by
Reviewed by
Zoland Books, 1999
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Review
In 1945, Vladimir Nabokov published an article on butterflies - "Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae" - in Pysche, a scholarly journal for lepidopterists. Although the author was a curator at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, almost no one noticed or read the article, for Nabokov was not yet famous, and his subject, the classification of an obscure group of South American butterflies known as "Blues," was not a hot topic. In addition, the author's prose style was dense and impenetrable even by the standards of taxonomy papers. So "Notes" gathered dust on library shelves for 40 years.
| A book based on Nabokov's 1945 scholarly article. |
One copy of "Notes" yellowed quietly at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where Kurt Johnson, one of the authors of Nabokov's Blues, was working as a research associate in 1985. In the mid-1980s, Johnson had visited Las Abejas, an isolated bit of forest in the Dominican Republic, and brought back some Blues. When these specimens did not seem to fit into the genus and species descriptions in the standard reference books, Johnson remembered, from graduate school, that Nabokov had written about these butterflies. A few minutes later he was in Room 82, where generations of curators of lepidoptery had stacked reprints, and he soon had his hands on "Notes." Nabokov's Blues is the story, running backward and forward in time, and extending from Siberia to Tierra del Fuego, of this paper, its author, his works, and the field of lepidoptery.
This is a great deal of territory, literally and figuratively, for one 340-page book to cover, and Johnson and Coates have divided it into several sections that do not hang together perfectly. Some parts are successful: the descriptions of the trials and triumphs of fieldwork in Latin America over the last 15 years are exciting and colorful. As they seek out Nabokov's Blues, a handful of collectors venture onto isolated Andean plateaus in Peru, dismal wet grasslands in southern Chile, and into mining company preserves in Santo Domingo. In Argentina they make a detour to help paleontologists dig up bones of a long-extinct sloth before heading onward. In both the Dominican Republic and Chile, they note the disappearance of habitats and the species they sheltered, sometimes as they watch.
| He got rich writing, and still collected butterflies. |
The passages devoted to Nabokov also work surprisingly well, considering that neither author knew much about the writer when they began the book. There is a short biography, beginning with Nabokov's childhood as part of a fabulously wealthy family (ruined by the revolution), who owned a country estate where young Vladimir caught and mounted butterflies. This section concentrates on his lepidopterist side, and while his novels and stories are mentioned, there is no attempt to delve deeply into his literary career. The biography ends with Nabokov's death, the result of a fall suffered while collecting in the Alps, near Davos, Switzerland.
Ironically, it is the parts of the book about lepidoptery and Nabokov's stature as a scientist that fall short. Since these are Kurt Johnson's own fields of expertise, a reader might expect the sections on taxonomy; on the "sociology of science," as the authors call it; and on the value of Nabokov's contributions to lepidoptery to be the strongest parts of the book. But Johnson is much too close to the issues here, and the sound of axes being ground is often deafening.
| Nabokov and Johnson are both taxonomists. |
Johnson, like Nabokov, is primarily interested in taxonomy, the categorization of organisms into species, genera, and larger groups. In previous centuries, when biologists' tools were fewer, taxonomy enjoyed preeminence, and careers were made identifying and naming the thousands of plants and animals brought back by explorers and fossil hunters.
Now most biologists work with molecules, not organisms, and the big reputations are made by synthesists dealing with big issues, such as Darwinism. Nabokov, who did not have a Ph.D. in biology - or anything else - was aware of what other scientists were saying and writing, but limited himself to dissecting butterflies and assigning names during his brief tenure at Harvard. Johnson's complaints about the changed priorities of biology and museums lend a sour tone to many pages.
| Nabokov abandoned science for literature in 1948. |
Nabokov abandoned his career as a lab scientist in 1948, when Cornell University offered him a job teaching European and Russian literature. Although he continued to collect during every free moment, he gave up dissecting and turned his attention to writing and teaching. In 1958, he published Lolita, the wildly misunderstood and immensely successful novel that made him a celebrity, and rich. He resigned from Cornell and moved to Europe to write - and of course collect butterflies when possible. Even after his death in 1977, he continued to be the subject of books and articles.
One such article, which seems to be Johnson's bete noire, was by Philip Zaleski, and ran in Harvard magazine in 1986. Zaleski drew Freudian parallels between Nabokov's dissection of butterfly genitals (the standard means of determining species) and his interest in human sexuality; he noted the fact that "insect" is an anagram for "incest" (a subject in a Nabokov novel), and included a quote from a Harvard professor emeritus noting that "It's an Old World tradition, particularly in the wealthy families, to become naturalists at the amateur level."
| There's nothing funny about butterfly genitalia. |
Odd as it seems, much of Nabokov's Blues is really a reply to these libels. There is nothing funny about butterfly genitalia, the book seems to admonish, for that is how classification is done. The argument adds that Nabokov did not like psychology and hated Freudian interpretations. Nabokov was not a mere butterfly collector, he was serious in his work, he got the Blues's classification right, and those professors should not have sneered at him; this is a repeated theme.
But why do Johnson and Coates protest so? First of all, Nabokov died rich and famous, rare for serious writers and unknown for lepidopterists. Second, the entire story told in Nabokov's Blues demonstrates that Nabokov was astonishingly correct in his guesses about how the tropical Blues were divided. Working from only the museum specimens available in New York and Boston - Nabokov never set foot in Latin America and could not consult European collections because of the war - he combined careful examination with good luck and worked out which species belonged to which genus. The fieldwork Johnson describes so well largely confirms this outline.
| Despite its flaws, it's worth reading. |
But Nabokov's Blues is well worth reading in spite of these weaknesses. It is gracefully written, packed full of information about butterflies and Latin America, and even has enough about Nabokov's books to temp this reviewer to read one.
Jonathan D. Beard has been a journalist since 1981, when he left his job as a librarian at Columbia University.
The Neotropical Blues not only represent a vast and intriguing biological homeland but potentially hold the key to answers to some of the most sweeping questions about the region's biological history. And unlike an overwhelming majority of Earth's creatures, they are connected with the name of a world celebrity, Vladimir Nabokov. That Nabokov's Latin American Blues went unstudied for so long is in part a strong reflection on the inactivity in basic biological science since 1945.
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