In "Strong Opinions" we read that "Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” and we find Nabokov's advice "to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on "ideas." Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own
footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the "how" above the "what" but do not let it be confused with the "so what." Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.” ).However, independently of Nabokov's clear positioning in relation to allegories, we find that several os his books are seen as "allegories" (I remember he dismissed various such interpretations concerning Lolita, as Alfred Appel Jr. also observes in The Annotated Lolita.). Search tools led me to data about. "Invitation to a beheading" analysed as political allegory.(Robert Alter in"Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics") and to "RLSK" (Jacob Emery: Figures Taken for Signs: Symbol, Allegory,Mise en abyme).An available page online opened me to Naiman's views [ excerpts from . Vladimir Nabokov: A Literary Life - Página 29 - Resultado da pesquisa de livros do Google books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0230247237 - Traduzir esta página David Rampton - 2012 - Biography & Autobiography]

"Eric Naiman read Zashchita Luzhina as the quintessential self-reflective novel...Naiman notes that all the emigrés are two-dimensional in the novel, with the exception of Luzhin, who is trying to become three-dimensional. Taken together, he argues, these features of the novel invite readers to turn the text into an allegory, although "Fundamental to allegory is the extent to which vistually all events in a text are reducible to an abstract idea or set of ideas relentlessly pursued', Naiman concludes that in a sense the whole realm of naive aesthetic pleasure is under threat, insofar as the reader can only explain the novel's opaque moments by turning mysterious symbols into sustained and decipherable allegories. The risk of reading Nabokov too easily must be avoided...
This is a compelling reading: allegory is as omnivorous in its desire to account for everything as this account suggests. Faced with the contention that Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" is an allegorical journey that Marlow takes into his own mind, there is always part of us that cannot help wondering about the hippopotamus he encounters while going upriver into the darkest Africa. What role does it play in the allegory, for example? "Zashchita Luzhina" is different because Nabokov is trickier than Conrad, more adventurous in the sorts of realities he chooses to represent. Besides, in Nabokov's novel the backdrop is propitious for such an allegory. The squares of a chess board and the class between the individual and a stratified society lend themselves to allegory as easily as dark continents and sinuous rivers. If we object that all those carefully delineated émigrés with the trappings of their apartments and their inane conversations are as hard to allegorize as the hippo, there is a mountain of evidence to show Nabokov planting clues, even at the level of the morpheme, to support precisely such a radical reading. Yet it can also help to look at this conflict between surface and depth from a slightly different angle, focusing at various points on modes of characterization and Nabokov's reliance on the contemplation of things as aesthetic objects, with a view to elucidating the workings of this novel. [ quotes Luzhin 317-8/29] This is the ekphrastic theme again, the idea of recognizing wordless representations of the world and the patterns they make."

A: "Vladimir Nabokov wrote about a common cotton sock. It slides on to a foot, and it walks around all day. Later it falls on to a carpet, and it flies into a laundry hamper. It flits around from place to place, ending up in a dresser drawer, where it will await it's next use. All you have to do is spin time a little faster, and a sock is as animated as any living thing."
B: "Lol. What acts on the sock? Does it have organized electro-chemical reaction and neuromuscular junctions? I don't think this is even close to the same. Normally inanimate things are acted upon by things that act. That does not make inanimate become life.."
C: "As for Nabokov's sock, that is an allegory. Of course the sock is manipulated by a human, but the author has asked us to consider the sock on its own. It is an exercise of the imagination. Reality can look very different when you do that."
D: "I like the Nabokov allegory. And I think it's a good analogy to the body. What animates (literally, "ensouls") and manipulates it? Again, an exercise of the Imagination." ..

I believe that the animations, anthropomorphisms and personifications which I've been selecting from VN's novels are seen poetically and in isolation. It seems to me that most of them they are unrelated to "symbolism" or "allegories," simple products of my "naive aesthetic pleasure" (probably my snippets fit into what Eric Naiman observes, in relation to setting the focus on Nabokov's novels under the lens of allegory, when he warns that the ":whole realm of naive aesthetic pleasure is under threat, insofar as the reader can only explain the novel's opaque moments by turning mysterious symbols into sustained and decipherable allegories.") Personally, I'm also curious about the fascinating shifts of perspective related to mind-body-words that partly reveal the workings of VN's imagination, even how he transformed some nightmares of his own.

I thank my friend for sharing his views with me and helping me along.

Jansy

............................................................................................................

* - Cf also: Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms: "allegory, a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape-as in public statues of Liberty or Justice. An allegory may be
conceived as a metaphor that is extended into a structured system. In written narrative, allegory involves a continuous parallel between two (or more) levels of meaning in a story, so that its persons and events correspond to their equivalents in a system of ideas or a chain of events external to the tale: each character and episode in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), for example, embodies an idea within a pre-existing Puritan doctrine of salvation. Allegorical thinking permeated the Christian literature of the Middle Ages, flourishing in the morality plays and in the dream visions of Dante and Langland. Some later allegorists
like Dryden and Orwell used allegory as a method of satire; their hidden meanings are political rather than religious. In the medieval discipline of biblical exegesis, allegory became an important method of interpretation, a habit of seeking correspondences between different realms of meaning (e.g. physical and spiritual) or between the Old Testament and the New (see typology). It can be argued that modern critical interpretation continues this allegorizing tradition. See also anagogical, emblem, exemplum, fable, parable, psychomachy, symbol. For a fuller account, consult Angus Fletcher, Allegory (1964).
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/allegory#ixzz2Rpw53Eyi
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:"Work of written, oral, or visual expression that uses symbolic figures, objects, and actions to convey truths or generalizations about human conduct or experience. It encompasses such forms as the fable and parable. Characters often personify abstract concepts or types, and the action of the
narrative usually stands for something not explicitly stated. Symbolic allegories, in which characters may also have an identity apart from the message they convey, have frequently been used to represent political and historical situations and have long been popular as vehicles for satire. Edmund Spenser's long poem The Faerie Queen is a famous example of a symbolic allegory.For more information on allegory, visitBritannica.com.