In 1955 his renowned and scandalous bestseller, Lolita, was a way of signalling that America had become one of his subjects
Looking back on his childhood in Russia, Vladimir Nabokov remarked that he was “a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library.” His prosperous father made sure he learned English and French as well as Russian. When he departed for Berlin in the early 1920s, followed eventually by moves to Paris and, after the Nazi invasion, the United States, he found this knowledge valuable. Short of money, he taught English to fellow emigres in Berlin. In the U.S.
He acknowledged that “I am an American writer, born in Russia,” but he resented giving up his first language. He wrote that his private tragedy was abandoning “my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.” He found the difference resembled “a champion figure skater switching to roller skates.” Eventually, John Updike called him “the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship.
Alfred Appel, a Nabokov expert who edited a book about this book, The Annotated Lolita, needed 900 footnotes to explain every reference that Nabokov makes to an obscure detective novel or a fragment of American slang. That was the style of thinking Nabokov adopted in his new environment. Nothing in popular culture was lost on him.
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