Vladimir Nabokov practiced his science as a conservative specialist on a particular group of organisms, not in any way as a theorist or a purveyor of novel ideas or methods. He divided and meticulously described; he did not unify or generalize. (I will explain in the next section why a natural historian can make such a judgment without intending any condescension or lack of respect.) Nonetheless, four arguments have been advanced again and again by literary commentators who seem driven by a desire to depict Nabokov as a revolutionary spirit in natural history as well.
1. The myth of innovation. Many critics have tried, almost with an air of desperation, to identify some aspect of Nabokov’s methodology that might be labeled as innovative. But taxonomic professionals will easily recognize these claims as fallacious—for the putative novelty represents either a fairly common (if admirable) practice, or else an idiosyncrasy (a “bee in the bonnet”) that Nabokov surely embraced with great ardor, but that cannot be regarded as a major issue of scientific importance.
As a primary example, many critics have stressed Nabokov’s frequent complaints about scientists who fail to identify the original describers when citing the formal Latin name of a butterfly—either in listing species in popular field guides, or in identifying subspecies in technical publications. Zimmer (page 10), for example, writes: “A growing number of non- and semi-scientific publications nowadays omit the author. Nabokov called it ‘a deplorable practice of commercial origin which impairs a number of recent zoological and botanical manuals in America.’”
By the rules of nomenclature, each organism must have a binomial designation consisting of a capitalized genus name (Homo) and a lowercase “trivial” name (sapiens), with the two together forming the species name (Homo sapiens). (Linnaean taxonomy is called “binomial” in reference to these two parts of a species’s name.) It is also customary, but not required, to add (not in italics) the name of the first describer of the species after the binomial designation—as in Homo sapiens Linnaeus. This custom certainly helps specialists by permitting easier tracing of the history of a species’s name. But this practice is also extremely time-consuming (locating the original describer is often tedious and difficult; I don’t know the first authors tor several of the snail species most central to my own research). Moreover, when hundreds of names are to be listed (as in popular field guides), rigid adherence to this custom requires a great deal of space for rather limited benefit.
Therefore, popular publications (especially the manuals of Nabokov’s ire above) generally omit the names of describers. In addition, and for the same reason, technical publications often compromise by including describers’ names for species, but omitting them for subspecies (trinomial names for geographically defined subgroups within a species). Honorable people can argue either side of this issue; I tend to agree with Nabokov’s critics in this case—but I cannot generate much personal passion over this relatively minor issue.
In another example, Boyd (The American Years, page 128) praises Nabokov’s methods: “Nabokov’s mode of presentation was ahead of his time. Instead of showing a photograph of a single specimen of a butterfly species or a diagram of the genitalia of a single specimen, he presented when necessary a range of specimens of certain subspecies in nine pages of crowded plates.” Here I side entirely with Nabokov and his proper recognition of natural history’s primary subject matter: variation and diversity at all levels. But Nabokov did not proceed in either a unique or an unusually progressive manner in illustrating multiple specimens (I rather suspect that his decision reflected his fussy and meticulous thoroughness more than any innovative theoretical vision about the nature of variation.) This issue has provoked a long history of discussion and varying practice in taxonomy—and many other specialists have stood with Nabokov on the right side (as I would say) of this question.
2. The myth of courage. As an adjunct (or intensification) to claims for innovation, many literary critics have identified Nabokov as theoretically courageous (and forward-looking) in his expressed doubts about Darwinian orthodoxies, particularly on the subject of adaptive value for patterns of mimicry in butterfly wings.
In this context, a remarkable passage from Speak, Memory has often been cited. Nabokov apparently wrote, but never published, an extensive scientific article (see Remington, page 282) in an attempt to refute natural selection as the cause of mimicry by denying the purely adaptive value of each component of resemblance. (Darwinians have assumed that mimicry—the evolution, in one butterfly species, of striking resemblance, generally in color patterns of the wings, to another unrelated form—arises for adaptive benefit, usually for permitting a “tasty” species to gain protection by simulating a noxious species that predators have learned to avoid). This paper has been lost, except for the following fragment that Nabokov included in Speak, Memory:
“Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators. Nonetheless, one may also attack a common view for opposite reasons of conservative allegiance to formerly favored ideas. On Nabokov’s forcefully expressed doubts about Darwinian interpretations of mimicry, two observations identify his stance as more traditionally conservative than personally innovative or particularly courageous. First, when Nabokov wrote his technical papers in the 1940s, the modern Darwinian orthodoxy had not yet congealed, and a Nabokovian style of doubt remained quite common among evolutionary biologists, particularly among taxonomists immersed in the study of anatomical detail and geographic variation (see Robson and Richards, 1936, for the classic statement; see Gould, 1983, and Provine, 1986, for documentation that a hard-line Darwinian orthodoxy only coalesced later in the 1950s and 1960s). Thus Nabokov’s views on mimicry represent a common attitude among biologists in his time, a perspective linked more to earlier consensuses about non-Darwinian evolution than to legitimate modern challenges. (I am, by the way and for my sins, well recognized, and often reviled, for my own doubts about Darwinian orthodoxies, so I do not make this judgment of Nabokov while acting as defensor fidei.)
