Поиск по творчеству и критике
Cлово "ZOOLOGIST"

1. Nabokov: from lepidopterology to "Lolita"

Входимость: 2. Размер: 5кб.

1. Nabokov: from lepidopterology to "Lolita"

Входимость: 2. Размер: 5кб.

Часть текста: being excellent authors - from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins - but few examples of great novelists doubling up as proficient zoologists. Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita , Russian émigré intellectual and expert lepidopterist, is the "type specimen" of a renowned novelist with a creditable reputation as an insect taxonomist. In butterfly circles, Nabokov was a monarch. Butterflies and literature were Nabokov's twin passions. He started in 1906, aged seven, when he caught his first specimen on his family estate. A few years later, Nabokov was precocious enough to think he had found a new species, only to have his dreams dashed. Undaunted, he set out on a life of butterfly hunting, interspersed with equally passionate forays into fiction. Nabokov not only realised his dream of finding a new species; he had several named after him. He became an authority on the taxonomy of a family known as the "Blues". "It is not improbable," he said, "that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology." To him, butterflies represented a form of immortality, whereby the asexual, shuffling caterpillar transmogrified after "death" into an aerial acrobat with the sexual potency to impart a physical presence to future generations. Although not avowedly religious, Nabokov suspected a conscious design to the world and thought it likely, according to his biographer, Brian Boyd, that there was some transformation of human consciousness...