Word: lepidopterists
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...French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) came in impressive sequence, one surpassing another in virtuosity, like the work of a magician developing his craft, slow motion, before his audience. The Collector was a comparatively simple pass?butterflies in psychotic transformation turned into pinioned women, perhaps a gothic variation on Lepidopterist Nabokov. In The Magus, Fowles worked gaudier effects: allegory, romance, black magic. The French Lieutenant's Woman played the entire Victorian milieu against the 20th century; Fowles could so persuasively dream up another world that he was free to call all of it into speculation by proposing alternative endings...
...Literary Lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, 74, identified a unique American species, the Nymphet, in his 1958 novel Lolita. Although the work was internationally acclaimed, it failed to win any of the major American book awards. In fact, the Russian-born Nabokov, who is frequently mentioned as a potential Nobel prizewinner, has picked up few prizes; five of his novels have been nominated for National Book Awards, only to be ultimately passed over. Now the self-described "pleasant outsider" has landed one of the country's most distinguished prizes: the National Medal for Literature, awarded for a living American writer...
Entomologists still credit Nabokov as a serious lepidopterist. He described a dozen new variations of butterfly (mainly in the broad-ranging subfamily of blues), including the Lycaeides melissa samuelis Nabokov. His reports were models of precision, experts recall. But, in a prose necessarily dense with taxonomical terms, a few refreshing poetic riffs occurred: "From the opposite side of the distally twinned uncus," Nabokov wrote in a 1944 report describing genus Lycaeides, "and facing each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists (of the old school) with the uncus hoods lending a Ku Klux Klan touch...
First at Stanford, then for seven years as a part-time lecturer in the Russian language at Wellesley, with side jobs as a lepidopterist in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology (plus a few more tennis lessons), and finally as a professor at Cornell from 1948 to 1958, Nabokov studied America, as a colleague at Cornell puts it, like someone "in Madagascar observing the natives." In 1945 he became an American citizen. They occupied a succession of rented houses?more or less bivouacked in the quarters of a different absentee professor each year ?partly for lack of cash, partly...
Vladimir Nabokov once remarked that the ideal reader for his books would be someone like himself, "a little Nabokov." There may never be one, for it would be hard to match him even in junior size. Besides being a scholar, critic, translator, chess player, lepidopterist and eccentric, he is one of those relatively rare writers who in the midst of their career have been able to alter the language of their craft. Above all, he is a unique artificer in the arid world of contemporary fiction...