“I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts.”

Although Vladimir Nabokov is remembered as one of America’s most venerated novelists, his first and most beloved pastime was not the writing of books, but the chasing of butterflies. Nabokov loved butterflies long before Humbert Humbert fell so tragically in love with his adolescent nymphet and long after American parents had stopped naming their children “Lolita.”

Book of the Week: Nabokov’s Childhood Inspiration

In celebration of Nabokov’s lifelong love for this branch of entomology, this week’s choice for Book of the Week is:

The butterflies of the eastern United States and Canada : with special reference to New England  by Samuel Hubbard Scudder.

From VN’s personal collection

The three volume set of this work indisputably shaped Nabokov’s first perceptions of the hidden world of taxonomy; a world concerned with type specimens, small red tags, and the tiniest of minutia. It has been confirmed that the Nabokov family library in Vyra, Russia held a copy of this book. Perhaps, it is the very same one that Nabokov is enjoying featured in the picture above. Although Nabokov appears to exhibit the politeness and propriety as expected from a young aristocratic boy, one can only imagine a young Vladimir privately perusing this book’s pages and beautiful color lithographs with gluttonous delight.

A little known fact is that Nabokov deeply admired Samuel Hubbard Scudder, author of this work. Nabokov emigrated to the United States in 1940 and within a year moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he would volunteer to organize the then disheveled collections of butterfly specimens held in the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s Entomology Department. This is the collection that was started by Samuel Scudder and A.S. Packard in 1859. In fact, many of the specimens held in the collection were personally contributed by Scudder himself. It was not by a twist of fate that Nabokov ended up in Cambridge; his admiration for Scudder had paved the way.

From the Book of the Week

In tribute to Scudder, upon discovering a misclassified species of  butterfly that bore the wrong label in the Museum of Comparative Zoology’s collection, he renamed the sub-species of melissa after him: Lycaeides mellisa samuelis, commonly known as the Karner Blue.

It truly was a rare person to be held in high esteem by Nabokov who has been noted by his biographers to be a markedly irreverent man who saw little wrong with calling Ezra Pound a total fake, criticizing Audubon’s technique in regards to his illustrations of butterflies, or perhaps most shocking: disparaging Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. To the average person,  such criticism is considered blasphemy. Nevertheless, we all know Nabokov was far from average and behind each criticism he had as always had diligently and ever so painstakingly collected evidence to support his statements.

Click here to view all of the plates from this week’s book of the week on Flickr and Pinterest!

Nabokov’s Lepidoptera Career and Contributions

While working at MCZ, Nabokov’s passion for lepidoptera was quickly noted. He was eventually appointed to a paid position as the de-facto Curator of Lepidoptera for the museum and served this post from 1942-1948. It would be during this time that he would produce his most important contributions to the field. His top three accomplishments were:

The Karner Blue, its own species?

1) The separation of the Karner Blue aka Lycaeides melissa samuelis from the Lycaeides idas group. As noted earlier, there was a butterfly that had been misclassified in the MCZ collections. This particular butterfly had previously not been observed and described by taxonomists. After doing extensive work in genitalia comparison for the butterfly, Nabokov renamed the specimen in honor of Scudder by giving the specimen his first name samuelis. Some have even suggested that this sub-species might be a full-fledged biological species in its own right but, further inquiry still needs to be done. Any takers? You can read his 1943 article in the open-source journal Psyche where he separates out the Karner Blue from the idas.

2) Providing a compelling hypothesis about the Polyommatus blues evolutionary and migratory paths in his 1945 Psyche paper Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae. He conjectured that they came from a common ancestor that lived about 10 million years ago in Asia and they migrated by way of the Bering Strait and moved slowly all the way down to Chile. While most full-time lepidopterists had disregarded Nabokov’s findings as those of a dilettante, a recent paper has vindicated Nabokov’s theory (using gene-sequencing technology to map evolutionary relationships) showing that he was correct about the migratory patterns of the Blues. Of the discovery, Naomi Pierce current Curator of Lepidoptera at the MCZ and co-author of the vindicating paper said she “was blown away…because he made these five predictions about what our time traveler would see, and he was spot-on correct about all of them.” Read the full story which appeared in the NY Times last year.

