It was in a sunlit mountain lodge in Utah, in 1943, that Vladimir Nabokov explained to a puzzled publisher the aims of his eccentric and brilliant study of Nikolay Gogol; when in Speak, Memory Nabokov recalled a locomotive his St. Petersburg drawing teacher had drawn for him, he imagined it had come from Utah; and it was in Utah where he caught an entirely new species of butterfly, Nabokov's Pug. Utah seems to be a nodal point for Nabokov's main interests: literature, lepidoptera and the visual arts.

Nabokov's passion for butterflies and its impact on his writing are well known. Much less familiar is his deep love of the visual arts and their ubiquitous influence on his verbal art.

‘I think in images,’ Nabokov says, and representing new observations with suggestive pictures is a prominent quality of his art (SO 4).

Visual impressions rivet his attention, but not ‘the sequence and relationship of sounds like those in music’ (SO 35). ‘Literature’, he says, ‘is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book's imagery and magic’ (LRL 166). The capacity to observe with astuteness seems the main prerequisite for authors. ‘All the great writers have good eyes’ says Nabokov, and it is only on occasion that he refers to the verb ‘describe’ instead of ‘picture’ to discuss a certain passage (LRL 141). Literary art is persistently compared to painting, and this applies most conspicuously to the masters of Russian literature.

An attractive pastoral scene in Chekhov is in Nabokov's view a ‘beautiful little picture’ (LRL 271). ‘Turgenev at his very best’ offers ‘mellow coloured little paintings – rather watercolours than the Flemish glory of Gogol's art gallery,’ he says (LRL 65). Chekhov's portraiture is compared to that of ‘Sargent the painter’ (LRL 288). Nabokov uses the expression ‘word picture’ to denote delightful images, like those presented by himself: images of light and shade, actions, gestures or landscapes, but most often of scenes in which peoples are caught in a way they have never been portrayed before (LRL 200).