Book Description

Unpublished and Uncollected WritingsEdited and Annotated by Brian Boyd and Robert Michael PyleNew Translations from the Russian by Dmitri NabokovLiterature and Lepidoptera dance an elaborate pas de deux through seventy years of Vladimir Nabokov's life, from his boyhood in Russia to his life as an émigré in the Crimea, Berlin, France, the United States, and finally in Switzerland. An American literary giant, Nabokov also produced first-rate work as a scientist, and in his fiction and elsewhere eloquently advocated attention to the details of the natural world and promoted the delights of discovery.Nabokov's Butterflies presents Nabokov's twin passions through an astonishingly rich array of novels, stories, poems, screenplay, autobiography, criticism, lectures, articles, reviews, interviews, letters, and notes, plus a wealth of beautiful and fanciful drawings by Nabokov and photographs of him in the field.Here for the first time, newly translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov, is Nabokov's most intense amalgam of literature and Lepidoptera, his forty-page afterword to The Gift-cut short by his switch from Russian to English and from Europe to America at the midpoint of his life-an immensely rich and revealing work. Here too are scores of fascinating letters to his mother, wife, and colleagues; the sui generis scientific articles; "The Admirable Anglewing," an intriguing entomological tale; a taste of the prodigious work he expended on his ultimately unrealized Butterflies of Europe; and ten poems newly translated from the original Russian.Nabokov's Butterflies is a major literary event: not only in chronological scope but also in genre no other volume of Nabokov's writing encompasses such variety. It is, as Dmitri Nabokov claims, a book that "would have warmed the cockles of Father's heart," and a must-have for admirers of the great novelist and all who appreciate the joys of Lepidoptera.