Page 118 - The Secret Museum

IN THE WORLD OF MUSEUMS, Vladimir Nabokov, who most famously wrote Lolita,

which I loved, is better known for his butterfly expertise than he is for his novels.
While writing piles of books, Nabokov collected butterflies across America,
published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species and, in 1942, he was made
curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He set up
shop in the museum, behind the scenes. I went to visit his former office.

The room is lined with metal drawers, each filled with rows of butterflies. Lots of
his butterflies are stored in the drawers, along with thousands of others collected by
different curators over the years. There is a desk pushed up against a window that

looks out over the university campus. Nabokov worked from here. It’s a different
desk that is now used by the current butterfly curator, but it is kept in the same place.

I stood by the desk and looked out of the window, and I saw students milling about
chatting, eating lunch, reading and daydreaming. I imagined Nabokov doing the same,
looking out, over butterflies, to watch the students at play. The only difference now is
that today they’re reading iPads rather than books and there are food trucks, not
packed lunches. Otherwise, I’d imagine Nabokov would feel right at home.

There is a photograph of him framed and hung on the wall beside the window. The
image shows him holding up a butterfly, one of the hundreds he prepared in this

room.
In the corner, by another window, is a small, dusty, wooden cabinet. It’s about a

metre high, with two doors. Open the doors, and inside are hundreds of little glass
vials, with corks for lids. Inside each one is a tiny butterfly penis. There are more
butterfly bits on glass slides, stacked inside small boxes on shelves inside the
cabinet.

There are also index cards that seem to be written in Nabokov’s writing; they
describe each of the genitalia. Like the specimens, they are just as he left them in the
1940s.

I took out a box, picked out a slide and held it to the light. I could just about make
out a little black spike: the genitalia of a single male blue butterfly. The glass vials

used to have preserving liquid inside them but the fluid has dried out since Nabokov
prepared them, so each butterfly penis now rattles around inside its bottle. It is really
quite a strange thing to do – to hold a glass bottle, containing a butterfly’s penis,
collected years ago by the famous author.

It might seem a bit of a weird thing for him to have done, that is, if you’ve read his
novels but don’t know much about butterfly curating. But a butterfly curator wouldn’t
find his collection strange at all. Studying male butterfly genitalia is one of the best
ways of telling one species apart from another. It’s a better way than looking at just

their wings and their size, because many butterflies look so similar.
The cabinet isn’t very important to the butterfly world – there is nothing of great
scientific importance inside it – but I found it fascinating that Nabokov loved