Free Stalking Nabokov by Brian Boyd Page B

who had worked out the specific and generic relationships of Latin American Blues from the very few specimens available to him in wartime Cambridge, Massachusetts, had determined them perfectly.
    In just over a decade, Nabokov’s lepidopterological work went from seeming a mere personal quirk that had led to a few inconsequential amateur publications to being widely available in the 800-page Nabokov’s Butterflies , annotated minutely by Dieter E. Zimmer (see chapter 9 , “Netting Nabokov”); narrated and contextualized by lepidopterist Kurt Johnson and his cowriter Steve Coates, in Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (1999); updated, cited extensively, and commemorated in fifteen-odd papers by Johnson, Zsolt Bálint, and Dubi Benyamini; and even featuring in Natural History . Naomi Pierce, curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and therefore Nabokov’s successor, agreed in the early 2000s to organize an exhibition at the MCZ in commemoration of Nabokov’s butterflies. Herself an expert in the Blues, even she had assumed he was merely a gifted amateur, but she ended the project in awe at Nabokov’s insight. (Stop Press: January 2011. A new paper by a team led by Pierce suggests that DNA analysis—undreamed of, of course, in Nabokov’s day—supports his hypothesis about the evolution of Latin American Blues.) 5
    In Speak, Memory Nabokov uses the nickname of a local bog, “America,” where he collected butterflies as a child, as a way to prefigure the America he would sail for at the end of his autobiography. In a poem, he foresaw in this America refuge, per contra , that he would one day be recognized in the land of his birth: “a Russian branch’s shadow shall be playing upon the marble of my hand.” 6 It did not happen in his lifetime. Even when Véra Nabokov edited the Russian poems he had selected just before his death for inclusion in Stikhi 1979, she had no inkling that his books would be published in the Soviet Union, with official blessing, a few years later. Now Nabokov’s verse has earned a volume in the prestigious Biblioteka Poetov series; his work has been collected in a ten-volume annotated edition and glossed by Russian scholars like Alexander Dolinin; it is being reissued by Azbuka, for whom Andrey Babikov has produced an exemplary edition of all his Russian plays. 7
    Nabokov had a long-standing interest in infinity. One of the many paradoxes of infinity is that although there can be larger and smaller infinities, infinity equals infinity times two. Nabokov’s work seemed inexhaustible even in his own lifetime. Now it seems twice as inexhaustible and, for all its increased diversity, even more seamless. The Original of Laura will be almost the last new Nabokov fiction we will ever see. But there are hundreds, even thousands more pages to come of Nabokov in full flow, and not dammed up by death.

7. Nabokov’s Afterlife
    Don Barton Johnson, who was a cryptologist and a Slavic linguist before the Russian literary scholar, editor, and publisher Carl Proffer invited him to solve Nabokovian puzzles, had become by 1985, with the publication of Worlds In Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov , the leading American Nabokovian of his day. He later founded the journal Nabokov Studies and the electronic listserv, Nabokv-L, both still running.
    Despite his own work on the relation between this world and a next or other world in Nabokov, this natural skeptic came to feel that the metaphysics was almost superfluous icing on the Nabokovian cake. At the Nabokov centenary conference in Cambridge in 1999—where Zoran Kuzmanovich stirred so much discussion when he asked about the place of the metaphysics in Nabokov—Jane Grayson, the conference organizer, invited a concluding discussion on future directions in Nabokov scholarship. Among other things, Don Johnson and I addressed Zoran’s question, and I later persuaded Don that we should write up