Each summer while Vladimir Nabokov was a faculty member at Cornell he and his wife would drive across the country to collect butterflies. Nabokov, who didn’t drive, would use the long stints between stops to collect butterflies to work on his novels and poems. In fact he even wrote a poem titled “On Discovering A Butterfly” where he shares his passion for new species descriptions and adding type specimens to museum collections. This is just one of the many interesting things you can learn about Nabokov and his passion for Lepidoptera in our new exhibit “From Nabokov’s Net: Nabokov’s contributions to butterfly science & the Cornell University Insect Collection”.
We will feature specimens collected by Nabokov with his own hand written labels. We hope you will come see the exhibit in Mann Library which will open on March 14th and be open until the end of July.
