Pages from a scrapbook containing hand-drawn diagrams and manuscript notes

“My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting,” Vladimir Nabokov said in 1962. He began collecting butterfly specimens when he was seven, and over time he filled thousands of index cards with notes on the subject. In the mid-1940s, before earning fame and notoriety with Lolita (1955), Nabokov was a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. There he filled scrapbooks with detailed drawings of the genitalia of butterflies of the subspecies Lycaeides and wing patterns for several other types. Nabokov also discovered a new species, the Karner blue, in upstate New York in 1944.