Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
- Kurt Johnson &
- Steve Coates
Zoland Books: 2000. 372 pp. £18.99, $27
Vladimir Nabokov the towering man of letters was also the geeky and shambling lepidopterist who, every summer, roamed the uplands of North America or Europe with a butterfly net. Lolita (1958) and other novels were actually written while he was on butterfly-collecting trips in the Rockies. Nabokov won international fame as a novelist and poet after Lolita, but he was even more proud that a handful of specialists had named butterflies after him. In spite of its subtitle, The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius, Nabokov's Blues is not primarily another biographical work about the great writer. The many references to butterflies in Nabokov's novels and poems, and his taxonomic work on the 'blues' (Lycaenidae), are discussed at length, but the odyssey in the subtitle properly belongs to author Kurt Johnson, a New York financier and lepidopterist. The real hero of Nabokov's Blues is taxonomy; its supporting cast, in addition to Nabokov and Johnson, includes Hungarian PhD student Zsolt Bálint, Israeli engineer Dubi Benyamini and Peruvian entomologist Gerardo Lamas.
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