Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (review)

212 Nabokov Studies Blackwell treats the concept of boundaries in the full breadth of its manifestation as boundary between nations, between individuals, between writing and reading, between fiction and reality, between ontological levels. Blackwell suggests here that the overcoming of boundaries is related back to the theme of love from the previous chapter and the achieving of a state of transcendence. Blackwell proposes that in finding his ideal reader, Fyodor has conquered the boundaries between reader and writer and between loving individuals by merging with Zina. In a similar fashion, Blackwell implies that in engaging the reader as he does, Fyodor (and Nabokov) draw the reader into a creative process, thus overcoming the boundary between them. This chapter and the book end with an imaginative reading of Fyodor's love poem to Zina and the final poetic stanza of the novel with particular attention paid to the concept of the boundary. Zina 's Paradox is a book that impresses most by virtue of its ability to treat a wide variety of potentially abstract, far-reaching topics while remaining focused on The Gift. Blackwell never loses sight of his primary object of study and, in treating it in the context of such expansive issues as memory, love, transcendence and so on, produces a variety of stimulating insights extending from the exiled Russian community in Berlin to Nabokov's creative processes. Although Blackwell's central thesis attempts to construct an understanding of Zina as a creative force within the novel, this is the least successful part of the book. Apart from Zina's explicit presence as addressee in Chapter 3 of The Gift, there seems little in the novel to explicitly buttress Blackwell's provocative claims regarding her function in the novel as a whole. In the absence of textual support, Blackwell is left, in the opinion of this reader, claiming a transformative role for Zina without ever actually being able to demonstrate it. This does not detract from the validity of Blackwell's many other claims for the novel, however. And regardless of how one assesses the legitimacy of Blackwell's claims regarding Zina's creative role in the novel, Zina 's Paradox remains, in many respects, an insightful book dealing with one of the most challenging novels of world literature. This in itself is a spur for future studies of The Gift and recommendation for Blackwell's Zina 's Paradox. Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates. Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Zoland Books, 1999. xii + 372 pp. + 8 black-and-white plates. ISBN 1581950098. Review by Robert Dirig, Cornell University. This book is a remarkable achievement! It chronicles the long-delayed but surprisingly catalytic influence of Vladimir Nabokov's most obscure scientific paper. Published fifty-six years ago, while he was working at the Museum of Reviews 213 Comparative Zoology (MCZ) at Harvard, the paper treated an array of Neotropical Blue butterflies that Nabokov had never seen except in museums. Johnson and Coates relate in great detail the ongoing discovery of new species of Latin American Blues on Caribbean islands and on the Central and South American mainland during the last few years. The tale is fittingly told with much drama and excitement—for this sort of exploration pushes the frontiers of lepidopteral science; Nabokov had, in fact, craved this "edge" since early childhood, but never quite achieved it for himself. The book contains much more than an account of this effort, however. It reviews the history of systematics (the scientific field that circumscribes new species and attempts to discover their evolutionary relationships). It also summarizes the native cultures and history of European colonization in South America, and provides general information on that continent's landforms and natural history. It is a book from which a reader can leam a great deal about many things outside of its main subject. Nabokov's Blues begins appropriately by quoting the final stanzas of Nabokov 's 1943 poem "On Discovering a Butterfly," which distills the essence of butterfly collecting and study in such a unique and masterful way. A collection of fourteen essays follows, each organized around a theme: Part I ("The Aurelian," five essays) does a...