GU: Dear Jansy Mello, Many thanks for your comments. In Russian there is “obez’iana” (singular) or “obez’iany” (plural), just like in Portuguese. (Incidentally, “obez’iana” is derived from a word, which is met in the Levant and Persia — “abuzine”.)

SS: I think Russian in this sense is closer to Portuguese: most common is
the word "obesyany" which covers both apes and monkeys.
VF: Jansy (and Grigory): I think we are mixing here a lot of apples and oranges -- or Oranges and Peaches (Darwin's famous book title, as you know :).

I do not think that calling VN a "creationist" in art helps too much -- in art VN was a "creator." ... And while it is true that VN was (and many are still) dissatisfied with neo-Darwinist models of his (pre-molecular) times, I daresay he never disputed evolution as a process: instead, he celebrated its wonders every time he had chance both as an artist and as an intellectual. Clearly it has nothing to do with modern "creationism", largely an anti-intellectual political and cultural phenomenon...Apes and monkeys: in Russian indeed they are a single word, unlike in English ("obezyany") --- but I would not read evolutionism into English language only because it has a separate word for apes

"A Russian aristocrat, writer and scientist, Nabokov represents the features of a cultural world of 'aristocratic' natural history which blended aesthetics and science," said Alexandrov, a Center Research Fellow and historian of science from the European University of St. Petersburg.

...An important aspect of the shift was the replacement of traditional taxonomy by modern science, a transformation that Nabokov resisted...Butterflies and beetles were for him...aesthetic objects akin to paintings and engravings. Nature was equated with art, and the conservation of nature with the preservation of art... Already a published novelist in Russian, Nabokov's first publication in English was the article, "A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera." His vision of nature and belief in the immanent laws of form put Nabokov at the center of a debate in taxonomy and evolutionary biology fueled by Darwinian ideas... A sharp critic of Mayr, Nabokov wrote, "Taxonomists would be far better in describing with precision all the morphological details of certain forms than in studying so-called populations - what a dreadfully misused and hideous word, anyway." ...In his autobiographical Speak, Memory, Nabokov marvels at the elaborate mimicry in larvae and butterflies aimed at fooling predators, and dismisses Darwin's evolutionary explanation: "'Natural selection,' in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of 'the struggle for life' when a protective devise was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator's power of appreciation. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception."...The new taxonomic approach attempted to eliminate aesthetics from science, said Alexandrov, by its recognition of the boundaries between the scientific and non-scientific, between science and art... "Many who had been raised with aristocratic lifestyles 'surrendered' in the 1930's, that is, they changed their minds, not just because of arguments against the past but because their daily lives changed - thought-style changes with lifestyle. But Nabokov lived in his past and his prose. There was no need for him to change his life and mode of thought." ...Had he remained in Russia, it's possible, perhaps likely, that Nabokov would have become an entomologist who wrote rather than a writer who did entomology... His loyalty to aesthetic essentialism into the middle of the 20thcentury, said Alexandrov, "allows us to view both the cultural richness of a form of life to which he belonged and the ending of its existence brought about by general changes in the modernization and professionalization of science."

Also, www.coloradocollege.edu/Bulletin/August2005/block4.asp - 14k - where we read about Corinne Scheiner's project about "... the intersections of Nabokov’s work as a novelist and his work as a lepidopterist...demonstrate, as Stephen Jay Gould suggests, that the “major linkage of science and literature lies in some distinctive, underlying approach that Nabokov applied equally to both domains — a procedure that conferred the same special features upon all his efforts.” ... Bearing in mind Nabokov’s claim that “in a work of art there is a kind of merging between … the precision of poetry and the excitement of science,” we begin by reading from his autobiography, “Speak, Memory,” to discover how his interests in literature and butterflies merge in his life".

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