Apologies---I forgot to mention that Anthony
Stadlen's much-to-the-point comment "Surely, VN's style cannot be judged by what
he makes his "creature" Humbert do with HIS "fancy prose style", explicitly
acknowledged by "Humbert" on his first page."
This observation amplified in ADA where VN even
provides a marvellous description of one of Ada's speech styles.
Arch
and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a
special belletristic device — Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue intérieur’
borrowed from old Leo — or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of
Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about
Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, ‘a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out,
bloom side in,’ as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a
conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of
subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent
monosyllables (‘Idiot Elsie simply can’t read’) — all this somehow
finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic
torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he
both resented and perversely enjoyed.