Nabokov's second-rate brand of English

In Lolita, Nabokov’s uses his afterword’s parting paragraph to remind us he’d pulled the trick off one hand behind his back (written Nov. 12 1956):

After Olympia Press, in Paris, published the book, an American critic suggested that Lolita was the record of my love affair with the romantic novel. The substitution “English language” for “romantic novel” would make this elegant formula more correct. But here I feel my voice rising to a much too strident pitch None of my Amencan friends have read my Russian books and thus every appraisal on the strength of my English ones is bound to be out of focus. My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-which the native illusionist, fractails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

• Vladimir Nabokov