Writing about The Flaws of Nature ( Curmudgeon link in http://queue.acm.org/) SK-B mentioned "Nabokov's devious 'proofs by rhyme' (as well as "proofs by anagram")" related to "fine literature and literary programming".
He offered an example: Nabokov, "when discussing tribal antagonisms, adds the warning: remember that stranger rhymes with danger." And S K-B added: "and so it does, but it also rhymes with manger..."
His conclusion, directed to his readers, not to Nabokov:"Yes, Nabokov is playfully weaving verbal “conceits” with no serious claim that strangers are dangerous because of a few shared syllables.Yet one must remain alert against endowing words and sounds with fanciful metalinguistic and a-historical "baggage." [...]
JM: Humor may serve to hide its author's tendenciousness or second intentions. It also serves to endow words with a magic quality.
I don't see that ( I think SK-B agrees with me) VN intended to bring about a scientific demonstration of "rhyme" or "anagram"- if considered in isolation. It was a part of VN's kind of humor, although VN uses the play with a "proof by rhyme" hiding a serious intent. It even is unrelated to "rhyme" per se, nor any "cosmic-comic" consonantal games, nor any linguistic and etymological reasonings.
Besides that ,Nabokov often uses "personification", and attributes a human mood to objects with a humoristic twist. It looks jejune, infantile...but it is not always the case. It often becomes something magical.
Examples of personification or of animism abound in VN, but I chose a less conspicuous one from "The Aurelian" ( I'll underline the special words related to "street" and "trolley":
"Luring aside one of the trolley-car numbers, the street started at the corner of a crowded avenue. For a long time it crept on in obscurity, with no shop windows or any such joys. Then came a small square (four benches, a bed of pansies) round which the trolley steered with rasping disapproval".
It seems to me that Nabokov is able to develop different verbal-ideas by extracting them from the very kernel of a thing.
He must have a special relationship with the "signifying" process... Nabokov's wardrobes moan, drawers and doors have evil intentions, the moon has eyes, almost like the pictures found in a book for children where the indeffinition bt what lies outside and inside is still operating strongly.
I'll get two other examples, now from an author who is very unlike VN ( Markus Zusak, "The Book Thief"):"the snow was shivering outside"(p.143); "The mayor's wife bruised herself again." (bruise: a difficult smile). These inventions ( Nabokov's, Zusak's) retain a strong childish appeal and thereby they can shock the reader into awareness, at times when routine words have lost their effectiveness. They invite a kind of "innocence" and openness.
Sandy Klein posts Steve Coates (NYT) "Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of “scientific” knowledge joins the opposite slope of “artistic” imagination?": Nabokov’s fiction is always becoming propaganda on behalf of good noticing, hence on behalf of itself.”..."Nabokov himself, in his impish interview mode, teased those who would question him...I love the following passage from some of Professor Nabokov’s unpublished college lecture notes... The passage isn’t as widely known as it should be, though it appears Brian Boyd’s two-part biography:“Whichever subject you have chosen, you must realize that knowledge in it is limitless [...]
JM: In Strong Opinions, interview n.2 (1962) Nabokov develops this idea about specialization and observation: "Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist... You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing... we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects..."
There are other items connected to "specialization and ghostly objects." In Ada ( quoted once again in S.O,p.143): "In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. ‘To be’ means to know one ‘has been.’ ‘Not to be’ implies the only ‘new’ kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future." Also, in SO, we find an interview with A.Talmey (1969) in which Nabokov stresses the importance of "pure imagination. Incidentally, I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination."