So apparently, Nabokov's penchant for insects began at an early age. When he was just a teenager, he started to publish about them. While in Crimea, he studied nine species of Crimean moths and 77 species of Crimean butterflies! He also worked with the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and was actually quite a talented butterfly artist as well. He also was able to give names to several species of butterflies, including the Karner blue.
Later on, he became especially interested in the study of butterfly genitalia. I really find it interesting how he is such a renowned writer and yet was also so involved in the study of butterflies.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/vladimir-nabokov-butterfly-illustrator
1 comment:
Just to expand on this, Nabokov goes into a lot of details about his passion for butterflies in his memoir that I read last year for my independent study. He grew up on an estate in the Russian countryside as the son of wealthy landowner. As a child he explored the areas around his estate and searched for butterflies and moths. He became quite the lepidopterist (the fancy word for a butterfly collector). After the Russian revolution, Nabokov was exiled from his country as the son of a wealthy, albeit liberal, landowner. This exile had a profound effect on Nabokov who never returned to his home country. His family fled desperately to Crimea from the Revolution, so his time there studying butterflies was probably a peaceful pastime that reminded him of home and helped him escape from the anxiety of exile. Later in life, wherever he moved, he tried to continue his butterfly hunting, including in the United States, which became his adopted home later in life, where he greatly enjoyed hunting butterflies.
I would also say that in some way his talent for lepidopterology is in some way similar to his talent as a writer and literary critic. I think as you guys can tell from his scene by scene breakdown of Metamorphosis, Kafka can be very precise and analytical, which is probably necessary to carefully examine and draw butterfly genitalia through microscopes for hours on end. Also of note, one thing that Nabokov makes clear in Speak, Memory is how he views life as full of symbols, themes, and motifs that we construct around ourselves, and for Nabokov, butterflies are an important of example of this.
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