EDITOR's NOTE. One can celebrate NV's birthday on three dates: April 10th --according to the Russian calendar in use at the time of his birth; April 22--as it was outside of Russia in the XIXth century; or April 23 -- as it was in the XXth century. My Nabokov birthday present arrived in the mail yesterday, the 22nd, in the form of an elegant 722 page volume Nabokov's Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings, edited by Brian Boyd & Robert Pyle, with New Translations from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov (Boston: Beacon, 2000) ISBN 0-8070-8540-5. $45.00. The jacket blurb and Contents are reproduced below

LITERATURE 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 emigre 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 novel selections, 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 Drnitri 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 unexpected 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 oly in chronological scope but also in genre, no other volume of Nabokov's writing encompasses such variety. It is, as Dmitri Nabokov has said, a book that "would have warined the cockles of Father's heart," and a must-have for admirers of the great novelist and all who appreciate the joys of Lepidoptera.

NABOKOV, LITERATURE, LEPIDOPTERA by Brian Boyd p.1

BETWEEN CLIMB AND CLOUD: Nabokov among the Lepidopterists, by Robert Michael Pyle p.32

NABOKOV'S BUTTERFLIES: Selected Writings 1908-1977 p.77

Father's Butterflies: Second Addendum to The Gift pp. I98-234

The Butterflies Of Europe pp. 569-612

BIBLIOGRAPHY by Brian Boyd p. 741

BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS NAMED BY AND FOR VLADIMIR NABOKOV by Robert Michael Pyle p. 751 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS p.759

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The volume contains 53 black & white illustrations and 38 in color.

The section entitled NABOKOV's BUTTERFLIES contains three parts. The entire section, Selected Writings 1908-1977, contains virtually every reference to lepidoptera in VN's fiction and non-fiction. Within that section are two long items:

1) "Father's Butterflies" which is a hitherto unpublished satellite to The Gift" and 2) The Butterflies of Europe--a series of notes for a projected but abandoned book of that title.