Having committed myself to writing a review of Stephen H. Blackwell and Kurt Johnson’s multifaceted and beautifully executed book, I soon began to wish I could delegate it to one of my daughters, who is a science writer and—like Nabokov but, alas, unlike me—would fully comprehend all the evolutionary subtleties of butterflies’ genitalia. Even as a “lay” reader, however, I need no convincing that Nabokov’s pursuit of butterflies was much more than an amateurish hobby. And yet certain things I am simply unable to judge, such as whether Nabokov was indeed a truly precocious scientist who anticipated most recent DNA-based breakthroughs and discoveries. Neither can I offer an educated opinion on how accurate his systematics and taxonomies were. Blackwell and Johnson, as well as several experts who contributed to the volume, strongly believe Nabokov and his theories were all that, but I am also aware that this high opinion of his scientific acumen is not universally shared. A noted American entomologist, May Berenbaum, wrote in 2000 in Science, while reviewing two earlier books on Nabokov and butterflies: “Although many of his conclusions may have been correct, the fact remains that his research was of modest extent and of interest to only a small segment of the scientific community” (vol. 290, no. 5489, 58). And even among the contributors to this volume there are dissenting opinions. Thus, James Mallet, a specialist on evolution and mimicry, calls Nabokov only “a potentially great scientist” and laments that Nabokov “snobbishly” dismissed the importance of “mechanics and dynamics” as well as statistical models (236).

I will have to leave this argument to the scientists among us, but fortunately for readers like me the book offers plenty of other material that even unscientific minds can judge and appreciate, namely what Blackwell and Johnson call Nabokov’s “prowess as an artist & doing his own illustrations” (25), and new content and angles found in the 10 essays (somewhat shorter and more informal than most academic articles) in the last portion of the book by literary scholars, writers, and scientists, on the role butterflies played in Nabokov’s life, scientific research, and oeuvre.

On the very first page of their Introduction, the editors quote Nabokov’s statement that he could not “separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is” (1). He obviously could not equally separate the scientific pleasure of knowing what it was and the artistic pleasure—or bliss, as he often called it—of drawing the different species’ wings and genitalia with utmost precision. The book reproduces 148 of Nabokov’s butterfly drawings, 62 in color. The earliest ones go back to 1941, just months after the Nabokovs came to the United States; during this period he first worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and then obtained a research fellowship at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. The black-and-white drawings are mostly on Nabokov’s favorite stationery: four-by-six index cards, like the ones he used for writing his novels but without lines. The color plates include Nabokov’s famous book dedications to Véra featuring beautifully hand-painted butterflies, among them “Vanessa incognita” on the first edition of Pale Fire, which he presented to his wife on his 63^rd birthday: April 23, 1962 (183).

Among the 10 essays, I would single out two: Dorion Sagan’s “Fictional Realism: Scaling the Twin Peaks of Art and Science” (243–50), and Stephen H. Blackwell’s “Nabokov’s Morphology: An Experiment in Appropriated Terminology” (260–68). Sagan, a well known science writer, displays astute breeziness, which Nabokov himself would have appreciated, when he discusses Nabokov’s “undecidability and productive duplicity”—as revealed, among other things, in the writer (and scientist) rejecting the supernatural yet, at the same time, entertaining an open-ended view of the “otherworld.” This Sagan compares to quantum physics, “where superpositionality contains, in a liminal state as it were, multiple possibilities that can be differently but validly construed upon measurement” (245–46). He also gifts us with a poignant description of what butterflies had come to mean in Nabokov’s life: “Nabokov’s nostalgia was visceral. Butterflies for him became a kind of placeholder, being real and alive but whose evanescence gave them the status of transitional objects after the loss of his family” (247). Blackwell’s piece offers an interesting contrast of taxonomy in science and what happens, in Nabokov’s view, when it crosses into the human sphere, as when Humbert supplies us with a taxonomic description of the nymphets, which reduces Lolita to a mere species and deprives her of any personality.

Nabokov routinely associated science with passion, and what I personally miss in this otherwise very informative and well put together volume is more of a record of that passion, in the writer’s and scientist’s own inimitable words. When he came to the New World he discovered—together with the Manhattan skyscrapers, fast food, motels, and (as Pnin would) automatic washing machines with portholes—North American butterflies, which took his scientific and aesthetic breaths away. “[T]he highest enjoyment of timelessness & ,” he famously wrote in Speak, Memory, “is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to 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―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal” (139). It is this passion that begets Nabokov’s passionate readers who, in turn, feel a thrill of gratitude to the writer for generously sharing his private ecstasies with them, even if they do not care much for the precise systematics and taxonomies of these rare butterflies.