The synesthetic experience of reality
When Nabokov wrote, his brain perceived the letters in different hallucinatory colors. This is called synesthesia, when the brain draws parallels between different types of sense data. It usually manifests most clearly around the practice of music or language. For Nabokov, this is ironic, because the reader knows already that Vladimir Nabokov became one of the most powerful writers to ever live.
The old movies
How ironic for young Nabokov to already understand one of life's most perplexing mysteries: the reality of the past. Nabokov describes first learning this great paradox by watching old movies about people who existed before he was born. This meant that his life was finite and subject to a reality he did not choose for himself. In other words, he realized at a young age that he was a mortal.
The ironic nursemaid
When Nabokov meets the nursemaid he despises, she holds a secret key to his affection: She can teach him to speak French. This ironic duality ends up making the woman one of Nabokov's favorite people in his entire life, and he writes about her in many of his books.
Nabokov's OCD
One unfortunate problem with such a creative imagination is that Nabokov quickly became addicted to his own fascination, becoming overwhelmingly bored by tedium and preferring a nearly ecstatic obsession with documenting the animals (by collecting butterflies). This obsessive relationship to the pleasure of his own learning ensures Nabokov's rise to true genius, but it also represents his Oedipal orientation to his life.
The paradox of beauty and horror
Vladimir's life was one of relative peace, except in his mind where he was constantly plagued and perplexed by his own genius. As a young boy, he became quite literally addicted to learning and learned the hard way about beauty's tantric dark side: horror. This tantric horror continues through the novel in his obsessive relationship to women and his absolute slavery to his romantic impulses. In the end though, this horror becomes part of his novels, and he lands himself a wife and kid and he seems to level out, but there is not way around it—the man was some sort of artistic prophet. His relationship to the muse was one of constant worship and adoration.
