NABOKOV AND BUTTERFLIES | Facts and Details (2025)

NABOKOV AND BUTTERFLIES

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was a Russian-born writer who emigrated to America and is best known for his book “Lolita”. Nabokov was deeply interested in butterflies. He once speculated that if there had been no Russian Revolution who probably wound have ended up a butterfly specialist at a Russian museum. He wrote, "I have hunted butterflies...as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts...Few things could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration."

From the age of seven he dreamed of discovering a new species, something he achieved at an elevation of 4,000 feet in the Alps in the summer of 1938 and in the United States, with the discovery of “Neonympha dorothea” at the Grand Canyon, in 1942. He worked on producing the most detailed and comprehensive butterfly catalogue ever produced but abandoned the project after two years because it was just too ambitious

Nabokov interests in butterflies crept into his fiction. Several of his characters were lepidopterists (butterfly scientists) and others—Vanessa Van Ness, Percy Elphinstone, Electra Gold and Avis Chapmen— had butterflies incorporated into their names.

In the 1940s, Nabokov held a part time position at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and also worked as a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Most summers were spent driving around the Rockies and the West looking for butterflies. His experience in American motels late showed up in “Lolita”. One of Nabokov's colleagues at Harvard was the famous biologist Edmond Wilson, who Nabokov once accused of cutting out the bottom of one of his butterfly nets.

Book: “Nabokov's Blues” by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates (Zoland Books, 2001) on butterflies.

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Nabokov's Blues

Nabokov published several papers on group of North American and South American butterflies known as Polyommatini, or blues. His specialty was differentiating the different butterfly species by on the basis of differences in their genitalia which he gave names like “alula” and “bululla”.

By dissecting a small sample of 120 specimens, Nabokov did the first extensive taxonomic study of this large, complicated group of neo-tropical butterflies and helped to classify them. "Nabokov was blessed with what taxonomists called a good eye," butterfly expert Dr. Kurt Johnson told the New York Times in 1997. "In the whole study, Nabokov actually misidentified only three species, a remarkable success rate, really."

New species have been named “vera”, “lolita”, “humbert”, “ada” and “zembla”. In the 1970s, Nabokov's research was used to examine the effects of plate tectonics on animals in North America and South America. It was discovered that butterflies in South America had more in common with butterflies in Africa than North America, which gave evidence than Africa and South America were once connected.

Nabokov on the Caterpillar to Pupa Transformation

Caterpillars pass through five larval stages, or instars, before metamorphosing into adults. The caterpillar often changes its markings, patterns and colors and looks like a completely different species in its different stages. All caterpillars have glands capable of producing silk, which are usually used to make a cocoons. The silkworm is a caterpillar for a kind of moth. In Hawaii, a flesh-eating caterpillar was discovered that traps its prey — mostly snails — with silken threads like a spider.

In a lecture on caterpillars and butterflies at Cornell in 1951,Vladimir Nabokov told his students, “Though wonderful to watch, the transformation from larvae to pupa... is not a particularly pleasant process for the subject involved. There comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he begins to feel pervaded by an odd sense of discomfort. It is a tight feeling — here about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch. Of course he has molted a few times before, but “that” is nothing in comparison to the tickle and urge he feels now. He must shed that tight dry skin, or die. As you have guessed under that skin, the armor of a pupa — and how uncomfortable to wear one’s skin over one’s armor — is already forming.”

“The caterpillar must do something about that horrible feeling. He walks about looking for a suitable place. He finds it, he crawls up a wall or a tree-trunk. He makes for himself a little pad of silk on the underside of that perch, he hangs himself by the tip of his tail or last legs, from the silk patch, so as to dangle head downwards in the position of an inverted question-mark, and there “is” a “question” — how to get rid of his skin. One wriggle, another wriggle — and zip the skin bursts down the back and he gradually gets out of it working with shoulders and hips like a person getting out of sausage dress. Then comes the most critical moment — You understand that we are hanging head down by our last pair of legs, and the problem now is to shed the whole skin — even the skin of those last legs by which we hang — but how to accomplish this without falling?”

“So what does he do this courageous and stubborn little animal who already is partly disrobed. Very carefully he starts working out his hind legs, dislodging them from the patch of silk which is dangling, head down — and then with an admirable twist and jerk he sort of jumps “off” the silk pad, sheds the last shred of hose, and immediately in the process of the same jerk-and-twist jump he attaches himself anew by means of a hooks that was under the shred of skin on the tip of his body. Now all the skin has come off, thank God, and the bared surface, now hard and glistening, is the pupa, a swathed-baby-like thing hanging from that twig — a very beautiful chrysalis with golden knobs and a plate-armor wingcases. This pupal stage lasts from a few days to a few years.”

Vladimir Nabokov on the Pupa to Butterfly Transformation

On the transformation from pupa to butterfly Nabokov told his students, “After two or three weeks something begins to happen. The pupa hangs quite motionless but you notice one day that through the wingcases, which are many times smaller than the wings of the future perfect insect — you notice that through the horn-like texture of each wingcase you can see in miniature the pattern of the future wings, the lovely flush of the ground color, a dark margin in a rudimentary eyespot.”

