Writer Vladimir Nabokov paraphrased his father's description of the owlet moth Plusia rosanovi (as it appeared in Volume III of the four-volume Butterflies and Moths of the Russian Empire, 1912) in his posthumous essay "Father's Butterflies", printed in The Atlantic, April 2000: "How lovely it is, by the way, how one's eye is caressed by, the dark-cherry forewing, traversed by a mauve-pink stripe and adorned at its center by the golden emblem of its genus, in this instance a tapering, bowed half-moon -- and if it is hard to render the flowery velvet of the background, what is one to say of the 'emblem,' which, on the actual moth, resembles a dab of gilt redolent of turpentine, and must therefore be copied (and recopied!) in such a way that the painter's work transmits, besides all the rest, a resemblance to the work of a painter!"
