01|07|06 NABOKOV'S CODE Vladimir Nabokov Museum & Russian National Centre of Photography
presents
NABOKOV’S CODE
Author Dmitry Sokolenko
3 – 31 July 2006.
«My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting».
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions
Many Nabokov readers would agree that the novelty Nabokov brought into literature was the combination of art and science. In Nabokov these two methods of cognition form a synthesis which is Nabokov’s unique achievement.
Can art study its objects as meticulously as enthomology studies butterflies? Can science reveal artistic design in nature? These are the questions that Nabokov addressed in many of his works.
Vladimir Nabokov caught his first butterfly at the age of seven and he wrote his first poem at the age of fourteen. From that time on writing and butterfly collection and studies formed two equally powerful forces that dominated Nabokov’s life.
All his life Nabokov not only collected butterflies but also studied them as a scientist and published in science journals. In fact, one of his first publications after escape from the Soviet Russia was not a poem but a paper on butterflies.
After his emigration to the US Nabokov accepted the position of the Curator of Lepidoptera (butterfly collection) in the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology where he worked full-time until 1948. These years were most productive for Nabokov the enthomologist. Altogether Nabokov first described more than 20 new species. The number of species that were named after Nabokov and his literary characters by other enthomologists is 27.
All of Nabokov’s early butterfly collections were lost but huge collection made in the US (1940-1959) and in Switzerland (1959-1977) are preserved in museums. Vladimir Nabokov Museum, St. Petersburg (the only Nabokov museum in the world) owns a part of the Harvard collection that was generously donated to us in 1990.
Nabokov’s butterfly collections were exhibited several times in various museums but there’s never been an attempt to present these as not only as scientific but also artistic phenomenon. The joint project of the Nabokov Museum and the National Centre of Photography of the Russian Federation aims at revealing the beauty and the complexity of butterflies with the help of Leica modern optical equipment in photogtaps by Dmitry Sokolenko. We feel that bringing modern science and art together in this project we would follow in the Nabokov tradition.
