Nassar, Joseph. Transformations in Exile: The Multilingual Exploits of Nabokov's Pnin and Kinbote. 1993

Having become fluent in Russian, English and French as a child, Vladimir Nabokov was not simply a Russian writer until 1939 and an Anglo-American one thereafter. More accurately a polyglot with amazing metalinguistics awareness, he incorporated within his writing, especially his English-language novels, a polylinguistic matrix. Employing techniques such as code-switching, language overlapping and multilingual literary puzzles, motifs, themes and allusions, Nabokov created a “web of sense,” a subtext partially accessible to monoglots, but only fully comprehensible to those who know well several languages, literatures and histories. In addition to providing an enriching experience for the monolingual reader, Pnin (1957), which marked Nabokov’s self-awareness as an intrinsically polyglot writer, and Pale Fire (1962), which revealed the immensity of his genius and complexity, also offer engaging multilingual subtexts.