The Secret Museum. Molly Oldfield

      IN THE WORLD OF MUSEUMS, Vladimir Nabokov, who most famously wrote Lolita, which I loved, is better known for his butterfly expertise than he is for his novels. While writing piles of books, Nabokov collected butterflies across America, published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species and, in 1942, he was made curator of Lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He set up shop in the museum, behind the scenes. I went to visit his former office.

      The room is lined with metal drawers, each filled with rows of butterflies. Lots of his butterflies are stored in the drawers, along with thousands of others collected by different curators over the years. There is a desk pushed up against a window that looks out over the university campus. Nabokov worked from here. It’s a different desk that is now used by the current butterfly curator, but it is kept in the same place.

      I stood by the desk and looked out of the window, and I saw students milling about chatting, eating lunch, reading and daydreaming. I imagined Nabokov doing the same, looking out, over butterflies, to watch the students at play. The only difference now is that today they’re reading iPads rather than books and there are food trucks, not packed lunches. Otherwise, I’d imagine Nabokov would feel right at home.

      There is a photograph of him framed and hung on the wall beside the window. The image shows him holding up a butterfly, one of the hundreds he prepared in this room.

      In the corner, by another window, is a small, dusty, wooden cabinet. It’s about a metre high, with two doors. Open the doors, and inside are hundreds of little glass vials, with corks for lids. Inside each one is a tiny butterfly penis. There are more butterfly bits on glass slides, stacked inside small boxes on shelves inside the cabinet.

      There are also index cards that seem to be written in Nabokov’s writing; they describe each of the genitalia. Like the specimens, they are just as he left them in the 1940s.

      I took out a box, picked out a slide and held it to the light. I could just about make out a little black spike: the genitalia of a single male blue butterfly. The glass vials used to have preserving liquid inside them but the fluid has dried out since Nabokov prepared them, so each butterfly penis now rattles around inside its bottle. It is really quite a strange thing to do – to hold a glass bottle, containing a butterfly’s penis, collected years ago by the famous author.

      It might seem a bit of a weird thing for him to have done, that is, if you’ve read his novels but don’t know much about butterfly curating. But a butterfly curator wouldn’t find his collection strange at all. Studying male butterfly genitalia is one of the best ways of telling one species apart from another. It’s a better way than looking at just their wings and their size, because many butterflies look so similar.

      The cabinet isn’t very important to the butterfly world – there is nothing of great scientific importance inside it – but I found it fascinating that Nabokov loved butterflies as much as books. His twin passions wove their way through his life from when he was young.

      His father taught him as a child to chase, catch and collect butterflies while roaming around their family home of Vyra, in north-western Russia, and a love of butterflies was something they shared together. His mother showed him how to really look and to remember. These skills would come in handy for both writing and butterfly curating.

      When his father was imprisoned in Russia for his political activities, eight-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a present.

      Nabokov was forced into exile in Europe in 1919. There he visited vast museum halls to look closely at the shimmering rainbow of butterflies on display. He married in Berlin in 1925, and he and his wife Vera roamed the mountains at weekends, collecting hundreds of specimens.

      By 1940, he was living in Paris and, when the German tanks rolled in, he and his wife and their son, Dimitri, fled to America. In his apartment he left behind a set of European butterflies.

      It was in America that he took up his first professional appointment in the world of butterflies, as a research fellow at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was appointed in 1942 and stayed for six years. He had imagined being a curator as a child and collected all the time.

      In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he describes how his governess sat on a tray full of butterflies he had collected himself and squashed them: ‘… A precious gynandromorph, left side male, right side female, whose abdomen could not be traced and whose wings had come off, was lost for ever: one might re-attach the wings, but one could not prove that all four belong to that headless thorax on its bent pin.’

      At Harvard he saw plenty of these gynandromorphs, part of the huge collection created by butterfly curators over the decades. I saw one for myself; it is kept in one of the metal drawers – one wing was iridescent blue, the other half blue-half black with white flecks. Other interesting butterflies I saw, lifeless on pins, were a now-extinct Xerxces Blue, which once flew in the San Francisco area, and a huge green and yellow butterfly whose collector had been eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea.

      Over 20 butterflies have been named in Nabokov’s honour, including ‘Lolita’ and ‘Humbert’, which are named after the two main characters in Lolita. He wrote the novel on index cards while on butterfly-collecting trips with Vera. After he’d finished writing, she’d type up his handwritten cards. When he tried to burn an early draft, she saved the pages from the flames.

      The Nabokovs loved these long, butterfly-collecting adventures. They would set off from Harvard at weekends and during the holidays: Vera always at the wheel, because Nabokov never learned to drive. Once they drove a thousand miles across North America, taking on a blazing Kansas storm, just to spot a single species of butterfly.

      Blue butterflies fascinated him, and he and Vera would pursue them all over the North American wilderness. Once he’d collected his specimens he would study their genitalia, looking carefully at the barbs and the shape of each one. His best work on butterflies was a paper about Polyommatus blue butterflies. He examined the genitalia of 120 of the creatures, which lived in the Neotropics, and found that different species had flown to the New World from Asia in a series of waves over millions of years. He said that ‘a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine’ would have witnessed the colonization.

      At the time, his findings weren’t really given much credit, but recently, in 2011, researchers at Harvard