Second, although we must always struggle to avoid the primary error of historiography—the anachronistic use of later conclusions to judge the cogency of an earlier claim—in assessing Nabokov’s views on mimicry, we may still fairly note that Nabokov’s convictions on this subject have not withstood the standard scientific test of time (veritas filia temporis, to cite Bacon once again). The closing words of a world’s expert on the evolutionary biology of butterflies, and a firm admirer of Nabokov’s science, may be cited here. My colleague Charles Lee Remington writes (page 282):
Impressive though the intellectual arguments are . . . . it would be unreasonable to take them very seriously in science today. Mimicry and other aspects of adaptive coloration and shape involve such superb and elaborate resemblances that various biologists had questioned the Darwinian explanations during the early decades of this century. Subsequent publication of so many elegant experimental tests of mimicry and predator learning . . . . and color-pattern genetics . . . . has caused the collapse of the basic challenges, in my view as a specialist in the field. However, I do guess that Nabokov had such a strong metaphysical investment in his challenge to natural selection that he might have rejected the evolutionary conclusions for his own satisfaction. He was an excellent naturalist and could cite for himself very many examples of perfect resemblances, but he may have been too untrained in the complexities of modern population genetics.
Finally, I must also note that several other prime components o
f Nabokov’s biological work would now be viewed as superseded rather than prescient, and would also be judged as a bit antiquated in their own time, rather than innovative or even idiosyncratic. In particular, as a practical taxonomist, Nabokov advocated a definition of species based only on characters preserved in specimens of museum collections. Today (and, for the most part, in Nabokov’s time as well), most evolutionary biologists would strongly insist that species be recognized as “real” and discrete populations in nature, not as units defined by identifiable traits in artificially limited data of human collections. Many species owe their distinction to genetic and behavioral features that maintain the cohesion of a population in nature, but may not be preserved in museum specimens. Nonetheless, Nabokov explicitly denied that such populations should be recognized as species—a view that almost all naturalists would now reject. Nabokov wrote in one of his technical papers (cited in Zimmer, page 15): “For better or worse our present notions of species in Lepidoptera is based solely on the checkable structure of dead specimens, and if Forster’s Furry cannot be distinguished from the Furry Blue except by its chromosome number, Forster’s Furry must be scrapped.”
3. The myth of artistry. Nabokov made many drawings of butterflies, both published, and as charming, often fanciful illustrations in copies of his books presented to friends and relatives, especially to his wife, Vera. These drawings are lovely, and often quite moving in their sharp outlines and naïve brightnesses—but, putting the matter diplomatically, the claim (sometimes made) that these drawings should be judged either as unusual in their accuracy or as special in their beauty can only be labeled as kindly hagiographical, especially in the light of a truly great tradition for wonderful and sensitive art among the best natural history illustrators, from Maria Merian to Edward Lear (who wrote limericks as a hobby, but worked as a skilled illustrator for a profession).
4. The myth of literary quality. Some critics, recognizing the merely conventional nature of Nabokov’s excellence in taxonomy, have stated that, at least, he wrote his non-innovative descriptions in the most beautifully literate prose ever composed within the profession. Zaleski (page 36), for example, extolls Nabokov for writing, in technical papers, “what is surely the most polished prose even applied to butterfly studies.” Again, such judgments can only be subjective—but I have spent a career reading technical papers in this mode, while applying at least a serious amateur’s eye to literary style and quality. Nabokov’s descriptive prose flows well enough, but I find nothing distinctive in his contributions to this highly restricted genre, where rules and conventions of spare and “objective” writing offer so little opportunity to spread one’s literary wings.
The Argument for Literary Illumination
Once we debunk, for Nabokov’s case, two false solutions to the paradox of intellectual promiscuity—the argument, refuted above, that his lepidoptery represented a harmless private passion, robbing no substantial time from his literary output; and the claim, rejected in the first part of this section, that his general genius at least made his lepidoptery as distinctive and as worthy as his literature—only one potential source for conventional solace remains: the proposition that although time spent on lepidoptery almost surely decreased his literary output, the specific knowledge and the philosophical view of life that Nabokov gained from his scientific career directly forged (or at least strongly contributed to) his unique literary style and excellence.
We can cite several important precedents for such a claim. Jan Swammerdam, the greatest entomologist of the seventeenth century, devoted the last part of his life to evangelical Christianity, claiming that a fundamental entomological metaphor had directed his developing religious views: the life cycle of a butterfly as an emblem for the odyssey of a Christian soul, with the caterpillar (larva) representing our bodily life on earth, the pupa denoting the period of the soul’s waiting after bodily death, and the butterfly marking a glorious resurrection.
