Nabokov's butterflies: unpublished and uncollected writings

Vladimir Nabokov was no ordinary person. His uncollected and unpublished writings, gathered together with scholarly flourish in Nabokov's Butterflies, are testament to the extent to which his imaginative works are imbued and invested with his overwhelming passion for lepidoptera, a passion nurtured from 1906, when, at the age of seven, Nabokov captured his first butterfly. In an article published in The New Yorker magazine in 1948 he mused, "It is astounding how little the ordinary person notices butterflies". Later he would "confess" his ardent enthusiasm in his memoir, Speak, Memory and, summing up his enduring passion, "I have hunted butterflies in various climes and disguises: as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hatless old man in shorts". The 700 pages of Nabokov's Butterflies, covering 60 years of writing and research, have been impeccably edited by his biographer Brian Boyd and Robert Michael Pyle, an expert on butterflies, and their witty, informative essays complement perfectly Nabokov's precise and erudite prose. His son Dimitri has added some new translations, most notably a 40-page addendum to The Gift Nabokov's last novel written in Russian. Though the reader may find trawling through the many pages of scientific writing something more than a labour of love, there is enough here of memoir, fragments of novellas, poems, letters, articles, diary entries (plus an appendix worthy of a mind devoted to minutiae)--thoughtfully illustrated with black and white photographs and Nabokov's own exquisite drawings--to satisfy and ultimately to astonish. --Catherine Taylor