Well of course he did. Which is why I find it easy to sneer at him, in spite of his gifts.
Follow along; an "artist" of pedophilia accuses another of being savage and crude! That's a blind spot big enough for the MACK truck of common sense to slide through sideways. Only in academia could one get away w/ such hypocracy.
Obviously, artistic objectives trump bourgoise sensibilities, harumph, harumph. Which explains "Piss Christ" and a Madonna smeared w/ dung. Those then are the progeny of N and his ilk.
OTH, the western lexicon is filled w/ Cervantes' children, from quixotic to "tilting at windmills" they remain relevant. That is because Quixote is all too human, we see ourselves in him and for every time he was knocked on his can we can match him bruise for bump. And the belly laughs are an important part of it.
Honest Quixote is noble at last and his creator Cervantes will be celebrated long, oh so very long, after N is merely a footnote in the history of the degeneration of Western Literature.
Just MO, I mean no disrespect to you.
Subject matter is not what makes something crude. The treatment does. The subject matter of King Lear is crude. Despite the subject matter ‘Lolita’’ does not contain any descriptions of sexual acts. Nabokov regarded Cervntes zs crude even when he was a struggling writer in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. His idea of great writers are Joyce and Proust.
Sounds like you haven’t actually read Lolita since there is nothing remotely titillating about the content once you get past the subject matter itself.
How is Nabokov responsible even partially for the ‘degeneration of Western Literature’? He was one of the most sensitive prose stylists and critics to ever write in English.