“Another day or two — and the final transformation occurs. The pupa splits as the caterpillar had split — it really is the last glorified mouth, and the butterfly creep out — and in its turn hangs down from the twig to dry. She is not handsome at first. She is very damp and bedraggled. But those limp implements of hers that she had disengaged, gradually dry and distend, the veins branch and harden — and in 20 minutes or so she is ready to fly . You have noticed that the caterpillar is a “he”, the pupa is “it” and the butterfly is “she”. You will ask — what is the feeling of hatching? Oh, no doubt , there is a rush of panic to the head, a thrill of breathlessness and strange sensations, but then the eyes sees a flow of sunshine, the butterfly sees the world, the large and awful face of the gaping entomologist.”

Nabokov on His Early Passion for Butterflies

Vladimir Nabokov wrote in The New Yorker: From the age of five...my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender. The original event had been banal enough. On some honeysuckle near the veranda, I had happened to see a Swallowtail—a splendid, pale-yellow creature with black blotches and blue crenulations, and a cinnabar eyespot above each chrome-rimmed black tail. As it probed the inclined flower from which it hung, it kept restlessly jerking its great wings, and my desire for it was overwhelming. Justin, an agile footman, caught it in my cap, after which it was transferred, cap and all, to a wardrobe, where the reek of naphthalene was expected to kill it overnight. On the following morning, however, when my governess unlocked the wardrobe to take something out, the butterfly, with a mighty rustle, flew into her face, then made for the open window, and presently 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. [Source: Vladimir Nabokov, The New Yorker, June 12, 1948]

Soon after the wardrobe affair, I found a spectacular moth, and my mother killed it with ether. In later years, I used many killing agents, but the least contact with the initial stuff would always cause the door of the past to fly open. Once, as a grown man, I was under ether during an operation, and with the vividness of a decalcomania picture I saw my own self in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged Emperor moth under the guidance of my smiling mother. It was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dreams, while my own vitals were being exposed: the soaking, ice-cold absorbent cotton pressed to the lemurian head of the moth; the subsiding spasm of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the chitinous crust of its thorax; the careful insertion of the pin in the cork-bottomed groove of the spreading board; the symmetrical adjustment of the strong-veined, “windowed” wings under neatly affixed strips of paper.

I must have been eight or nine when, in a storeroom of our country house, among a medley of dusty objects, I discovered some wonderful books acquired in the days when my mother’s mother had been interested in natural science and had had a university professor of zoology give private lessons to her daughter. Some of these books were mere curios, such as the four huge brown folios of Albertus Seba’s work (“Locupletissimi Rerum Naturalium Thesauri Accurata Descriptio . . .”), printed in Amsterdam around 1750. On their coarse-grained pages, I found woodcuts of serpents and butterflies and embryos. The cut showing the fetus of an Ethiopian female child hanging by the neck in a glass jar used to give me a nasty shock every time I came across it, nor did I much care for the stuffed hydra on Plate CII, with its seven lion-toothed turtle heads on seven serpentine necks and its strange, bloated body, which bore buttonlike tubercles along the sides and ended in a knotted tail.

Nabokov on Butterfly Classification, Evolution and Mimicry

Vladimir Nabokov wrote in The New Yorker: By my early teens, I was already voraciously reading entomological periodicals, especially British and Russian ones. Great upheavals were taking place in the development of systematics. Since the middle of the century, Continental lepidopterology had been, on the whole, a simple and stable affair, smoothly run by the Germans. Its high priest, Dr. Staudinger, was also the head of the largest firm of insect dealers. Even now, half a century after his death, German lepidopterists have not quite managed to shake off the hypnotic spell occasioned by his authority. He was still alive when his school began to lose ground as a scientific force in the world. While he and his followers stuck to specific and generic names sanctioned by long usage and were content to classify butterflies by characteristics visible to the naked eye, English-speaking authors were introducing nomenclatural changes as a result of a strict application of the law of priority, and taxonomic changes based on the microscopic study of organs. The Germans did their best to ignore the new trends and continued to cherish the philately-like side of entomology. Their solicitude for the “average collector who cannot be made to dissect” is comparable to the way nervous publishers pamper the “average reader”—who cannot be made to think. [Source: Vladimir Nabokov, The New Yorker, June 12, 1948]

There was another, more general change, which coincided with my ardent adolescent interest in butterflies and moths. The Victorian and ardent adolescent interest in butterflies and moths. The Victorian and Staudingerian kind of species, hermetic and homogeneous, with sundry “varieties”—alpine, polar, insular, etc.—affixed to it from the outside, as it were, like incidental appendages, was replaced by a new, multiform, and fluid kind of species, made up of geographical races or subspecies. The evolutional aspects of the case were thus brought out more clearly, by means of more flexible methods of classification, and further links between butterflies and the central problems of nature were provided by biological investigations.

The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Such was the imitation of oozing poison by bubble-like macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled, and rejected”). When a certain moth resembled a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walked and moved its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly had to look like a leaf, not only were all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes were generously thrown in. “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.

