Page 120 - The Secret Museum

North America, taking on a blazing Kansas storm, just to spot a single species of

butterfly.

Blue butterflies fascinated him, and he and Vera would pursue them all over the
North American wilderness. Once he’d collected his specimens he would study their
genitalia, looking carefully at the barbs and the shape of each one. His best work on
butterflies was a paper about Polyommatus blue butterflies. He examined the
genitalia of 120 of the creatures, which lived in the Neotropics, and found that
different species had flown to the New World from Asia in a series of waves over
millions of years. He said that ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time

machine’ would have witnessed the colonization.

At the time, his findings weren’t really given much credit, but recently, in 2011,
researchers at Harvard University sequenced DNA from the blues and found that
Nabokov’s musings were correct. Blue butterflies flew in five waves from Asia to
the New World – just as Nabokov had at one time emigrated with his family from
Europe to America.

When asked in an interview for The Paris Review in 1967 whether he had felt at
home during his time in America, Nabokov said he was ‘as American as April in
Arizona’. Asked if anything reminded him of the Russia of his youth, he replied, ‘my

butterfly hunting, in a loop of time, seemed at once to resume the butterfly chases of
my vanished Vyra.’ The ‘fairly wild’ landscapes of north-western America were, he
pointed out, ‘surprisingly similar to the Arctic expanses of northern Russia’.

Butterflies reminded him of home and, wherever life took him, he felt
comfortable, butterfly net in hand, waiting to catch one of his precious, delicate
creatures – rather like catching memories and ideas, and transforming them into
characters at his writing desk. ‘My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime,
cruelty, soft music,’ he once wrote. ‘My pleasures are the most intense known to

man: writing and butterfly hunting.’
In a letter to his sister (1945), Nabokov wrote that ‘to know that no one before you

has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no
one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope,
where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena —
all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.’

He became utterly hooked on collecting, pinching the delicate, colourful creatures
at the thorax, then studying them carefully to find out everything he could about them.
There was a price to pay – late in life, Nabokov’s eyesight failed, ruined by all the
hours he’d spent looking at tiny genitalia under a microscope in the back room of

Harvard’s museum.