>>>>>JM: Why did Nabokov choose to name it "samuelis"? Any link with Samuel Johnson or little paradises?

 

No. It was named after Samuel Hubbard Scudder (1837-1911),  the most famous American lepidopterist, whose Butterflies of the Eastern United States and Canada, with Special Reference to New England (1889) Nabokov read as a child and called “stupendous” (Speak, Memory).

Scudder worked in the same Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, as VN.

All Scudder’s collections are deposited there.

Among many other insect species, Lycaeides scudderi (now Plebejas idas scudderi) (Lycaenidae) was named after Scudder, as well as the famous Karner Blue, Lycaeides (now Plebejus) melissa samuelis Nabokov, 1943; its holotype [the unique specimen on which species description should be based] was collected by Scudder.

The story of Karner Blue is told in Zimmer’s A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths and detailed in Johnson & Coates’ Nabokov’s Blues.

 

(from “Adakisme, Dolikisme: the Kirkaldy connection” The Nabokovian, 2006, 56: 14-19.)

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