"In 2014, when he was travelling around the US on a book tour, Mircea Cartarescu was able to fulfil the dream of a lifetime: a tour of Vladimir Nabokov's butterfly collection. Cartarescu is a great admirer of the Russian-American author, and shares with him a literary career that bridges the western and eastern cultural spheres as well as a history of being mooted as the next Nobel literature laureate but never having won it."
"Above all, the Romanian poet and novelist shares Nabokov's fascination with butterflies. As a child, he harboured dreams of becoming a lepidopterist. On a visit to Harvard, Cartarescu was allowed access to Nabokov's former office and marvelled at specimens the St Petersburg-born author had collected. His most important scientific work was about butterflies' sexual organs, and I saw these very tiny vials with them in, he whispers in awe."
In 2014, while traveling the US on a book tour, Mircea Cartarescu toured Vladimir Nabokov's butterfly collection at Harvard and examined specimens, including tiny vials containing butterflies' sexual organs. Cartarescu's fascination with butterflies dates to childhood dreams of becoming a lepidopterist and informs his fiction. The Blinding trilogy is conceived in the shape of a butterfly; The Left Wing contains butterflies on many pages and mixes memoir with dreamlike surreal scenes, such as medieval villagers boiling giant frozen butterflies for a feast. Cartarescu expresses kinship with Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico and contrasts his surrealism with Nabokov's different artistic connections.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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