In 1897, two years before Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, a 40-year-old Russian general and member of Russia's long-ruling Romanov family, Grand Duke Nikolaĭ Mikhaĭlovich concluded a major project—the editing and publishing of a nine-volume series about butterflies, lyrically titled Mémoires Sur Les Lépidoptères. Just a few years later, young Nabokov, besotted by the same love for butterfly discovery that had marked the older aristocrat's own youth, would find the series in the attic of his family's summer home. Peeking in between the covers of the series' volumes, Nabokov became transfixed by the “incomparably beautiful figures” that made their pages come to life.

An empire’s butterflies

Published over the course of thirteen years starting with the first volume in 1884, Mémoires was a product of collaboration between naturalists from France, Germany, England as well as Russia and featured studies by various authors about a wide variety of butterfly species. Its intricate butterfly illustrations were exquisitely hand-colored. In line with the cultural mores of Russia's elite at the time, its articles, even those penned by its Russian authors, were written in French, German or English. At this scope and level of detail and quality, the project marked an unprecedented endeavor in the study of entomology in 19th century Russia, requiring significant resources to bring to fruition. Endowed with enormous wealth and high status thanks to his tsarist Romanov lineage, the Grand Duke Nikolaĭ Mikhaĭlovich was in a likely position to act as its lead organizer and benefactor, and as one of its creative contributors.

Mémoires sought to address a particular lacuna in the study of lepidoptera in imperial Russia, which had had a later start to the formal study of entomology than in Europe. As Nabokov was himself given to complain, while Russia controlled vast regions of the Eurasian continent by the late 19th century, investigations into its butterfly populations had been largely limited to the areas around St. Petersburg and some of the landscapes along the Volga River in southern and southwestern Russia, the latter being regions populated by German peasantry brought to Russia by Catherine the Great and thus most likely to be the focus of study by the German and German-Russian naturalists working in Russia in the 19th century. As stated in the introductory note for the series' first volume, the planned series would, to be sure, include contributions about butterflies from different regions of the world. Its main purpose, however, would be to bring together studies of the butterfly fauna found across the Russian Empire and neighboring countries. Accordingly, many of the articles of the series describe butterflies gathered from Siberia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, many not yet known to other European naturalists. Several of these were penned by Mikhaĭlovich himself, also by fellow Russian and contributor Grigory Grumm-Grzhimaylo (1860–1936), a naturalist who would earn the deep admiration of Vladimir Nabokov for the intrepid collecting expeditions he undertook to the famously forbidding mountain ranges of Pamir (in present day Tajikistan) and Kunlun (in the present day Xinjiang and Qinghai provinces of China) and elsewhere in in Central Asia and Western China.

Self-taught lepidopterist, acclaimed historian, doomed reformer

The Grand Duke Nikolaĭ Mikhaĭlovich ("Grand Duke" was a title conferred on all male members of the Romanov family) was not formally trained in the natural sciences, having primarily received the military education expected of most men of aristocratic standing in tsarist Russia. But he had had opportunity to develop strong interest and skill in butterfly collecting as a child exploring fields and forests around Tiflis (present day Tblisi, Georgia), where his father was imperial Governor General. Befriended and encouraged in these informal pursuits by German-Russian naturalists at the Museum of Tiflis, Mikhaĭlovic continued to engage in butterfly collecting trips as a young adult, and also funded several larger expeditions into the Caucasus and Central Asia . Extensive entomological as well as botanical collections became prized features of Mikhaĭlovic's palatial home in St. Petersburg, and for a time he served as honorary president of the Russian Entomological Society. Upon leaving the military in 1902, however, Mikhaĭlovic gained wider recognition for his research and writing on Russian history. He also became known as a vocal advocate for liberal political reform in late imperial Russia and for years exchanged letters about the problems of Russia's repressive Romanov regime with the famed, reform-minded Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. Efforts to reform Romanov rule would, of course, ultimately prove futile, and the fall of the Romanov regime with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 led to the Grand Duke's execution in 1919.