Nabokov on His Delight Pursuing Butterflies

Vladimir Nabokov wrote in The New Yorker: When, having shaken off all pursuers, I took the rough, red road that ran from our house toward field and forest, the animation and lustre of the day seemed like a tremor of sympathy around me. Black Erebia butterflies (they are called Ringlets in England), with a special gentle awkwardness peculiar to their kind, danced among the firs. From a flower head, two male Coppers rose to a tremendous height, fighting all the way up, and then, after a while, came the downward flash of one of them returning to his thistle. These were familiar insects, but at any moment something better might cause me to stop with a quick intake of breath. I remember one day when I warily brought my net closer and closer to a little Thecla that had daintily settled on a sprig. I could clearly see the white “W” on its chocolate-brown underside. Its wings were closed and the inferior ones were rubbing against each other in a curious, circular motion—possibly producing some small, blithe crepitation a human ear could not catch. I had long wanted that particular species and, when near enough, I struck. You have heard champion tennis players moan after missing an easy shot. You have seen stunned golfers smile horrible, helpless smiles. But that day nobody saw me shake out a piece of twig from an otherwise empty net and stare at a hole in the tarlatan. [Source: Vladimir Nabokov, The New Yorker, June 12, 1948]

However, if the morning hunt had been a failure, one could still look forward to mothing. Colors would die a long death on June evenings. The lilac bushes in full bloom, before which I stood, net in hand, displayed clusters of a fluffy gray in the dusk—the ghost of purple. A moist young moon hung above the mist of a neighboring meadow. In many a garden have I stood thus in later years—in Athens, Antibes, Atlanta—but never have I waited with such a keen desire as before those darkening lilacs. And suddenly it would come, the low buzz passing from flower to flower, the vibrational halo around the tapering pinkish body of a Hummingbird moth poised in the air above a corolla. Its handsome black larva, resembling a diminutive cobra when it puffed out its ocellated front segments, could be found on dank willow herb two months later. Thus, every hour and season had its delights. And, finally, on frosty autumn nights one could sugar for moths by painting tree trunks with a mixture of molasses, beer, and rum. Through the gusty blackness, one’s lantern would illumine the stickily glistening furrows of the bark and two or three large moths upon it imbibing the sweets, their nervous wings half open, butterfly fashion, the lower ones exhibiting their incredible crimson silk from beneath the lichen-gray primaries. “Catocala adultera! ” I would shriek triumphantly in the direction of the lighted windows of the house as I stumbled home to show my captures to my father.

Beyond the park, there were fields, with a continuous shimmer of butterfly wings over a shimmer of flowers—daisies, bluebells, scabious, and others—which now rapidly pass by me in a kind of colored haze, like those lovely, lush meadows, never to be explored, that one sees from the diner on a transcontinental journey. At the end of this grassy wonderland, the forest rose like a wall. There I roamed, scanning the tree trunks (the enchanted, the silent part of a tree) for certain tiny moths, called Pugs in England—delicate little creatures that cling in the daytime to speckled surfaces, with which their flat wings and turned-up abdomens blend. There, at the bottom of that sea of sun-shot greenery, I slowly spun around the great boles. Nothing in the world would have seemed sweeter to me than to be able to add, by a stroke of luck, some remarkable new species to the long list of Pugs already named by others. And my pied imagination, ostensibly and almost grotesquely grovelling to my desire (but all the time, in ghostly conspiracies behind the scenes, coolly planning the most distant events of my destiny), kept providing me with hallucinatory samples of small print: “. . . the only specimen so far known . . .” “. . . the only specimen of Eupithecia petropolitana was taken by a Russian schoolboy . . .” “. . . by a young Russian collector . . .” “. . . by myself in the Government of St. Petersburg, Tzarskoye Selo District, in 1912 . . . 1913 . . . 1914 . . . 1915.”

Then came a year when I felt the urge to push on still farther and explore the vast marshland beyond the River Oredezh. After skirting the bank for three or four miles, I found a rickety footbridge. While crossing over, I could see the huts of a hamlet on my left, apple trees, rows of tawny pine logs lying on a green slope, and the bright patches made on the turf by the scattered clothes of peasant girls, who, stark naked, romped in the shallow water and yelled, heeding me as little as if I were the discarnate carrier of my present reminiscences. On the other side of the river, a dense crowd of small, bright-blue butterflies that had been tippling on the rich, trampled mud and cow dung through which I had to trudge rose all together into the spangled air and settled again as soon as I had passed.

After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub, I came to the swamp. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of Diptera around me, the cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sounds of the morass under my foot than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, the pictures of which I had worshipped for several seasons. And the next moment I was among them. Over the bilberry shrubs, with their dim, dreamy blue fruit, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss, over mire, over the fragrant racemes of the lone and mysterious marsh rocket, a dark little Fritillary, bearing the name of a Norse goddess, passed in a low, skimming flight. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-stippled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that covered my forearms and neck, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded lepidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the marsh, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my hands, a perfume that varies with the species; it may be vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last, I saw I had come to the end of the swamp. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under the ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the olive green of slopes above timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Mostly National Geographic articles. Also David Attenborough books (Princeton University Press), New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Natural History magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, and various books and other publications.

Last updated February 2025