His dream has been to venture out on a collecting trip abroad, but lack of resources or interfering circumstances have never allowed this to happen.
He imagines collecting butterflies in places such as Digne in France, Ragusa in Dalmatia, Sarepta in Russia, or Abisko in Lapland, catching them in the tropics, or following the lead of Father Dejean (a French missionary who worked in East Tibet[1]).
The narrator assures the reader that Pilgram has achieved a state of happiness in which he is visiting all the places he ever dreamt of and seeing “all the glorious bugs he had longed to see”.
While many of Nabokov’s writings refer to butterflies, they achieve their strongest literary treatment in this short story, and in Speak, Memory, The Gift, and Ada.
Pilgram’s journey takes him from his pupa-like condition to a golden, "aurelian" threshold before he enters into a different state as he undergoes his metamorphosis.