"Mr. Steiner's article  ("Extraterritorial")  is  built  on solid  abstractions  and opaque generalizations. A few specific items can be made out and  should  be  corrected.  He  absurdly overestimates  Oscar Wilde's mastery of French. It is human but a little cheap on his part to chide my Van Veen for sneering at my  Lolita   (which,   in   a   transfigured   form,   I magnanimously  turned  over  to a transposed fellow author); it might be wiser for him to read Ada more  carefully  than did the morons whom he rightly condemns for having dismissed as hermetic  a  writer's limpid and precise prose. To one piece of misinformation I must strongly object: I never belonged to  the "haute  bourgeoisie"  to  which  he  grimly  assigns  me (rather like that Marxist reviewer of my  Speak,  Memory who  classified  my  father  as  a  "plutocrat"  and  a "man of affairs"!). The Nabokovs have been soldiers and  squires  since (at least) the fifteenth century."

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 Vladimir Nabokov. Anniversary notes

  lib.ru/NABOKOW/Anniversary.txt