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Speakers): David Bethea (U. of Wisconsin-Madison)

Nabokov’s engagement with Darwinism was lifelong. Indeed, it could be argued that as time went on, classical Darwinism, much more than Freudianism, was the perfect stalking horse for the Nabokov who saw art and science in productive dialogue.  Initially, with the young Vladimir’s avid butterfly hunting and his eagerness to find a new species, the Darwinian framework of modern evolutionary biology was a constant in the background. However, as Nabokov grew into a mature artist and experienced the vagaries of exile and personal loss, the lessons of Symbolism—first and foremost, the notion of other worlds existing in this one—stayed with him. Beginning in the early 1930s with his work on The Gift (1937-38) and its uncompleted addendum “Father’s Butterflies” (2000), Nabokov sparred directly with concepts central to Darwinian thinking, including mimicry, species concept, and “survival of the fittest.”  This dialogue continued through the 1940s, but on the side of “science proper,”  with Nabokov’s tenure as research fellow-lepidopterist at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). In his final decades and period of greatest fame, after he had given up his microscope for good, Nabokov returned to Darwinist musings, most vividly in Speak, Memory (1967).  But the return was also an advance, as Nabokov, child of the Symbolist era to the end, came to see his own life as part of a larger pattern, one that he created but also one that was created in him.  The present talk will begin by filling in some relevant Symbolist period background to the “early career” of Nabokov, proceed to the sustained dialogue between Darwinian theory and Nabokovian art and science in “mid-career,” and conclude with the “later-career” Nabokov’s uncanny anticipation of recent developments in evolutionary theory and artificial intelligence.
 
David M. Bethea is Vilas Research Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is the author and editor of various books on classical and modern Russian letters, including The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically (2009).  He has just finished co-editing a volume entitled Nabokov in Context for Cambridge University Press and is at present working on a study of the role of Charles Darwin in modern Russian culture.