Nabokov was miserable and poor. Then his wife made him publish Lolita... | Books | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/aug/01/vladimirnabokov
Nabokov wrote in at least three main tongues - French, Russian, Anglo-American - and wove another dozen languages, including those of entymology and botany, into his polyglot virtuosity. There is scarcely a line in his poetry or corruscating paragraph in his prose not crammed with allusions, cross-reference, calculated (often arcanely, cunningly misleading) echo. Acrostics, anagrams, palindromes, puns, neologisms, spangle the many layered confections of his style.
More even than Joyce, the art of Nabokov invites, challenges and derides, with degrees of amused hauteur, the febrile labours, the servile ingenuities of the learned decoder.