Lepidopterology, light of my life, fire of my loins...

The International Herald Tribune (via BookSlut) has an interesting article about an exhibit in St. Petersburg which attempts to reconcile Vladimir Nabokov the novelist with Nabokov the lepidopterologist (uhhhhh, butterfly scientist--he spent seven years as a research fellow at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology). The exhibit features pictures of butterflies and other insects juxtaposed with insect-related passages from Nabokov's written work.

"When you do what Nabokov did, when you shift your focus from entomology to literature, you hold onto all the methods and research tools that you've been using for years," Sokolenko said in an interview before the exhibition opened in early July. "I think that his painstaking attention to detail could only have come from his profession, from what he was doing in entomology."

Last year Overlook's Illustrated Lives series covered Nabokov. More on that here.

--John Mark