Volume 48, Number 10 · June 21, 2001
Nabokov on the Wing
By Michael Wood
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov–Wilson Letters, 1940–1971
edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Simon Karlinsky
University of California Press, 388 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius
Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates
Zoland Books, 372 pp., $27.00; McGraw-Hill, 372 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings
edited and annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, with new translations from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov
Beacon, 782 pp., $45.00
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
Stacy Schiff
Modern Library, 456 pp., $14.95 (paper)
'It is amusing,' Vladimir Nabokov wrote to Edmund Wilson in 1942, 'to think that I managed to get into Harvard with a butterfly as my sole backer.' Nabokov was forty-three at the time, and was referring to his position as research fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which he held until 1945, when he took up an appointment in language and literature at Cornell. He had also been teaching Russian at Wellesley for most of the time he was living in or near Cambridge. Wilson thought Nabokov's New Yorker piece on his childhood passion for butterflies, later to become Chapter Six of Speak Memory, 'one of the best things you have done in English,' but didn't pay much attention to Nabokov's scholarly work in lepidoptery, in spite of Nabokov's quiet insistence on treating it (almost) in the same breath as his fiction.
Review, 3863 words
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