Vlad the Impaler

Inga Clendinnen

• Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings edited by Brian Boyd and Michael Pyle
  Allen Lane, 783 pp, £25.00, March 2000, ISBN 0 7139 9380 4
• Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius by Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates
  Zoland, 372 pp, £18.00, October 1999, ISBN 1 58195 009 8

Ever since Lolita ignited the American literary scene in the late 1950s Vladimir Nabokov has been the most famous lepidopterist in the world – indeed, the only one most of us have ever heard of. The covers of books written about him quiver with these interesting insects; even the name ‘Nab-o-koV’, properly spread, seems to have a butterfly look to it. And we can all toss together a quick case for butterfly-chasing to be seen as a comprehensive metaphor for his literary art: ‘in a luminous landscape a single vibrant dancing mote in exuberantly idiosyncratic but ultimately patterned flight’ kind of thing. Now we are being offered two large books seeking to uncover rather less opportunistic linkages between the lepidopterist and the writer.