Migratory patterns of the Blues from N.Pierce’s et. al. article

3)  A complete revision of the North American members of the genus Lycaeides. After dissecting 350 specimens, Nabokov came up with three groups: Lycaeides argyrognomon (renamed idas in 1954), Lycaeides scudderi and Lycaeides melissa. Of the paper he wrote and published in the Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (available for free on the BHL) Nabokov said, “This work took me several years and undermined my health for quite a while. Before I never wore glasses. This is my favorite work. I think I really did well there.” Later, a review from Alexander Klots author of Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America glowingly said “the recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus.”  Nabokov couldn’t have been more pleased saying, “That’s real fame. That means more than anything a literary critic might say.”

Nabokov’s fanciful illustrations

Nabokov’s Legacy?

So are we to remember this man foremost as a Novelist or a Lepidoperist? Surely, his books would have been nothing without his butterflies. The pages of Nabokov’s fictional work flutter with 570 mentions of butterflies and entomologists have now named over 20 species of butterfly after characters from his novels. Ironically, it was Nabokov’s literary importance and notoriety that drew disdain from the very community that he so desired to be apart of. Most full time lepidopterists considered Nabokov a boyish aficionado with a reputation for excessive”splitting.” Moreover, they felt he had not earned but garnered the title “most famous lepidopterist in the world,” simply because of his literary status. Since many of Nabokov’s contributions to the sciences have been vindicated we think it only right to remember him as much a lepidopterist as a literary giant. The notion that the twain can meet is perhaps embodied in a quote from his novel Pale Fire:

“Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of ‘scientific’ knowledge joins the opposite slope of ‘artistic’ imagination?”

Yes, and it is on this Ridge where one will find Nabokov. At last Nabakov has been wholeheartedly accepted by the very community that once disregarded him. We know he would be pleased if he were alive today. Is it not comforting to know that a man of such incredible fame considered the life of the taxonomist, who busies himself with the classification and description of all of Earth’s wonderful creatures, the most rewarding of all. He knew the work to be done was endless, the pay less than fabulous, and the fame? Are you kidding? The thought is laughable. The work of the taxonomist is oft overlooked and its characters considered by society as dusty anachronisms who do monotonous “detail-oriented things.” Yet the work that is done is not done for the attention or glamor that it brings, but rather the inner satisfaction that comes from knowing that you are making a contribution that is vitally important to the existence and persistence of life.

Photocredit: US Fish and Wildlife Service, Ann Swengel

Today, the Karner Blues are poster-children of the conservation movement due in-part because of Nabokov’s work on them. In the early 60’s and 70’s Nabokov was still able to catch them on road-trips from Cornell to Boston. However in 1992, the Karner blue butterflies were federally listed as endangered. The dramatic decline in their population is due to habitat loss and modification resulting from human activities.

Learn more about the Karner Blue and the Recovery Plan in place to help save this iconic species.

We hope you enjoyed this post. Interested in guest-blogging for BHL? We’d love that! Natural history, biodiversity and conservation topics are especially welcomed. Email us your ideas at [email protected]

• Lepidoptera Links:Pictures of Butterflies on BHL Flickr

  Book of the Week: The butterflies of the eastern United States and Canada : with special reference to New England

  Taxon Bibliographies of the Lycaiedes in the BHL

  The Nearctic members of the genus Lycaeide, Nabokov

  NYTimes: Nabokov Theory Vindicated

  Nabokov Museum, holds his personal collection of butterflies and illustrations

  Nabokov Butterfly Bibliography

BHL Staff at the 2012 BHL Staff & Technical Meeting, Cambridge, MA, 27-28 September

On September 27-28, 2012, thirty-one staff members representing all 14 BHL member institutions convened at the Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University for the 2012 BHL Staff and Technical Meeting. As a combined meeting, it brought together not only those that manage the digitization workflow at each member institution, but also those that work to keep BHL’s technical infrastructure running smoothly and constantly improving.