In another example, one that would be viewed as more fruitful by most contemporary readers, Alfred Kinsey spent twenty years working as an entomologist on the taxonomy of the gall-wasp Cynips before turning to the surveys of human sexual behavior that would mark his notoriety as a pivotal figure in the social history of the twentieth century. In a detailed preface to his first great treatise, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), Kinsey explained how a perspective gained from insect taxonomy upon the nature of populations—particularly the copious variation among individuals, and the impossibility of marking one form as normal and the others as deviant—had directly informed and inspired his research on sexual behavior. Kinsey wrote:
The techniques of this research have been taxonomic, in the sense in which modern biologists employ the term. It was born out of the senior author’s longtime experience with a problem in insect taxonomy. The transfer from insect to human material is not illogical, for it has been a transfer of a method that may be applied to the study of any variable population.
We know that Nabokov made continual and copious reference to entomological subjects, particularly to butterflies, in all his literary productions—in passages ranging from the minutely explicit to the vaguely cryptical, to the broadly general. Several scholars have tabulated and annotated this rich bounty. Nabokov’s critics could therefore scarcely avoid the potential hypothesis, especially given the precedents of Swammerdam and Kinsey, that Nabokov’s lepidoptery shaped his literature in direct and crucial ways.
Literary scholars have often ventured such a claim, particularly by asserting that Nabokov used his knowledge of insects as a rich source for metaphors and symbols. In the strongest version, most, if not nearly all, citations of butterflies convey a level of deep symbolic meaning in Nabokov’s prose. For example, Joann Karges wrote in her book on Nabokov’s Lepidoptera (cited in Zimmer, page 8): “Many of Nabokov’s butterflies, particularly pale and white ones, carry the traditional ageless symbol of the anima, psyche, or soul . . . and suggest the evanescence of a spirit departed or departing from the body.”
Two arguments, one a specific denial of this search for symbolism, and the other a more general statement about art and science, strongly refute this last hope for the usual form of literary solace in Nabokov’s dedication to science—a claim that the extensive time thus spent strongly improved his novels. For the first (quite conclusive and specific) argument, Nabokov himself vehemently insisted that he not only maintained no interest in butterflies as literary symbols, but that he would also regard such usage as a perversion and desecration of his true concerns. (Artists, and all of us, of course, have been known to dissemble, but I see no reason to gainsay Nabokov’s explicit and heartfelt comments on this subject.) For example, he stated in an interview (quoted in Zimmer, page 8): “That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.”
Over and over again, Nabokov debunks symbolic readings in the name of respect for factual accuracy as a primary criterion. For example, he criticizes Poe’s symbolic invocation of the death’s-head moth because Poe didn’t describe the animal and, even worse, because he placed the species outside its true geographic range: “Not only did he [Poe] not visualize the death’s-head moth, but he was also under the completely erroneous impression that it occurs in America” (in Zimmer, page 186). Most tellingly, in a typical Nabokovian passage in Ada, he playfully excoriates Hieronymus Bosch for including a butterfly as a symbol in his Garden of Earthly Delights, but then depicting the wings in reverse by painting the gaudy top surface on an insect whose folded wings should be displaying the underside!
A tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower—mark the “as if,” for here we have an example of exact knowledge of the two admirable girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting
his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory.
Finally, when Nabokov does cite a butterfly in the midst of a metaphor, he attributes no symbolic meaning to the insect, but only describes an accurate fact to carry his more general image. For example, he writes in Mary (cited in Zimmer, page 161): “Their letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time—like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches.”
Second, and more generally, if we wish to argue that Nabokov’s lepidoptery gave direct substance, or set the style, of his literature, then we must face a counterclaim—for the best case of explicit linkage led Nabokov into serious error. (And I surely will not propagate the smug scientist’s philistine canard that literary folks should stick to their lasts and leave us alone because they always screw up our world with their airy-fairy pretensions and insouciance about accuracy.) If I wanted to advance a case for direct linkage, I would have to emphasize a transfer from Nabokov’s artistic vision to his science, not vice versa—unfortunately, in this instance, to the detriment of natural history. Nabokov frequently stated that his non-Darwinian interpretation of mimicry flowed directly from his literary attitude—as he tried to find in nature “the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art” (see page 37 for a full citation of this passage). And, as argued previously, this claim represents the most serious general error in Nabokov’s scientific writing.
The Solution of Accuracy
In standard scientific practice, when tests of a favored hypothesis have failed, and one is beating one’s head against a proverbial wall, the best strategy for reclaiming a fruitful path must lie in the empirical record, particularly in scrutinizing basic data for hints of a pattern that might lead to a different hypothesis. In Nabokov’s case, both his explicit statements and his striking consistency of literary usage build such a record and point clearly to an alternative solution. The theme has not been missed by previous critics, for one can hardly fail to acknowledge something that Nabokov emphasized so forcefully. But I feel that most published commentary on Nabokov’s lepidoptery has failed to grasp the centrality of this argument as a primary theme for understanding his own concept of the relationship between his literary and scientific work—primarily, I suppose, because we have been befogged by a set of stereotypes about conflict and difference between these two great domains of human understanding.