Nabokov’s Butterflies, Introduction

NO writer of Nabokov’s stature, not even Goethe, has been a more
passionate student of the natural world or a more accomplished
scientist. No one has ever evoked with more enchantment how a child’s
first passion for nature can grow into lifelong love and devotion. In
the years after Lolita thrust him into fame, Nabokov became the
world’s best-known lepidopterist. He had been highly respected by fellow
specialists for the papers he wrote while in charge of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, in the 1940s, at a time when he was also earning a reputation in America for his stories and poems in The Atlantic Monthly, but those who saw his zeal for butterflies featured on the cover of Time or in the pages of Life
in the 1960s often assumed that he was a mere hobbyist. The scale and
significance of his butterfly work remained a mystery to many until
scientists started to re-examine and expand on his work at the end of
the 1980s and throughout the 1990s. One of the foremost of these
scientists, Kurt Johnson, has recently, with Steve Coates, written
eloquently of Nabokov’s inspiration and legacy in (1999).