S. Mahunka szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 61. (Budapest, 2000)

Diversity — Several isolated Western Palaearctic taxa of idas (as bellieri Oberthür, 1910; calliopis Boisduval, 1832 or magnagraeca Verity, 1936) are considered as distinct species by various authors. Accordingly, to be consistent, (1) the American taxon anna needs to be separated from idas and (2) mexicana and samuelis from melissa (the later view preferred by Nabokov in various published letters, written after the publication of his 1949 studies of Lycaeides, see Lane and Weiler 1994: 19, Boyd and Pyle 2000:483, 713-714). It is clear now, after the discovery of P. fyodor, that the whole Was-species group (= subgenus Lycaeides) is widely distributed and very diverse across the entire Holarctic region. In that context it is in need of a modern revisionary study to both further elaborate and sum up the implications of the pioneer work done by the two classical workers of the field: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) and Walter Forster (1910-1986). Fig. 7. Geographic situation of the type locality of Plebejus fyodor sp. n. Etymology — Fyodor narrates Nabokov's novel The Gift, a record of his love of Russian literature, his lepidopterist father, butterflies, and a young woman named Zina. But it is precisely "under the spell" of butterflies that "something" unfolds in Fyodor's soul and becomes the enchanted means by which Fyodor relives, as if he himself had undertaken them, his missing father's journeys to exotic hunting sites, from Altai to the Tian-Shan range where "every color lived a magically multiplied life" and "head and breast filled with an electric agitation". The structure of The Gift strongly suggests that the father's love for butterflies is intimately connected with Fyodor's talents and passionate interests beyond Lepidoptera and thus gives us one meaning of the book's title. Fyodor's father's insistence on the "innate" strangeness of human life and his explanation of butterfly mimicry as exceeding the observing powers of the predators Nabokov would later raise to articles of faith in his own aesthetics.