A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths 2001 (review)

Reviews 215 that complements all the others as part of our continuing quest to appreciate the important scientific work of this literary giant. Dieter E. Zimmer. A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths 2001. Hamburg: privately printed, 2001. 392 pp. + 21 plates. ISBN 3000076093. Review by Brian Boyd, University of Auckland. To know more about where butterflies fit into Nabokov's life than he disclosed in Speak, Memory, readers had to wait for Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). To know where Nabokov's work on butterflies fit into science, they had to wait for Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (1999). To know what Nabokov wrote about butterflies, and when and where, they had to wait for Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000).3 And to understand Nabokov's butterflies, and where they fit into his work, they have had to wait for Dieter E. Zimmer's stupendous labor of love, thirteen years in the making, A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths 2001 (2001). The "2001" in the title differentiates this Guide from four previous published versions, "Nabokov's Lepidoptera: An Annotated Multilingual Checklist" (1993), and two 1996 prototypes and a 1998 revamp of A Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths5 The 2001 model, while of course not definitive—nothing that treats a rich and rapidly changing body of scientific knowledge can claim this—easily outperforms its forebears (392 pages and 21 color plates to the 146 pages of the 1993 "Checklist") and seems unlikely ever to be surpassed. In a review article in Nabokov Studies 2 (1995), I focused on Zimmer's "Checklist," hailing it as an immeasurable advance on everything else in the field to date, but also noting omissions, limitations in presentation, and shortcomings in the discussion of Nabokov's science and its context. Not only has Zimmer plugged the few omissions I mentioned, as well as innumerable others no one had been aware of, he has also thought out carefully and discovered how to provide whatever non-lepidopterists might need to know about Nabokov's butterflies. Even lepidopterists will leam much and find much they could not easily have checked. 1. Brian Boyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press). 2. Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates (Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books). 3. Ed. Brian Boyd and Robert Michael PyIe (Boston: Beacon). 4. In Michel Satori, ed., Les Papillons de Nabokov (Lausanne: Musée cantonal de Zoologie). 5. All Hamburg: privately printed. 216 Nabokov Studies In 1995 I discussed the "Checklist" in a review article because it provided an occasion to draw the attention of Nabokovians, including Zimmer, to the work being done since the late 1980s by Zsolt Bahnt, Kurt Johnson, Gerardo Lamas, Dubi Benyamini and their associates on the Latin American Blues, of which Nabokov had been First Reviser, and to the work done by Nabokov himself in his then unpublished writings at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. Already that time when literary Nabokovians knew so little of their lepidopterological counterparts seems long ago. Since then, Kurt Johnson has written of Nabokov's butterflies, with others or alone, in Nabokov Studies, in a stream of submissions to NABOKV-L, in Nabokov's Blues and· elsewhere, and in papers at both literary and scientific conferences, as well as in new technical papers where he and his colleagues have named new species in honor of Nabokovian people and places, in close cooperation with Nabokov scholars; Robert Dirig has spoken at the Cornell Nabokov Centenary Conference in 1998; Robert Michael PyIe has co-edited Nabokov's Butterflies, and that volume has made Nabokov's unpublished as well as his uncollected lepidopterological work available. Everyone who knows Nabokov knows of his passion for butterflies, and after the work of Johnson and others no one now has an excuse for thinking he was merely a passionate dilettante. He was a first-rate, although never a major, scientific lepidopterist. At the same time he was also too good a writer, too astute a student of human psychology, and too staunch a defender of individual difference to expect or...