There are many butterflies with “Nabokov” in their name. Did Nabokov describe all of them?

No, he did not.

Understanding scientific nomenclature, i.e. name-giving, and the difference between species named by someone versus in their honor helps clarify this.

The scientific name consists of three main parts: genus, species, and author/year. The genus and species names are italicized. If the specimen is a subspecies that name follows the species name and is also italicized.

The Karner Blue provides an example of a scientific name chosen by Nabokov himself.

The genus is a grouping of species that are closely related. It is italicized and capitalized in the scientific name. Nabokov originally named the species using the genus name in use at the time, Lycaeides, but as new understanding of species relationships emerged this entire genus was renamed.

The species is the specific epithet, designating a unique type of organism. It is italicized but never capitalized.

Nabokov originally thought the Karner Blue to be a subspecies of the melissa, and the subspecies name he gave was "samuelis” to honor the entomologist Samuel Scudder using his first name, which is unusual. When it was later determined that the Karner Blue was not a subspecies of melissa but its own species, this species name became samuelis.

When honoring a person in a scientific name, their name is customarily given a latinized ending. If used as a specific epithet, this name is never capitalized even when it is based on a proper noun.

Nabokov first formally described this species first in 1944. When a scientists discovers something they think is new, they write a full description of the new organism and publish it in a scientific paper so that it can be officially added to the collective knowledge of our world. The addition of the author’s last name and the year that they published this paper helps make it clear who published first and who gets credit for noting the new species.

The author name and the year in which they first identified the species or subspecies is always part of the proper name, but it is often not fully written out.

What are the parentheses for? As Nabokov originally named the species as a member of the Lycaeides genus, when the species was moved to a different genus he retained naming credit, but the parentheses are used to indicate there has been a change.

J. H. Masters named the subspecies Nabokov’s Blue in Nabokov's honor in 1972. There are also many species and subspecies of butterflies named to honor Nabokov more indirectly, primarily by using characters and locations from his literary works.

In 1960 Arthur Francis Hemming chose to acknowledge the extensive work Nabokov did on the Polyommatus Blues subfamily by naming an entire genus of Blues which Hemming was describing after Nabokov. As it is a genus, there can be multiple species and subspecies associated with it, but all will start with the name Nabokovia.

Until recently the practice of honoring people in scientific names was very common, but this practice is now being questioned. More scientists are turning instead to names that are descriptive of the species itself, or that honor the place and culture where a species was found.