develop his theories about classification by genitalia and by the arrangement of scales on certain Blues and other butterflies," he said.

"For a while that was ignored by the butterfly world as the whim of ... a great writer's hobby. (But now) he has been recognized as a true innovator. There have been books written about his discoveries ... which confirm some of them so that the entomologists of today are catching, for example, new species in the Amazon and naming these finds after Nabokov's fictional characters."

So, in a playful twist of fate that could only occur in a Nabokov novel, characters from his work -- "Pnin," "Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle" and "Pale Fire" -- appear in the real world of zoology.

Nabokov, who closely tracked color patterns of butterfly wings, must have been aware of the tenet that coloration served as protection so butterflies could evade prey, but he questioned whether the colors did not also serve a higher purpose.

According to Dmitri, Vladimir Nabokov believed the colorful wings of a butterfly had greater significance: "Nature was preparing it for the eye of man and the joy of man, which is perhaps vindicated by the fact that butterflies now have become loved so much on many levels."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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