SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA
NABOKOV'S BUTTERFLIES
Specimens collected by the author of Lolita and self-taught lepidopterist exhibited in his childhood home
While renowned for authoring literary masterpieces like Lolita and Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov was also an active collector of butterflies and has gained much posthumous respect for his scientific research. The Russian author’s passion for lepidoptery, the study of butterflies, (at least 570 mentions of butterflies have been counted in his work and over 20 species of butterfly have been named after his fictional characters) is preserved in his collection of pinned shimmery-winged insects in the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg.[ ] Although an avid collector throughout his life, his only collections that still exist are those he assembled while in the United States and in Switzerland. The remains have dispersed to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the museums of Harvard and Cornell, the Zoological Museum in Lausanne, and the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg on Bolshaya Morskaya Street, established in the house where he was born in 1899. The house has undergone significant change since his family left in 1917, yet it still possesses much of its old world aesthetic in its dining room, drawing room, and library. Nabokov fans can appreciate it as “the only house in the world,” which, like the fleeting beauty of butterflies, made regular appearances in his prose.