When we were in New York State in October, we spent half a day cruising around Ithaca, viewing Kathy’s alma mater of Cornell. We didn’t see much, because pouring rain pretty much confined us to our car. But there was one exhibit I really wanted to see, which was for some reason stuck in a corner of the Agriculture Building. With the entrance under construction, I snuck into the Ag Building through a basement door, shook the rain off my jacket, wandered through an underground labyrinth filled with humming machinery, and found an elevator to take me to the library full of volumes about winter wheat or whatever, and there found the object of my quest— Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collection.
In addition to writing novels, stories, and poetry in at least three languages, Nabokov designed chess problems, taught world lit at Cornell, and collected butterflies. (It seems to have been a full life.)
The collection was something of a disappointment, because it was confined to polished Lucite boxes. Because the room was full of windows and was otherwise well-lit, the clear boxes strongly reflected the room, and it was difficult to view the butterflies through all the bright reflection.
Fortunately the exhibit also included the title pages of some of his books, featuring his own hand-drawn art.
Some years ago I visited the Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg, which had more examples of his art. If you were Nabokov’s wife, or a friend, he would hand-draw a butterfly on or about the title page. And if you were a lepidopterist, you would recognize the genus, but have a hard time pinning down the species, because the butterflies were imaginary. He was a good enough scientist himself to make the butterflies plausible even to an expert.
The butterfly in the pictured book is identified as morpho verae, named after Nabokov’s wife, Vera.
It was totally worth a trip through the rain.
