Nabokov's Collection
“From the age of five, everything I felt... was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender.”
From a very young age Nabokov was a passionate butterfly collector, and throughout his life Nabokov made butterfly collecting trips as often as he could, always on the hunt for a novel species to discover.
While naming a butterfly species was a lifelong dream, it was one he attempted to fulfill several times before succeeding. As early as 1909 he thought himself to have discovered a new subspecies of the Poplar Admiral at his family’s estate in Vyra, but after writing to Nikolai Kuznetsov, the great Russian entomologist, he was gruffly informed that it had already been identified, albeit just a few years prior. This was no doubt devastating news for such a driven ten year-old enthusiast.
On Discovering a Butterfly
In the poem "On Discovering a Butterfly" which was published in The New Yorker in 1943, Nabokov describes the almost breathless delight he felt in the capture and treatment of what he believed was a new butterfly species.
In July of 1938 Nabokov had been collecting butterflies in the hills near the town of Moulinet in the Maritime Alps of southern France where he caught two unusual male specimens which by appearance seemed to be an intermediate between two known species, the Chalkhill Blue and Meleager’s Blue, both members of the Polyommatinae, or “the Blues,” the diverse subfamily of lycaenid, or gossamer-winged butterflies, on whom Nabokov was soon to become a foremost expert. Nabokov thought these two specimens might be of a novel species, but was unable to find any more, and significantly no females, before the collecting trip was over. When he and his family fled France to escape the Nazis in mid-1940, Nabokov made sure to bring these precious specimens with him to America.
After the family's arrival in New York until their move to the Boston area in the fall of 1941, Nabokov volunteered in the American Museum of Natural History’s (AMNH) entomology collections. This is where he brought his specimens to keep them safe and preserved, and where one was given the distinction of holotype, the first and official representative of its kind under the name Lysandra cormion Nabokov 1941.
Nabokov was a bit unsure of his classification however, particularly as he had only collected two male specimens, but the war he and his family had just fled made it impossible to return to try to collect more. He wrote in his 1941 paper Lysandra Cormion, a New European Butterfly: “Personally I would have postponed describing this rarity were I ever likely to revisit its lovely haunts.”
Nabokov’s find did indeed turn out not to be a true species, but this was not definitively proven until after Nabokov’s death. In 1989 German entomologist Klaus G. Schurian was able to produce butterflies that were morphologically identical to Nabokov’s cormion by breeding females of Polyommatus daphnis (i.e. Meleager’s Blue) with males of Lysandra coridon (Chalkhill Blue). These offspring were sterile and therefore not their own species.
A Grand (Canyon) Discovery
While the butterflies he caught in France in 1938 did not turn out to be of a true species, Nabokov did soon earn another opportunity to call himself "the godfather of an insect" when he caught another novel butterfly in the summer of 1941.
On a stop at the Grand Canyon on the 9th of June 1941, almost exactly a year after the Nabokov’s arrival in the United States, and on their first trip cross-country Nabokov snagged his first novel American specimen, now knowns as Dorothy's Satyr and under the scientific name Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea.
Nabokov’s chosen name for this butterfly, Neonympha dorothea, honored Dorothy Leuthold, a Russian language student of his from New York who had volunteered to drive the Nabokov family across the country to Stanford where Nabokov was to teach for the summer, while making some butterfly-related stops along the way. Securing a chauffeur was almost a necessity for accepting the position as at the time neither Vadimir nor Véra had a driver's license, let alone a car. On their stop-over at the Grand Canyon, walking down the Bright Angel Trail, Dorothy accidentally scared up this butterfly and Nabokov quickly netted it (having previously secured permission to collect butterflies within the National Park) and recognized that it was potentially a novel species.
That fall, newly moved to the Boston area, teaching literature at Wellesley and also beginning his work with the Lepidoptera collection in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), Nabokov brought in his summer’s catch and delved into the Satyrid specimens in the MCZ collection to compare it with. It was determined to be novel, and the specimen from the Bright Angel Trail was placed as the holotype in the MCZ.
While Nabokov was looking to confirm that he had found a new species with dorothea, he also found that some of the MCZ Satyrid specimens had been–seemingly to Nabokov with puzzling disinterest–incorrectly classified as Neonympha henshawi W.H. Edwards, 1876. Following careful microscope studies, Nabokov restructured the genus taxonomically, adding two new species as well as three subspecies. His 1942 article on the subject, Some New or Little Known Neartic Neonympha (Psyche: A Journal of Entomology. Sept.-Dec., p.61-80.) describes both the discovery of dorothea in the Grand Canyon and his larger reclassification. In this article Nabokov also noted his puzzlement at the lack of interest in Satyrids in general:
“Somehow lepidopterists have never seemed overeager to obtain these delicately ornamented, quickly fading Satyrids that so quaintly combine a boreal-alpine aspect with a tropical-silvan one, the upperside quiet velvet of "browns" being accompanied by an almost Lycaenid glitter on the under surface.”
Nabokov was convinced he had discovered a new species here–his dream–but today dorothea is considered only a subspecies of Cyllopsis pertepida Dyar, 1912.
Collecting During the Cornell Era
During his time as professor of Russian literature at Cornell (1948-1959), Nabokov collected hundreds of specimens from across the United States which he donated to Cornell University in 1960.
Nabokov's Collecting Trips
During Nabokov's time at Cornell he devoted most of his summers to writing, traveling, and butterfly collecting. He and his wife Véra took many trips out west to collect butterflies. This display shows some of his actual specimens on a map, pinned at the location they were collected. The tiny labels under each specimen tell you where and when Nabokov collected each butterfly. Sometimes handwritten labels are replaced with typed labels to make them easier to read, however, Nabokov's handwriting is clear and his original labels are preserved.
After collecting, butterflies and moths need to be pinned and spread into their final pose. The pin is critical for specimen safety - only with a pin can a butterfly or moth be picked up without damaging the wings or legs. Wings are gently held in place with thin glassine paper and pins so that they dry in the best position to see all features. Once dried they hold their shape indefinitely if they stay in a dry environment. Exposure to moisture will cause them to droop. Old dry specimens can be rehydrated and spread, but this is tricky and must be done with a careful hand.
What are all these envelopes for?
One of the main features for identifying butterflies are their wing patterns. To help preserve the wings, specimens are often stored in an envelope immediately after capture to prevent them from flapping around and damaging themselves. The specimen is positioned with its wings closed, and paper is folded around it in a triangular fashion so that one end of the paper can be tucked into the other without a need for glue or other means of closure. Relevant locality and collection data are written directly on the paper envelope.
Often envelopes like these are just temporary storage and the butterflies are quickly killed and the wings are spread. If a specimen is left in an envelope for too long it will become dry and brittle. It can still be “relaxed” and spread, but this is a much more delicate and time-intensive process. Sometimes specimens do remain stored in this way, as these are, simply to save space.
These letters capture the gifting of Nabokov's personal Lepidoptera collection, consisting primarily of butterflies, to Cornell University in 1960.
The first letter, from Cornell Entomology Professor John G. Francelemont to Vladimir Nabokov, is from February 10 of that year and acknowledges the gift of of the collection to Cornell's Entomology Department.
The second letter, dated October 3rd, is from Nabokov to Franclemont and accompanied the additional gift of “papered leps” which Nabokov had collected in California during the spring and summer of 1960, while he was also working on the screenplay for Lolita.