Episode Details

Vladimir Nabokov was a world-class lepidopterist whose butterfly classifications are still used by scientists today. He was also the author of Lolita — a novel so controversial that it was banned across multiple countries and so brilliantly written that it is now considered one of the greatest works of twentieth-century fiction. The man who spent his mornings pinning butterfly specimens spent his afternoons writing prose of hallucinatory precision.

This episode traces Nabokov from his aristocratic Russian childhood through the exile that took him across Europe to America, the butterfly research at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the publication of Lolita that made him rich, famous, and permanently controversial.

• Nabokov's privileged Russian childhood and the revolution that turned his family into refugees
• The years of exile in Berlin and Paris writing Russian-language masterpieces nobody read
• The butterfly research — genuine scientific contributions that were vindicated decades later
• Lolita — the novel every publisher rejected, the scandal it caused, and the literary genius within it