'As Bleak and Changeless as an Old Gray Rock'

On June 7, 1941, Vladimir Nabokov and his family, during a motor trip across their newly adopted home, stopped on the south rim of the Grand Canyon and spent the night in one of the cabins at Bright Angel Lodge. The next day, Nabokov, as an “accredited representative of the American Museum of Natural History,” was issued a permit to collect butterfly specimens in Grand Canyon National Park.

Early the following morning, June 9, Nabokov and the family’s driver, Dorothy Leuthold, one of his Russian-language students, were walking along Bright Angel Trail when Leuthold accidently disturbed with her foot a “midsized brown butterfly,” in the words of Brian Boyd (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, 1991). Nabokov recognized it as an as yet undescribed species of the genus Neonympha. He caught it and another of the same species in his net. Returning to their car, the lepidopterist discovered his wife, Véra, had caught by hand two additional specimens.

The following year, in the entomology journal Psyche, Nabokov published “Some new or little known Nearctic Neonympha.” He named the new species Neonympha dorothea in honor of the pupil/driver who kicked up the butterfly. Other entomologists, with Nabokov’s blessing, later reclassified it as a subspecies, Cyllopsis pertepida dorothea. In common parlance, lepidopterists and the rest of call it canyonland satyr, Dorothy’s satyr, Grand Canyon Brown and Nabokov’s wood nymph. The holotype is in the collection of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where Nabokov worked as a research fellow from 1942 to 1948. In Boyd’s words, he became the museum’s “de facto curator of Lepidoptera.”

This string of anecdotes suggests a fable, one that begins in political upheaval and evolves into a homecoming of sorts. Nabokov’s genius could flourish without meddling and the threat of death only in the United States. In 1919, he fled Russia to avoid the Bolshevik terror; in 1937, Berlin, to escape the rising Nazi tide; in 1940, Paris, ahead of the Wehrmacht. Thirteen months after fleeing France, Nabokov discovered his first new species of New World butterfly. Only in America could he teach, study butterflies, care for his family, speak his mind and write novels – Bend Sinister, Lolita (amply researched during his motor trips across the U.S.), Pnin. The state left him alone and, out of gratitude, he became a patriot. “I am,” he said, “an American writer, born in Russia.” In his 1964 interview with Playboy he says:

“Since my youth — I was 19 when I left Russia — my political creed has remained as bleak and changeless as an old gray rock. It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions.”

[In addition to Boyd’s biography, see Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (2000), edited by Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, a 782-page compendium of Nabokov’s work, scientific and artistic, on Lepidoptera, and a perfect bedside volume.]