"A dark Vanessa with crimson band": What Butterflies Meant to Nabokov

as a bit of recent Nabokoviana and a brief elaboration on my presentation:

here is an article announcing that a theory about butterfly evolution which Nabokov posited in one of his scientific papers has recently been confirmed:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html?pagewanted=all

here's a poem he wrote (1943) about collecting and studying butterflies:

On Discovering a Butterfly

I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new
to science shape and shade — the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checkered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer — and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep)
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

and here is a link to invented butterflies Nabokov liked to draw everywhere (book covers, lampshades, walls...)

http://www.nabokovmuseum.org/drawings1.html

the second from the left, top row - Brenthis Dozenita - combines Brenthis (a real butterfly genus) and a play on the title of the book on which it is drawn - Nabokov's Dozen. 

Underneath the title of the book, N added another name in Russian: dozenitnaya perlamutrovka. He converts the already fictional "dozenita" into the Russian "do" (before, prior) and "zenit" (zenith), and adds the Russian for "mother of pearl" - perlamutr. The "ka" ending is a way of forming a kind of female pet name for an object by deriving it from one of its attributes (if a girl has black (chierny) brows (brovi), she can be called "chernobrovka", which, I think, can only be translated into English as "the black-browed one"). 

so that the Russian butterfly can be translated as "the antezenithial nacreous one."

 

more good quotes and photos on N, butterflies, science, and art

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/07/01/nabokov-butterflies/

and finally a passage on mimicry from Speak, Memory:

“The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubblelike 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"). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird's dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are 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”