Butterfly effect! Rarely have we encountered a metaphor so delicately poised yet so immeasurably far-reaching. In 1948, when a fragment of Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography appeared in The New Yorker, the term was still unborn — its birth would come only in the early seventies. Had it existed then, the editorial desk could not have spared it.
Eight years before that publication, Nabokov had already made America his home. By then he was firmly established as a butterfly scholar, immersed in the reclassification of lepidopteran lineages at Harvard’s famed Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Butterflies — and Nabokov? We know one Vladimir Nabokov, the celebrated novelist whose Lolita bristled with both praise and censure. And here stands another: a butterfly expert, a lepidopterologist in the strictest sense.
Two men bearing
the same name?
In the draft of an interview — proposed but never recorded — we find mathematician and science writer Jacob Bronowski, famed presenter of the BBC classic The Ascent of Man, asking Nabokov, “Are you the same character when you are working with butterflies as when you are working on a novel?”
Nabokov’s reply, characteristically sly and glinting with mischief, “No, not quite. In ordinary life, for example, I’m strictly right-handed but when manipulating butterflies, I use my left hand more than my right.”
Bronowski’s failing health prevented the interview from materialising, yet the
exchange hints unmistakably that the two Nabokovs — writer and scientist — were indeed one. And reading his answer, remembering his lifelong play with words, one wonders: was he teasing us with a private joke? The “right hand” evokes dexterous; does the “left hand” tilt ever so lightly toward the sinister?
Five American publishers rejected Lolita. Eventually, the Paris-based Olympia Press gave it a nod. A bibliophile notes that they had earned a reputation for publishing somewhat “classy” erotica. Their author list included several figures — named and pseudonymous — who would later ascend to the front ranks of European literature.
Many critics, however, refused to brand Lolita as pornography. Nabokov wrote to the enthusiastic publisher: “You and I know Lolita is a serious work with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept it as such.” He wished to evade the awkward fame out of a scandal. Not everyone was so generous. One American publisher returned the manuscript saying it ought to be buried under a stone for a thousand years.
Today, critics scour not only Lolita but the entire expanse of Nabokov’s oeuvre for butterfly traces — names, behaviours, associated figures, reflections of his own life as a lepidopterist and countless other motifs. Whether he worked with his right hand or left, butterflies permeated his imagination.
In The New Yorker piece — later revised into a chapter of his book Speak, Memory — Nabokov recounts a day from his childhood though marking it as “banal”. He was seven.
On a sunlit veranda, a swallowtail danced upon a flower, sipping nectar. A family servant, noticing the boy’s enchantment, deftly trapped the creature with his cap and deposited — “cap and all” — inside the wardrobe. Nabokov writes that one might have thought the naphthalene within would end its earthly life. But the next morning, when his governess opened the wardrobe, the butterfly burst forth, brushed her face, and escaped through the open window. And within moments it “was
a golden fleck dipping and dodging and soaring eastward, over timber and tundra, to Vologda, Viatka, and Perm, and beyond the gaunt Ural range to Yakutsk and Verkhne Kolymsk, and from Verkhne Kolymsk, where it lost a tail, to the fair island of St. Lawrence, and across Alaska to Dawson, and southward along the Rocky Mountains — to be finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on a bright-yellow dandelion in a bright-green glade above Boulder.”
Itinerant mover
Was this the butterfly’s forty-year flight — or a shimmering allegory of Nabokov’s own journey?
His family leaving Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, settling in Berlin and from there, due to the rise of the Nazis,
leaving for New York and then to other cities in the US! Boulder
in Colorado was one of Nabokov’s favourite fields for butterfly hunting.
Both his parents helped light the flame of butterfly love. Butterfly collecting was his father’s passion. The attic brimmed with rare lepidopteran books, including Samuel Hubbard Scudder’s monumental The Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada. By coincidence, when Nabokov joined Harvard as a de facto curator, he found Scudder’s own collection there — and was tasked with revising its taxonomic classifications. What could have pleased him more?
Earlier, in New York, he had worked at the American Museum of Natural History. Under lepidopterist William P. Comstock, he learned to dissect butterfly bodies and identify species precisely by analysing differences in their reproductive organs. These organs differ fundamentally between two species more than external appearances.
Gradually he became so skilled that he dismantled and rebuilt the existing classification of a group of butterflies — the Lycaenidae, commonly called the Blues. His revised structure left a lasting influence on American butterfly studies.
Excessive snobbery, wielding a tongue unafraid to strike with fire while criticising some work, literary or lepidopterological, relishing wordplay, and even practical jokes involving butterflies — Nabokov’s acquaintances witnessed it all.
When gifting someone any new book of his, he would often draw a coloured sketch of a butterfly and even coin a fictitious Latin name incorporating the recipient’s name within it. Yet, many people believe he did not receive the recognition he deserved as a lepidopterist during his lifetime. He was self-taught; academics dismissed him as a dilettante indulging a hobby under the shelter of literary fame. Only in the 1990s did the tide begin to turn.
Nabokov examined each specimen with microscopic
devotion. Butterflies and moths are covered with minute scales — Lepidoptera itself encodes this truth (lepidos: scales; pteron: wings). He counted the rows of scales on each wing, identifying differences invisible to the casual eye. Some say this also created unnecessary subdivisions. In taxonomy, such people are called “splitters”; their opposites, who merge taxa, are “lumpers”.
Splitter vs Lumper
Nabokov was a consummate splitter.
Yet America owes this splitter a debt. In 1943, he identified subtle differences within a species and proposed a new subspecies — perhaps even a distinct species — and named it samuelis after Scudder’s first name. Today it is recognised as a separate species: the Karner Blue, perilously rare, surviving only in a few pockets.
Conservation efforts are now underway. Without Nabokov’s insight, it might have vanished unnoticed. Nabokov also proposed that the Blues of the Americas had arrived from Asia via the Bering Strait in at least five waves. He had no evidence beyond external features. In the 21st century, genetic studies confirmed every word — indeed they originated in Asia, and arrived in five waves, beginning some 10 million years ago.
Modern lepidopterists honour Nabokov by naming new species after him: Itylos pnin, Nabokovia ada, Madeleinea lolita. Three species bear the titles of his novels. They marvel, as critics do, at how effortlessly he wove butterflies into his fiction — and how his scientific papers carried the voice of a novelist. Consider his description of wing colouration: “The scintillant pulvis… dusting with metallic greenish blue… or turquoise… leaving the scintillae as seapools are left by the sea at low tide.”
The twisted remark toward Bronowski that we encountered earlier may also indicate Nabokov saw no chasm between the butterflyman and the novelist. No “splitter” there, no “lumper” either. It was all in nature.
In another interview for Vogue in 1969, Nabokov was asked, “Magic, sleight-of-hand, and other tricks have played
quite a role in your fiction. Are they for your amusement or do they serve yet another purpose?” Nabokov began his reply with “Deception is practiced even more beautifully by that other V.N., Visible Nature.”
He was referring to camouflage and
mimicry in animal kingdom. But this other V.N. for him was a source of endless magic.
Of amazement. Unsurpassable.
Judhajit Dasgupta, a veteran journalist, has studied butterflies for years. He coined common names in Bengali for some of the species unique to Bengal. Since then the names have become popular and spread widely, many people use them not knowing their origin. Dasgupta wrote about these indigenous varieties in his
Pashchimbanger Projapati (Ananda Publishers).
The photographs of butterflies used with this article
have been taken by him during his many expeditions