Tessa K.J. Haining ’23 lives in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.
Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist a scientist of butterflies.
His American literary career started close to Boston in 1941, at the helm of Wellesley College’s Russian department. At the same time, he was the curator of the butterfly collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. You can see Nabokov’s fastidious devotion to the Museum’s vast and varied collection in his anatomical drawings, his published entomology papers on different elements of taxonomy, and of course his books. Take “Pale Fire,” his 1962 poem-as-novel bursting with butterfly as theme: “I can do what only a true artist can do pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation … see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web.”