ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, July 25 — Just over a century ago, in June 1906, a 7-year-old Vladimir Nabokov caught his first butterfly.

Although he eventually gained worldwide fame as a writer — especially after the publication in 1955 of his scandalous best-selling novel “Lolita” — he also maintained a lifelong passion for lepidopterology, the branch of entomology that focuses on moths and butterflies.

Sometimes he was even dismissive of literature in favor of his scientific pursuits. “I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum,” he told an interviewer in 1964.

Some scholars of Nabokov’s writing have regarded his entomology work as part of a carefully devised effort to shape his public image. Andrew Field, his first biographer, called it “an elaborate literary pose.”

But those who play down the seriousness of Nabokov’s interest in butterflies tend to overlook that he did work as an obscure curator of lepidoptera for seven years. From 1941 to 1948 he was a part-time research fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, reorganizing its butterfly collection and publishing several well-received scientific papers.

Now Dmitry Sokolenko, 29, is trying to reconcile the two Nabokovs. Mr. Sokolenko has organized an exhibition in the Vladimir Nabokov Museum here that explores the links between the author’s art and his science. Titled “The Nabokov Code,” a riff on “The Da Vinci Code,” it juxtaposes quotations from Nabokov’s books with images of butterfly parts.

The images, taken under a microscope, are the sort of thing that Nabokov would have seen every day while researching lepidoptera at Harvard. The quotations, meanwhile, are filled with allusions to insects. Mr. Sokolenko organized the show to advance his hypothesis: that Nabokov’s meticulous, masterly prose style grew out of his love of science.

“When you do what Nabokov did, when you shift your focus from entomology to literature, you hold onto all the methods and research tools that you’ve been using for years,” Mr. Sokolenko said in an interview just before the exhibition opened on July 3. “I think that his painstaking attention to detail could only have come from his profession, from what he was doing in entomology.”

Mr. Sokolenko is no stranger to science: he is a microbiologist. Reared in a family of engineers, he grew up in Obninsk, a town in central Russia and a major hub for nuclear research during the Soviet era. After moving to St. Petersburg and earning a degree in biology, he took a job at the State Photography Center, a government-supported organization that helps the city’s numerous museums preserve their aging photography collections. Two years ago he organized a semi-educational, semi-artistic show of photographs featuring harmful microbes.

By coincidence, Mr. Sokolenko’s workplace is on the same street as the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, in the house where Nabokov lived until being forced into exile by the Bolshevik Revolution. Mr. Sokolenko first became hooked on Nabokov when he read “The Defense,” a novel about a chess player gradually driven insane by his obsession with the game. Last October he began volunteering at the museum, where he learned about Nabokov’s research at Harvard.

“Suddenly, I saw a completely different Nabokov, in the context of his entomological activities,” he said. “At some point I came to understand that Nabokov the writer had emerged under the influence of Nabokov the biologist.”

Hoping to share his insight with nonscientists, Mr. Sokolenko undertook the project that eventually became “The Nabokov Code.” He followed in Nabokov’s footsteps, photographing butterflies mentioned in his novels or studied as part of his entomological research. The exhibition includes only one image with no direct connection to Nabokov: the highly magnified eye of a fruit fly.

The eye is juxtaposed with a quotation from “Nikolai Gogol,” one of Nabokov’s best-known works of literary criticism: “The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”

Mr. Sokolenko’s exhibition comes at a time when Nabokov’s reputation is on an upswing in the rarefied world of lepidopterology. During his lifetime some lepidopterists, perhaps jealous of his literary fame, carped about his lack of formal training. Still, his work at Harvard, reclassifying the Lycaeides genus, earned him a mention in Alexander B. Klots’s 1951 “Field Guide to the Butterflies of North America,” an achievement that reportedly delighted Nabokov, prompting him to boast about it even many years later.

More recently, a pair of writers took a fresh look at Nabokov’s research in the 1999 book “Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius” (Zoland Books). The book’s authors, Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates, an editor at The New York Times, examined Nabokov’s efforts to classify a large and diverse group of butterflies now called the Latin American Polyommatini, which were little-studied until the 1980’s.

Mr. Johnson, a lepidopterist, spent five seasons trapping butterflies in a rain forest in the Dominican Republic; as he tried to put them in a taxonomic framework, he realized that Nabokov had already done the job in a paper published in 1945. He and his colleagues named several new species after Nabokov’s characters, including a Peruvian butterfly that was christened “Madeleinea lolita.”

Mr. Sokolenko faces an uphill battle when he tries to convince scholars of literature that, as he puts it, Nabokov’s “fantastic disposition for systemization could only have come from biology.” Before they went on display here, the images in “The Nabokov Code” were shown at an international Nabokov conference in France. The philologists there, Mr. Sokolenko grumbled, perceived them as “works of art” rather than evidence for the importance of science in Nabokov’s writing.

With luck, Mr. Sokolenko will have more chances to prove his point. He hopes the exhibition will travel to the United States and Germany after it closes here at the end of the month; he is currently in talks with potential sponsors.