Nabokov gets his lepidopterological props

Harvard, whatever its strong points, doesn’t always do a good job of recognizing genius.

Example one: When I was on the staff of the Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate literary magazine, I heard a story about what happened when the young Robert Lowell tried out for a place there. He was allegedly put to cleaning the stairs or some other menial task. “I’m through,” he said when he had finished, and was told, “Yes, you are.” He then transferred to Kenyon College. (When I was a freshman, Robert Lowell was teaching at Harvard. If the story I’d heard was true, this must have taken an exceptional amount of forgiveness or masochism on his part. Unfortunately, I didn’t discover until after he was dead that Lowell was one of my favorite American poets. )

Example two: Most universities would have been pleased to have Vladimir Nabokov teach literature for them, but not Harvard. Here’s what happened, according to the version of Giles Foden, author of The Last King of Scotland: “When Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard in 1957, the language theorist Roman Jakobson is said to have objected, saying ‘Gentlemen, even if one allows that he is an important writer, are we next to invite an elephant to be Professor of Zoology?’”

So instead of teaching literature, Nabokov became the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Yet even here he apparently got no respect.

But despite the fact that he was the best-known butterfly expert of his day and a Harvard museum curator, other lepidopterists considered Nabokov a dutiful but undistinguished researcher. He could describe details well, they granted, but did not produce scientifically important ideas.

Now it appears that Nabokov was no slouch as a lepidopterist. His bold theory about the evolution of the Polyommatus blues has been proven correct by modern gene sequencing. So congratulations, Volodya. And eat it, Harvard.