'The Excitement of Entomological Exploration'

A pivot or lasting change of focus occurred to me as a teenager. For years, since probably late toddlerhood, I had thought of myself as a budding naturalist. Behind our house in suburban Cleveland were a creek, grassy fields and second-growth woods, including a dense stand of poplars, locust trees and sassafras. Blackberries grew everywhere. In and along the creek were crayfish, salamanders, frogs and water striders. Our backyard was, in effect, a bountiful museum of biodiversity, surrounded by heavy development. Insects thrived – yellow jackets and hornets, spittlebugs and mosquitoes, and, best of all, the order Lepidoptera, butterflies and moths. 

Cecropia moths favored the trunks of ash trees. We found luna moths and mourning cloaks. The first field was rich in milkweed, which attracted monarchs. Various species of swallowtails, painted ladies and fritillaries seemed drawn to blackberry and strawberry blossoms. I became a collector, a devoted reader of field guides.

 

Perhaps it was the arrival of puberty. I never lost complete interest in the natural world but my attention shifted to literature. I stopped collecting. Around 1967, I discovered the work of Vladimir Nabokov, a love that has never faded and served to supplant my devotion to applied biology. He sustained lifelong  interest in lepidoptery and literature, with brilliant accomplishments in both. In the June 5, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, Nabokov published “Butterflies,” a memoir of his infatuation with Lepidoptera while growing up in prerevolutionary Russia. He later revised the piece which became Chapter Six of Conclusive Evidence (1951), then of Speak, Memory (1966), the finest of all autobiographies. He writes of those childhood quests:

 

“Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration. From the very first, it had a great many intertwinkling facets. One of them was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania. Its gratification admitted of no compromise or exception. Tutors and governesses knew that the morning was mine and cautiously kept away.”

 

The New Yorker excerpt concludes with one of Nabokov’s best-known set-pieces, an early digression on his great subject, Time:

 “I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”

 

Nigel Andrew in his delightful book The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment (Saraband 2025), refers to Nabokov as “the most literary of all butterfly lovers,” saying he was “conscious of the inadequacy of his own representations of butterflies in his fiction, when compared to his scientific work.” Yet no one who reads Pale Fire (1962) will forget the repeated appearance of Vanessa atalanta, the red admiral (or “red admirable,” as the novel’s poet John Shade prefers).