My Admirable Butterfly! A Fashionable Ode to Lepidoptera in Honor of Nabokov's Birthday

To most, Vladimir Nabokov is the Russo-American author behind such lyrical and metafictional novels as Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, but to a smaller subset of fans he's a famed lepidopterist--that's butterfly specialist for the uninitiated. What started out as a childhood fascination with the winged creatures at his parents' summer estate in Vyra, Russia, became a lifelong passion for the author. Upon arriving in America in 1940, he began volunteering as an entomologist at the American ...