In response to Matt Roth's comment, I'd like to point out the probably
deliberate irony of this interview's structure: immediately after
claiming that "creative work" is the "clearest revelation of
personality," Nabokov goes on to demonstrate how his own most recent
work has been anything but clear to its readers--listing no less than
five unnoticed "plums" that he hopes will "help the reader to enjoy my
work better." It looks to me like a case of crypsis: an attempt to
appear to assert the obvious belonging of his work to the genre of the
novel ("it's about people and personalities, like all novels", he seems
to be saying), while simultaneously challenging the very notion of a
"clear revelation" of anything, especially personality--he's
not Kinbote, he's Botkine-- (like the "simple" and "sincere" pilloried
in his lectures and interviews).
Stephen Blackwell