The man known primarily for being one of the 20th Century's most famous novelists was dismissed by some as an amateur in the field of insect evolution.
But now a decade long genetic study has proved that, against the odds, Nabokov was right and showed "extraordinary biological intuition".
When not writing, the author was most likely to be found stalking butterflies with a catching net. He didn't drive so his wife Vera would chauffeur him to collecting spots.
His efforts to classify them involved spending up to six hours a day examining their genitalia under a microscope.
Nabokov even wrote his most famous novel "Lolita" while on his annual summer butterfly collecting trip to the western United States, and his hobby led to him becoming curator of lepidoptery at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
His controversial evolution theory related to a group of butterfly species known as Polyommatus blues, which he postulated had come in five waves from Siberia, across the Bering Strait to Alaska and then south as far as Chile.
In language not usually associated with a scientific paper, he wrote in 1945 how "a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine" would have witnessed the colonisation.
He compared the shape of the butterfly dispersal to a giant horseshoe centred on the "nail of Nome," referring to the Alaskan city of Nome.
Nabokov died in 1977 but his theory has now been tested by butterfly experts who ventured into the Andes to collect Polyommatus blues and retrieve their DNA. They then used gene sequencing technology to establish that Nabokov was right.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society they concluded that the Bering Strait "served as a biological corridor for the dispersal of these insects from Asia into the New World" and that Nabokov was "a serious taxonomist who made important contributions to the systematics of the Polyommatus section."
The Russian-born novelist once said that he might have become a full time butterfly expert had his family not fled into exile, first in Western Europe then in America, following the Russian Revolution.