To maximize the 16 hours available for discussions, the meeting was divided into separate Staff and Technical tracks, with only those sessions relevant to all staff combined. Combined sessions included Program and Technical updates, as well as a discussion of BHL Projects and Initiatives, which was a chance for staff to identify high-impact projects to incorporate into a 2-year workplan for BHL. Staff sessions included a Program Management Update; brainstorming requirements for a BHL-Awareness Program; a Collections Analysis, Scope, and Prioritization discussion; a Blog brainstorming session; and discussions about BHL’s mission statement and goals. The Technical sessions discussed providing article-level access in BHL; replicating and synchronizing BHL content globally; the NEH Art of Life project status; BHL’s boutique digitization workflow management tool Macaw; Full-text searching; and OCR improvements.

This was also the first opportunity for BHL’s newest members, Cornell and the United States Geological Survey (USGS), to participate in one of our staff meetings. As a BHL-staff meeting virgin, we asked Jenna Nolt, librarian at the USGS, to share with us her thoughts about the meeting.

Jenna Nolt with a specimen of an edible polypore, genus Laetiporus, commonly known as chicken of the woods.

As a new librarian and new member of BHL, I was privileged to represent the U.S. Geological Survey Libraries at the staff meeting in September.  Our libraries have been contributing to BHL since March, and this was an exciting opportunity to meet, learn from, and collaborate with the other members.

From the moment I walked through the door I was impressed by the positive energy and enthusiasm of the whole group. After a general session we broke out into the staff track and the technical track; I stayed on the technical track.  As the sole librarian at my library dedicated to digitization, this was a valuable opportunity for me to discuss in detail some of the complexities of the digital world.  One thing I realized very quickly during these discussions is that all of us, in our individual libraries as well as in BHL, are addressing the same challenges of how to best organize, preserve, and expose complex objects in a constantly shifting digital landscape.

I was particularly interested in the discussion about OCR (optical character recognition) and excited by the plan for BHL to implement full-text searching, something that would be a huge benefit to our scientists and researchers. To accomplish this BHL will be using Solr which not only allows full-text searching, but also allows for faceted navigation, hit highlighting, and corrective spelling (“did you mean…”) features that any researcher knows the value of.

I was most actively involved with the section on Macaw, a piece of software created by Joel Richard at the Smithsonian used to upload digital objects packaged with metadata to Internet Archive. Our library has been testing and using Macaw for the past few months, and it has given us the ability to create a completely in-house digitization process for public domain materials. It was a great chance to speak with Joel directly and discuss with the group the possibility of setting up a cloud-based instance with multi-institutional access, which would be a huge advantage for many BHL members.

One theme emerged strongly for me over the course of the meeting.  I’ve become increasingly aware working in the information field that there are no simple answers in the digital world, no clear standards, and sometimes no answers at all. As anyone who has tried to do serious research online knows, this can be extremely frustrating.  But what I realized is that the BHL is at the cutting edge of constructing standards and creating answers where there are none to find.  When those skills are combined with the enthusiasm, passion for knowledge, and a love of science I saw at the meeting – well, that’s where the really cool stuff happens.

Thank you all and…I can’t believe I am saying this, but…can’t wait for the next meeting!

We are thrilled to welcome Jenna and our other new staff members to the BHL project. Nothing solidifies the initiation process more than participation in a two-day intensive staff and technical meeting!

The meeting may be over, but now the real work begins! We are busy developing plans to address our meeting action items and continue discussions about revising BHL’s mission and goals in order to further inform a 2 year workplan for the project. The 2012 Staff and Technical Meeting was a hands-down success and a fabulous opportunity for BHL’s dedicated staff to further our vision to repatriate biodiversity knowledge to the world.