“We are happy if in childhood we have good hearing: if we hear how beauty, love and uselessness loudly praise each other every minute, from every corner of the natural world,” writes the American writer Sharman Apt Russell in her “Romance with butterflies." On the pages of this elegant book, all the characters are equal and still interesting: the insidious parasitic riders lying in wait for the caterpillar, and the queen butterflies intertwining in an eight-hour post-nuptial flight, and the 18th century English naturalist Elinor Glanville, who was labeled crazy for her passion for lepidoptera, and American professor Vladimir Nabokov, giving a lecture on butterflies to dumbfounded Slavic students. A real novel of education from the life of insects, seasoned with the history of science, or more precisely, the history of scientific obsession. “The butterfly is the Creator, flying over the world in search of a place suitable for human life. Butterflies are the souls of the dead. Butterflies bring spring on their wings. Butterflies are thoughts that suddenly overshadow us; dreams that we savor." Fascinating reading.