Winding as a Mountain Road, Delightfully Nerdy, & Trilingual
Say what you will about Nabokov, but he's never plain, nor simple. His meditations on big, abstract ideas use a rhetorical device that's somewhere in between stream-of-consciousness and romantic-lyric poetry. Often, he lets the words carry him away, and we readers hold on for dear lives. Relax with that dictionary, though, and it's the most exciting vocab lesson you'll ever get. Part of this has to do with the fact that Nabokov is a writer who loves words. The other part is his status as a lifelong polyglot (someone who knows a bunch of languages).
In which Nabokov demonstrates he'd never use something as cliche as "A to Z":
I dream of my pavilion at least twice a year. As a rule, it appears in my dreams quite independently of their subject matter, which, of course, may be anything, from abduction to zoolatry. (11.1.1)
In which a passage that's supposedly a setting for a coming scene is actually packed with a Russian vocabulary lesson and note on the writing of the book itself:
Summer soomerki—the lovely Russian word for dusk. Time: a dim point in the first decade of this unpopular century. Place: latitude 59° north from your equator, longitude 100° east from my writing hand. (2.4.1)
In which we learn how much content has to do with style here: this memory, and the connections he's made, have changed his actual recollection:
From him I learned, and have preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that "butterfly" in the Basque language is misericoletea—or at least it sounded so (among the seven words I have found in dictionaries the closest approach is micheletea). (7.2.5)
(Don't miss out the the various science terms here, too! Nabokov the Lepidopterist uses natural science terms to make new, imagery. "Glass cell of my memory"? So strange, so fresh.)