Page 119 - The Secret Museum

butterflies as much as books. His twin passions wove their way through his life from

when he was young.

His father taught him as a child to chase, catch and collect butterflies while
roaming around their family home of Vyra, in north-western Russia, and a love of
butterflies was something they shared together. His mother showed him how to really
look and to remember. These skills would come in handy for both writing and
butterfly curating.

When his father was imprisoned in Russia for his political activities, eight-year-
old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a present.

Nabokov was forced into exile in Europe in 1919. There he visited vast museum
halls to look closely at the shimmering rainbow of butterflies on display. He married
in Berlin in 1925, and he and his wife Vera roamed the mountains at weekends,

collecting hundreds of specimens.

By 1940, he was living in Paris and, when the German tanks rolled in, he and his
wife and their son, Dimitri, fled to America. In his apartment he left behind a set of
European butterflies.

It was in America that he took up his first professional appointment in the world
of butterflies, as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
He was appointed in 1942 and stayed for six years. He had imagined being a curator
as a child and collected all the time.

In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he describes how his governess sat on a
tray full of butterflies he had collected himself and squashed them: ‘… A precious
gynandromorph, left side male, right side female, whose abdomen could not be traced
and whose wings had come off, was lost for ever: one might re-attach the wings, but

one could not prove that all four belong to that headless thorax on its bent pin.’

At Harvard he saw plenty of these gynandromorphs, part of the huge collection
created by butterfly curators over the decades. I saw one for myself; it is kept in one
of the metal drawers – one wing was iridescent blue, the other half blue-half black
with white flecks. Other interesting butterflies I saw, lifeless on pins, were a now-
extinct Xerxces Blue, which once flew in the San Francisco area, and a huge green
and yellow butterfly whose collector had been eaten by cannibals in Papua New
Guinea.

Over 20 butterflies have been named in Nabokov’s honour, including ‘Lolita’ and
‘Humbert’, which are named after the two main characters in Lolita. He wrote the
novel on index cards while on butterfly-collecting trips with Vera. After he’d
finished writing, she’d type up his handwritten cards. When he tried to burn an early
draft, she saved the pages from the flames.

The Nabokovs loved these long, butterfly-collecting adventures. They would set
off from Harvard at weekends and during the holidays: Vera always at the wheel,
because Nabokov never learned to drive. Once they drove a thousand miles across