Karner Blues

Late snow fell this early morning of spring. At dawn I rose from bed, restless, and looked Out of my window, to wonder if there the snow Fell outside your bedroom, and you watching.

I played my game of solitaire. The cards Came out the same the third time through the deck. The game was stuck. I threw the cards together, And watched the snow that could not do but fall.

In his poem “On Discovering a Butterfly,” Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov wrote of “the secluded stronghold” where specimens are kept “safe from creeping relatives and rust.” When Nabokov caught a frosty-blue butterfly in France in 1938, he brought it to the stronghold of the American Museum of Natural History, where it still sits with a bright red label, crowning it the first and official representative, or holotype, of Lysandra cormion.

While Nabokov is most famous for his fancy prose style, he was also devoted to lepidopterology, the study of moths and butterflies. After fleeing Russia in 1940, Nabokov started his American life volunteering in the Museum’s entomology collections. He once told an interviewer, “It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.”

The L. cormion specimen was only the beginning of the author’s contributions to the collections. In 1941, Nabokov sent nearly 500 field-caught butterflies to the Museum as he traveled with his family from the East Coast to California with stops in the Southwest.